The Cover Note
From first enquiry to renewal: where a broker's day goes
Ask a broker where the day went and the honest answer is rarely "advising clients". It is the work around the work. Follow one client file from the first enquiry through to renewal and you can see exactly where the hours go.
First enquiry: the file starts incomplete
A new enquiry arrives by email, phone, WhatsApp or a referral from another client. The details arrive piecemeal. Someone has to turn that into a file: the name of the insured, the address, the trade, the turnover, the claims history, the renewal date of the current policy.
None of that is advice. It is collection. And it is usually the first time those details get typed into a system that day, but not the last.
Quoting: the same details, typed again
Every insurer portal wants the same facts in its own format. The proposal form wants them again. If the risk is being re-marketed across three insurers, the broker or an account handler enters the same information three times, three different ways.
The broker's judgement sits in the market choice, the cover comparison and the advice to the client. The hours sit in the typing.
Binding cover: chasing what is missing
Between quote and cover there is always something outstanding. Proof of no claims. A signed form. An answer to the underwriter's question about flat roof percentage or subcontractor payments.
Keeping track of what is outstanding, and who is chased next, is a job in itself. In most brokerages it lives in diary notes, a spreadsheet, or someone's memory. When that person is out, the file stalls.
Mid-term: the file keeps moving
Clients move house, buy vehicles, hire staff, change their minds. Every mid-term adjustment means finding the file, checking what was said last time, and updating the record in more than one place. When the CRM and the documents disagree, someone has to work out which one is right, and the answer matters months later if there is a claim or a complaint.
Renewal: the file comes back, and so does the admin
Twelve months on, the file returns. Renewal terms to check against last year. Details to confirm. Possibly a re-market. A letter to draft and send within the required notice.
If the file was thin at enquiry, renewal inherits the gaps. If the record of advice was scattered across inboxes, renewal is when that gets uncomfortable. The same gathering, the same chasing, the same re-keying, on a deadline, across the whole book at once.
The pattern behind the hours
Put the stages together and a broker's day splits into two very different kinds of work. There is the judgement: reading a risk, advising a client, negotiating with an insurer. And there is the admin layer underneath it: gathering, re-keying, chasing and re-finding.
When we asked brokers about this, all 21 who completed our survey said they re-key the same client data into more than one system, and 18 of the 21 said repetitive tasks take more than 30% of their week. That is not carelessness. It is how the process is built.
What changes when the admin layer is handled
The fix is not working longer hours, and it is not another portal. It is handling the admin layer itself: collecting the details as they arrive, pulling what the brokerage already knows about the client, preparing the drafts, and keeping track of what is outstanding so nothing lives only in someone's head.
That is the layer Aoibhe is built to handle. She gathers the information, cites the brokerage's own documents, prepares the drafts and routes the work. The broker reviews it and makes the decisions. The point is not a different process. It is the same process, without the typing.
What a broker's day should be measured in
The brokerages that get this right will not be the ones with the longest hours. They will be the ones whose day is measured in conversations and decisions instead of keystrokes. The work between first enquiry and renewal is real, but most of it was never broker work. It was admin that landed on brokers because nobody else was doing it.