How a Top 100 Agency Achieved 3X ROI with Ascend in Just 90 Days
less manual reconciliation
faster exception resolution
ROI through labor cost & time savings
About Cross Insurance
Cross Insurance has grown to become the 21st-largest independent insurance agency in the U.S., with $245M in P&C revenue as of 2024. A fourth-generation, family-owned agency, Cross has successfully acquired more than 150 agencies and now employs over 1,100 employees across the Northeast. The agency remains community-focused as the official insurance broker for New England sports teams – the New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, the Boston Red Sox and more.
As an industry-leading insurance broker, Cross is undergoing a transformation project with PWC to become an Agency of the Future – implementing modern technology to improve their customer experience and reduce internal inefficiencies. A vital component to this project is identifying the right opportunities to invest in Generative AI tools with high, immediate ROI.
Challenges
As Cross centralized their P&C billing process across multiple branches, the team quickly uncovered that the direct bill commissions reconciliation process was ripe for improvement. A time-consuming process, the accounting team found themselves performing manual, duplicative work with significant operational bottlenecks.
Manual and Labor-intensive
Starting at the top of their process, carrier statements came in various formats, with inconsistent policy numbers, transaction types, and effective dates. As a result, matching statements to the correct policies in AMS360 became labor-intensive, with 5-7 team members manually deduplicating and painstakingly matching entries across multiple carriers and branches. The team often had to reach out to branch offices to clarify or correct information, further extending the processing time.
Error-prone
The manual reconciliation process was not only incredibly time-consuming but also prone to human error. Kelly Gardner, a Finance Project Coordinator, spent hours meticulously comparing commission statements line by line, often toggling between different systems and documents to ensure accuracy. This process was particularly challenging with carriers like Chubb, which had complex statement formats and multiple subsidiary companies.
Lost Revenue
The complexities of the process introduced challenges with financial reconciliation errors, closing books on time, and correctly paying producers. The lack of an automated system meant that Cross Insurance was potentially losing between 0.5-1% of its commission revenue due to processing errors and inconsistencies. With the agency’s scale and growth plans, this revenue leakage and the lack of visibility into it were likely to become more severe.
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Nicole Larcombe
IT Demand Billing & Accounting Manager
Solution
Ascend implemented a comprehensive Direct Bill Automation platform specifically tailored to Cross Insurance's complex multi-branch environment and mapped a process to sit between AMS360 and Workday. Initially focusing on their P&C processes, this platform could:
- Automatically ingest commission statements from various carriers
- Extract data using AI-powered document parsing, eliminating manual data entry
- Match statements to specific policies in AMS360 using AI-powered matching logic
- Flag potential exceptions and provide a module to triage
- Prepare clean, reconciled data to transmit into their ERP, Workday
In the initial months, Ascend’s dedicated solutions consulting team worked in tandem with the Cross team, continuously refining matching algorithms in real time and addressing edge cases in real time to ensure the team hit combined success metrics.
Results
With the help of Ascend, Cross Insurance transformed a manual, painful commissions reconciliation process to a streamlined flow with higher accuracy. The team was able to achieve the following results by creating a scalable, standardized process in one tool:
- Centralize accounting from field based offices into single, consolidated function
- Eliminate human reconciliation for ~90% of all direct bill policies
- Resolve exceptions cross-functionally at 4X speed due to Ascend’s collaboration functionality
- Realized a 3X return on investment through labor cost and time savings relative to the cost of Ascend
Building on the immediate ROI momentum, Cross Insurance is expanding its partnership with Ascend to unlock even greater operational and financial impact. Next steps include:
- Extending Ascend to Employee Benefits: Automating reconciliation workflows and mapping directly to policies in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.
- Deepening integration with Workday: Connecting P&C and Benefits data to build a unified revenue intelligence layer across the business.
- Recovering revenue leakage: Using AI-powered reconciliation to surface and reclaim millions in missed commissions and underpayments.
These initiatives are part of Cross’s broader “Agency of the Future” transformation journey—modernizing legacy workflows, scaling efficiently, and investing in purpose-built AI that delivers measurable results for both teams and clients.
Tim Moriarty
CIO
