Placement share by client and line: how a commercial insurance broker finds the lines placed elsewhere

A commercial broker retains most of its clients each year and still leaves money on the table with every one of them, because a client that places property and liability with the broker often places cyber, D&O and fleet with someone else. The policy system knows what was placed. This guide shows how to find what was not.

The measure

Per client:

Placement share = lines placed with the broker ÷ lines the client holds

Per producer:

Placement opportunity = Σ valued gaps across the producer's clients Renewal watch = renewals due in the window with no remarketing activity logged

The renewal watch is the retention half. Placement share is the growth half. Both come from the same export.

The rows you need

• Policy export: one row per policy with client, line, carrier, written premium, inception and expiry dates, and producer. Applied Epic, Acturis and the other systems export this as standard.
• Client master: client type and size, usually revenue band or employee count.
• Activity log: optional, for renewal watch. Client, producer, date, type.

Client identifiers only. Names stay in the policy system.

Defining the lines a client holds

The denominator has three sources and the report should say which applied.

1. Known: the client told the producer at renewal what else they hold, and it was recorded.
2. Lost: the broker quoted the line and lost it, so it exists.
3. Norm: clients of the same type and size in your own book hold the line more often than not.

A gap from the first two sources is a target. A gap from the third is a prospect. Both belong on the list, labelled.

The roll-up

1. Client by line: placed or not, premium, commission.
2. Client: lines placed, lines held, placement share, valued gap.
3. Producer: sum of premium, sum of valued gaps, renewals due, renewals with no activity. Assert that client premium sums to the producer's book.
4. Office and firm: assert that producers sum to the office, offices to the firm, and the firm to written premium in the ledger.

written premium = Σ offices = Σ producers = Σ clients

The identity fails when a client sits under two producers after a book transfer, or when a mid-term adjustment was exported twice. Both are visible at exactly one level.

A worked example

A manufacturing client, £40m revenue, five lines in the norm for that type.

Placement share: two of five. Valued gap at the broker's commission rates: £10,500. The producer's list opens with the D&O line, because it was quoted and lost last year and the renewal is in eleven weeks.

Renewal watch

For every policy expiring in the next ninety days, the report checks for a logged remarketing activity in the last sixty. None logged is the exception, ranked by premium. On a book of a few hundred clients this list is short and it is the retention plan for the quarter.

Where it goes wrong

Lines named differently per system. A broker on two policy systems after an acquisition has "Fleet" and "Motor - Commercial" as separate lines. Map to one list before anything is computed.

Mid-term adjustments as new policies. An endorsement exported as a separate policy row doubles the line and the premium. The duplicate check catches identical client, line and inception; the reconciliation to written premium catches the rest.

Producer transfers. A book moved between producers mid-year appears under both. Decide the owner as of period end for the roll-up and keep the history as an attribute.

Carriers as clients. Some exports include carrier settlement rows alongside client policies. Filter by record type before the roll-up.

Each quarter, from the policy export

Mapped once, the export produces the same roll-up each quarter: placement share and valued gaps per client and producer, the renewal watch, and the premium reconciliation. Covirage builds it from the export as it is. The insurance brokers page describes the setup, and you can upload a sample policy export and see the roll-up in your browser.