The Risk Your New Client Brought With Them : Risk & Insurance

Winning a new client through a broker of record change is a meaningful moment for any brokerage. The relationship has been earned, the client has made a deliberate choice, and the focus turns quickly to delivering on the promise that won the business.

What receives less attention in that moment is what transferred along with the account.

A BOR is a risk transfer event as much as it is a business development one. The client’s coverage history, their documentation, the certificates that have been issued on their behalf, the decisions made at prior renewals and how well any of it was recorded — all of it moves to the new broker. The incoming firm inherits the operational condition of that account without having set the standards that shaped it, and in most cases without a clear picture of what they are taking on.

What Comes With the Account

The gaps that arrive with a new BOR account are not always the result of poor practice by the prior broker. They are often simply the result of practices the new broker did not establish and would not have chosen.

Coverage decisions that were made informally and never documented. Certificates issued under holder requirements the new broker has not reviewed. Renewal notes that exist only in the prior account manager’s email. A policy check that may or may not have been completed, with no record either way. None of this is visible in the client conversation that led to the BOR, and most of it does not surface until the account is already in the book.

The exposure is real. When a claim arises or a certificate is questioned, the new broker is responsible for what is in the file, including what is missing from it. The fact that those gaps existed before the account transferred is context, but it does not change the brokerage’s position.

Why the Window Is Narrow

The period immediately following a BOR transition is when the risk is most addressable and the conditions for addressing it are least favorable.

Clients who have just moved their business are focused on the relationship, not the paperwork. They have already been through a transition, and asking them to revisit documentation, re-sign forms, or fill gaps from prior years can feel like the new broker is creating friction rather than delivering the service that was promised. That dynamic is understandable, and it is also how documentation gaps become permanent.

Experienced account managers know this tension well. The instinct is to get the account set up cleanly and demonstrate value before raising anything that feels administrative. The risk is that the administrative work that gets deferred in the first weeks tends not to get done at all.

What a Disciplined Onboarding Process Requires

The brokerages that manage BOR risk well treat the transition period as a structured intake, not a handoff. That means reviewing the documentation that transfers with the account before assuming it is complete, identifying gaps early enough that they can be addressed while the client relationship is still being established, and setting internal standards for what a properly documented account looks like before the first renewal.

It also means having a clear internal owner for that process from day one. BOR transitions that lack defined ownership tend to move through the system on momentum rather than structure, and the risk review does not happen because no one was assigned to make sure it did.

Winning the account is the beginning of the responsibility, not the resolution of it. The brokerages that build that understanding into how they onboard new clients are better positioned to protect both the relationship and themselves when something is eventually questioned. &

Kathryn Lerch is an insurance operations leader with more than 15 years of experience inside P&C agencies and brokerages, where she has held roles spanning commercial lines servicing, agency management, and multi-office operations leadership. She holds an Executive MBA from the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, and her writing focuses on the practical realities of how agencies evaluate technology, manage change, and build more efficient operations from the inside out.