SILA’s newest president talks leadership, trends, and more

How can professionals engage with SILA to maximize their membership benefits?

There are so many opportunities to find value with a SILA membership and to get involved:  

• Use the member page to post and respond to topics in the discussion forums and review the best practice guides, charts, educational, and other reference materials. Members can also access valuable resources like the SILA Digest, with content frequently contributed by Vertafore through our ongoing partnership with SILA.
• Attend a SILA chapter meeting, join a committee, or participate in one or more of SILA’s subgroups, which are great ways to find best practices in a particular region and nationally. 
• Take courses, consider getting a SILA designation, or attend SILA national conferences.  

Now let’s talk about some insurance industry trends you are seeing. First, how is onboarding evolving within the agency-carrier relationship?  

Agent onboarding has two parts. First is the onboarding process for the agency, brokerage, or securities firm, which involves education, training, and credentialing. Second is establishing selling relationships with one or more carriers. Digitization is driving change in these key areas to streamline the full life cycle of the agency-carrier relationship.

At Vertafore, we are eliminating repetitive data-entry tasks and moving towards solutions that collect data all at once. This allows producers, distributors, and carriers to focus on their core business without spending valuable time on administrative tasks.   

This momentum will continue to pick up speed in the years ahead with an increased emphasis on verifying data and ensuring compliance for producers conducting business with carriers.  

How does technology help navigate compensation challenges in the agency-carrier relationship?  

In Vertafore’s recent carrier report, agents ranked simple compensation statements as a must have when working with carrier partners. 

Compensation is key to any agency-carrier relationship. A fair and competitive pay structure helps build strong selling and servicing relationships between agencies and carriers. It encourages agents to focus on quality sales opportunities while promoting the sale of profitable products. On the flip side, inadequate compensation can lead to agency turnover, lower production, and a shift towards short-term gains rather than long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships.   

Maintaining multiple back-office systems is an ongoing challenge for carriers. These systems might be outdated or provide difficult to understand statements when multiple lines of business are involved. Agents, on the other hand, are looking for consolidated, accurate, and simple compensation statements to make sure they are receiving the correct payment for their work.  

Technology simplifies the process by taking these statements and consolidating them, some carriers can become or remain a partner of choice. Carriers can also optimize agent incentives to drive growth while making it easy to do business. The opportunity lies in modernized technology solutions.

How can technology help carriers manage increasingly complex compliance requirements?

Stakeholders in the insurance distribution value chain—including regulators, carriers, distributors, individuals, and education providers—benefit from technology that provides greater efficiency and better serves consumers across all states. Technology can connect all of these stakeholders meaningfully to automate and eliminate redundant and error-prone manual tasks.

In the industry right now, there is attention on new industry requirements such as annuity sales and Medicare plans to seniors. There is also a uniform push to make it easier for organizations that sell across states to comply properly. Regulatory changes often affect training and compensation standards. Technology can be leveraged to help streamline and manage these ongoing changes efficiently.    

What other insurance industry trends are you seeing as we look ahead to 2025?  

In this year’s hard market, we saw economic uncertainty, higher interest rates, accelerating inflation, and greater regulatory scrutiny taking a toll on mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity. I think M&A will pick back up next year due to interest rates starting to come down. If we do see a pickup, that could lead to more system consolidation and process changes.      

We continue to be in a hard market in the property and casualty space, but that might soften a bit in the coming year. There will always be disasters and ongoing climate challenges to contend with, but premium rates might start to level out.  If you are looking to get involved with SILA, head to www.sila.org/home.