In Part 1, I talked about how bloated workflows and weak infrastructure drag down insurance operations. Today, let’s talk about where that dysfunction really shows: in third-party reviews.
These reviews are supposed to help us. They’re supposed to offload the manual burden, speed up delivery, and improve our work product. In reality? They’ve become a workaround for not having the tools to solve the problem properly.
For years, brokerages and MGAs have thrown policy reviews over the wall, to third-party teams across the world, hoping that someone, somewhere, will catch the details that matter. The rationale is familiar: it’s cheaper, it scales, and it lets your team focus on clients.
But here’s what really happens:
So when the review comes back, what do you actually get?
A checklist. Maybe a summary. Possibly a few flagged items. But not confidence. Not insight. Just a box that’s been checked so the work looks done, even though you know you’ll have to re-review it yourself anyway.
Let’s call it what it is: an illusion of risk transfer.
You’re not really handing the risk off. You’re pointing a finger at someone else in case it goes wrong. So when the review is late, or worse, wrong, you can say, “We sent it out. We were waiting on it.”
But the client doesn’t care who you outsourced it to.
They care that you, the broker, didn’t catch the issue.
And in 49 out of 50 states, they’re expected to read the policy themselves. But they don’t. They rely on you, because they pay you to. Because you’re the professional. Because that’s your value.
That responsibility doesn’t get outsourced.
The real problem isn’t just geography. It’s the absence of context.
A policy review is only as good as the context it’s reviewed in:
You can’t plug a document into an AI engine and expect it to understand all of that. And you can’t send it to an under-trained team 10 time zones away and hope they know what to look for.
We don’t have a manpower problem, we have a tooling gap.
We’ve built processes that pretend to solve the problem (COI trackers, outsourced review queues, Excel-based checklists), but they don’t address what brokers actually need:
The ability to deliver a reviewed, reconciled, client-ready output—quickly and with confidence.
None of this is meant to attack brokers. It’s the opposite.
The industry has placed more and more expectations on you, faster turnaround, more document reconciliation, deeper compliance, but given you no real infrastructure to deliver. So you outsource, or multitask, or defer. Not because you're lazy. Because there’s no alternative.
But here's the thing: reviewing a policy is not the hard part.
The hard part is doing it 300 times a week across 20 different contexts and keeping it consistent. Who can do it on your team when you have a few hundred emails coming in daily?
We outsource without context, and that weakness doesn't stay isolated. It spreads.
Overlooked exposure turns into delayed closings, blown margins, and bloated teams trying to compensate for bad infrastructure.
That's why we built RiskRemedy. It’s not a magic button, and it’s not a black box. It’s a back office purpose-built to handle the operational reality of insurance today, where policy reviews don’t live in isolation, but as part of a web of documents, decisions, and obligations.
In Part 3, I’ll walk through how firms are turning their review process from a liability into a selling point, and how better operations are becoming the competitive edge that wins clients and retains them.