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Finding a Market for Hard to Place Accounts

When I was actively selling insurance I always wanted to work on the difficult and hard to place accounts. My largest account was an automobile remanufacturer. One of the products they remanufactured was front-wheel drive trains so the product liability was always a challenge. But it certainly kept things interesting!

The hardest part was finding an insurance company that would be interested in underwriting and pricing the account. At that time, it entailed a lot of phone calls to a lot of wholesale brokers. Fast forward 15 years and the process of finding just the right market has gotten significantly easier.

I see an increasing number of posts on LinkedIn groups and other industry forums from agents asking for help in identifying a market for hard to place accounts. While this is better than the calls I used to do, it still is time-consuming.

BindThat.com is an example of a new web-based platform that enables all players in the commercial insurance industry to discover, share, connect, and identify trustworthy wholesale brokers, resources, and insurance solutions for a variety of accounts that might not fit standard markets.

Agents and Brokers can use the site to:

Research and identify new markets via a real-time database of recently bound deals, saving them time every day.
Access an up-to-date insurance application library.
Reduce the sales cycles by becoming more efficient every day.

Wholesalers and Underwriters can use the site to:

Efficiently promote new classes of business and coverage.
Connect with a new audience of agents and brokers.
Reduce operation costs via pinpoint marketing.

This service is based on the idea that actual bound deals are the best indicator of an underwriter and wholesaler’s interest in a particular type and line of business. The site maintains a real-time database of bound deals that grows daily as underwriters and wholesalers post new information regarding their recent transactions. Agents and brokers can then search this database to find specific markets, save time, and help increase sales.

When an underwriter posts information about a particular transaction, the agent on the account can go in and verify the information. Privacy is maintained — for both the agency and the client — because no client-specific information is released on the platform. Other agents searching the database can view this verified information so they know it’s an actual transaction that has been completed.

There is no cost for an individual at an agency to sign up for an account.

Two of the founding partners have over 20 years of underwriting and brokerage experience along with the technical expertise of developing comprehensive online data management systems. The third founding partner has over 15 years of marketing, branding, and website development experience having run a usability consulting firm that services over 30 companies in the Fortune 500.

By creating an easy to use, cloud-based software as a service interface for all in the industry, BindThat.com helps empower their members, provides much needed transparency, and energizes commercial insurance relationships around the country.