Guide · Premium matching

What is a three-way match in insurance?

A three-way match in insurance verifies that three independent records agree before premium cash is applied: the bank credit, the broker remittance advice, and the bordereau or policy record. When all three agree, line by line, the payment is applied with evidence.

Disambiguation

Is this the same as a three-way match in accounts payable?

Same principle, different documents. Accounts payable compares purchase order, goods receipt, and invoice before paying out; insurance compares bank statement, remittance advice, and bordereau before applying money in. One record can be wrong; three in agreement rarely are.

The three records

What are the three documents in the match?

01 · Bank statement

The money that arrived

A credit with a date, an amount, a currency, and, if you are lucky, a fragment of reference in the narrative.

02 · Remittance advice

What the broker says it covers

The broker’s own breakdown: which policies the wire settles, line by line, with a header total.

03 · Bordereau

What is actually owed

The booked obligations: policy references and premium amounts the payment should settle.

Why three, not two

Why isn’t a two-way match enough?

Because a bank line and a booked amount agreeing proves very little. Brokers pay many policies in one wire, deduct commission, and reference nothing, so an amount-only match happily applies money to the wrong obligation and calls it reconciled. The remittance names the policies; the bordereau confirms each one is genuinely owed.

In practice

How does a three-way match handle the messy cases?

Return premium and refunds

Negative lines match under the same logic, run on absolute values, so refunds and commission offsets still reconcile.

Cross-currency settlement

The bank settles in one currency, the bordereau is booked in another. The match converts, then records both amounts and the rate.

Broker name variants

Where broker naming is inconsistent, a stricter reference-and-amount variant of the match keeps working without guessing identity.

When any leg disagrees, the payment queues as an exception with the disagreement named, never applied on a best guess.

How Brisc does it

Run the match by rule. Keep the evidence.

Brisc’s Reconciliation Analyst runs the remittance-backed three-way match as the top rung of a deterministic rule ladder. Every match records the rule that made it; AI reads the documents and never decides a match.

97%+

Accuracy on matched records, because deterministic rules do the deciding.

80% → 92–95%

Match rate from day one to steady state, over roughly 90 days.

1 in 20

Roughly the share of rows a person reviews at steady state.

See the full ladder on bank reconciliation for insurance, read the cash application guide, or browse all guides.

Common questions

Three-way matching, answered

Is a three-way match the same thing as bank reconciliation?

No. The three-way match is one rule inside the wider discipline. Bank reconciliation also clears fees and internal transfers, handles payments that arrive with no remittance at all, and proves the bank position against the ledger. The three-way match is the strongest evidence standard within it.

What if the broker never sends a remittance advice?

Then a three-way match is impossible by definition, and the payment has to be matched directly against open obligations using the policy reference, payer, and amount. A good process runs both: remittance-backed matching where the advice exists, direct matching where it doesn’t.

Can a three-way match handle refunds and return premium?

Yes. Return premium and commission offsets appear as negative lines, so the same three-way logic is run on absolute values. The direction of the money changes; the evidence standard doesn’t.

What happens when the three records disagree?

The payment isn’t applied. It queues as an exception with the disagreement spelled out, for example a remittance line with no matching bordereau row, so a person resolves it with the full context rather than re-deriving it from scratch.

Does AI decide whether the three records match?

It shouldn’t. Matching belongs to deterministic, explainable rules, so the same inputs always give the same answer. AI is useful for reading the documents, remittances and bordereaux arrive in every conceivable format, and for arguing borderline cases, but the match decision stays with the rules.

Bring your own remittance. Watch all three legs agree.

30 minutes, no slide deck, your real files: a bordereau, a statement, a submission. Your business is specific; the walkthrough should be too.

Book the walkthrough