Element Risk Management accelerates acquisitions with unified agency and direct bill automation
Saved a week reconciling commission statements
Decrease in steps to handle agency bill policies
With automated AR/AP
About Element Risk Management
Founded in 2011 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Element Risk Management originated from humble beginnings in a basement and has expanded significantly over the past decade. Through strategic acquisitions, the agency possesses policies dating back to 1909, reflecting over a century of service in the insurance industry. Today, it operates 15 locations across Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Element Risk Management offers a comprehensive range of insurance solutions, including personal, business, and employee benefits coverage. It emphasizes quality, excellence, and professionalism, leveraging advanced technology to innovate within the industry.
Challenges
Element Risk Management has been acquiring 2–3 agencies per year, creating a growing strain on accounting operations. Each acquisition introduced new carriers, new clients, and new legacy workflows which made it increasingly difficult to be efficient. Realizing revenue between agency bill versus direct bill already introduced multiple manual workflows - adding new offices every year only added additional complexity to their responsibilities. Whether it was reconciling commission statements, tracking payments from clients, or disbursing premiums to carriers, there wasn't an easy way to integrate, streamline, and automate accounting responsibilities across all their existing offices.
Andrew Mudalel
Director of Finance
Solution
To address their growing operational complexity, Element Risk Management implemented Ascend as a unified financial operations platform across the agency. This provided complete visibility into all funds flowing in and out of the business while also automating many of the manual, time-intensive tasks previously handled by their accounting team.
For direct-billed policies, Ascend's AI automated manual steps to process reconcile commissions such as:
- Fetching commission statements from carrier portals
- Reconciling statements to Applied Epic
- Posting commissions back into Applied Epic
This allowed Element Risk Management’s accounting team to focus solely on managing exceptions instead of processing full statements, allowing them to spend less time closing their books.
For agency-billed policies, Ascend automated repetitive tasks across the entire workflow from invoicing and payments to trust and operational accounting, including:
- Insured payment reminders / binding notifications
- Generating financing agreements
- Disbursing commissions and carrier payables
Across all offices, Ascend was implemented as the platform to manage agency bill payments across the entire policy lifecycle.
Results
By adopting Ascend, Element Risk Management achieved their goal to implement a single platform to streamline all their accounting operations across all offices, new and existing. Ascend was able to help save time across both direct bill and agency billed policies and provide a single automate platform for the accounting team. This resulted in:
- 15+ hours a week saved on commission reconciliations
- 50% decrease in steps needed to manage agency bill policies
- Improved cash flow and improved financial visibility
- Streamlined communication between their agency and clients
Andrew Mudalel
Director of Finance
