Finalizing rates and coverages is just the first step in creating an insurance policy. Once all parties reach an agreement on terms, the post-bind process begins. The first step for Shepherd is to collect all necessary information—signed regulatory documents, underlying policies, and more. This process often requires exchanging numerous emails, and is especially cumbersome for larger insurance programs with many carriers.

The insurance industry has long relied on email to manage the post-bind process, despite obvious inefficiencies and potential for redundant efforts. Consistent with our mission at Shepherd, we decided to apply technology to this process and to bring post-bind into the digital age. At the end of 2024 we introduced Shepherd’s Post Bind Checklist, a dedicated interface for all tracking and document management with our broker partners.

What is post-bind servicing?

At the heart of post-bind servicing, the process by which an agreement to bind coverage becomes a full insurance policy, is the collection of key documentation. These forms confirm decisions made during underwriting, such as whether optional coverages were accepted or rejected, and to verify details needed for the final policy, like the underlying policy documents.

These requests, also known as “subjectivities”, can include a wide range of documents, such as:

Signature files

• Coverage Selection/Rejection

• State Mandated Forms

• Market Diligent Search Forms

Policy Documents

• Underlying Binders and Policies

• Quota Share Binders and Policies

Information about the insured

• Loss Runs

• Sub-Contractor Requirements

Generally, subjectivities must be collected in a designated period of time after the policy has been bound in order for a policy to be issued.

Better for our customers, better for Shepherd

By creating a digital-first workspace for all post-bind activities, the Post Bind Checklist has made collecting these subjectivities easier, faster, and more accurate. The Post Bind Checklist allows Shepherd to quickly collect the right documents needed to issue policies, and spend less time combing through emails and sending out reminders to brokers. As a result, the Shepherd team now delivers binders 75% faster, with an average turnaround time of just 2 days from binding to delivery.

A shared source of truth

When an insured's program includes a large insurance tower, it often involves multiple layers, carriers, and policies that need to be collected and reviewed. The Shepherd Post Bind Checklist solves this problem by making it easy for brokers to see what our team has on file, and what documents we still need. Most importantly, this process doesn't require a Shepherd associate to do a full audit of program files every time they reach out to a broker.

With the Post Bind Checklist, brokers get real time insights into the status of their policy and don’t have to either wonder what’s going on or try and reconstruct what is required from them across email chains and phone calls. Not only does this make the post-bind servicing process faster and easier, it also makes it more accurate as there is less chance for miscommunication.

Easy, detailed reminders

Another transformative benefit of the Post Bind Checklist is that the information that lives in the Checklist can easily be leveraged into helpful email reminders that the Shepherd Customer Experience team can send out accurately and en masse. Subjectivities often come in piecemeal, with brokers sending over signature files like TRIA forms or underlying policies as they become available from their client or other insurance providers. Managing all of this disparate information is difficult enough, consistently updating a group of stakeholders about this information only increases that challenge.

Being able to send reminders with the click of a button means that the Shepherd team can make sure that brokers are always getting detailed, comprehensive reminders of everything they need to do to get their final policy, with a minimal burden. Not only do these emails provide an up-to-date list of all the required subjectivities, they also help provide brokers with helpful context on what is missing, and why it’s needed.

A faster servicing motion

Thanks to the Post Bind Checklist, the Customer Experience team has been able to consistently reduce the time it spends issuing both binders and policies, even as Shepherd has consistently bound more and more deals. Since Q4 of 2024, the Shepherd Customer Experience team has been able to reduce the time it takes to issue binders and policies by close to 50%, without sacrificing quality or accuracy.

And because the Post Bind Checklist is agnostic to the type of policy it’s used for, it will make sure that our team is able to continue to deliver fast results even as we expand our product offerings in 2025 to include Builder’s Risk and beyond.

Where we're going from here

Not only has the Post Bind Checklist transformed Shepherd’s own internal servicing motion, it’s also been a hit with brokers. Since launching the Post Bind Checklist a few months ago, brokers have quickly adopted it as their primary way of providing Shepherd information, and now the overwhelming majority of document submissions to Shepherd come through the Post Bind Checklist instead of email.

With the strong adoption we’ve seen thus far, we’re excited to continue to build out the capabilities of the Post Bind Checklist to continue to make life easier and more efficient for our broker partners. This includes a slew of enhancements to the Post Bind Checklist that will make it easier for brokers to quickly upload information, including more granular details about underlying policies.

We also plan on continuing to leverage AI to assist our teams with the review of sometimes multi-hundred page policies. These improvements promise to help brokers get even faster indications that their uploaded documents fulfill the necessary requirements, allowing the Shepherd team to continue to issue policies quickly and accurately.