Preparing to run your book in Nextera Bright
A reinsurance broking system is only as good as the structures loaded into it. Almost all of the preparation is about getting counterparties, programme structures and accounting conventions right before the first placement is entered, because everything downstream — claims, technical accounts, settlement, bordereaux — derives from them.
This page is written for an operations or IT lead running the implementation.
Before you start
Section titled “Before you start”Decisions your organisation must make
Section titled “Decisions your organisation must make”- Which book goes on first. Facultative and treaty behave differently enough that most implementations start with one. Treaty carries the structural complexity; facultative carries the volume of individual placements. Choose deliberately and state why.
- How far back you migrate. Open treaties only, or history? History enables renewal comparison and loss experience from day one, and it is the single largest driver of migration effort. There is no universally right answer, but there is a wrong one: deciding this late.
- Currency conventions. Which currencies you transact in, at what level currency is fixed (programme, section, transaction), where FX rates come from, and which rate applies to technical accounts versus settlement.
- Brokerage and commission conventions. How brokerage is calculated and deducted, and how ceding commission is handled on proportional business — including any sliding-scale or profit-commission arrangements.
- Technical account cycle. How often accounts are prepared per treaty, and what your expectations are of each counterparty’s cycle. These rarely match; the system has to hold both.
- What “complete” means for a placement. Your internal rule for tracking and escalating shortfall against 100%.
Data you must gather
Section titled “Data you must gather”| Input | Typical owner | Why it is needed |
|---|---|---|
| Cedant and reinsurer master data | Broking operations | Every record has a counterparty; duplicates here corrupt balances everywhere |
| Reinsurer security / rating information | Credit or compliance | Placement decisions and credit exposure reporting |
| Open treaty structures — sections, layers, participations | Treaty team | The structure every cession, claim and account derives from |
| Open facultative placements with slips and terms | Placement team | In-force cover |
| Outstanding technical account balances by counterparty | Finance | Opening position for settlement |
| Outstanding claims and recoveries | Claims team | In-flight recoveries and credit exposure |
| Counterparty bordereau formats | Operations | The per-counterparty layouts that must be produced and ingested |
| Chart of accounts / GL interface specification | Finance systems | Where technical accounting meets the ledger |
The row worth dwelling on is counterparty master data. A cedant that exists twice under slightly different names produces two sets of balances that never reconcile, and the problem compounds silently for months. Deduplicate before migration, not after.
People you need available
Section titled “People you need available”- A treaty specialist who can validate that migrated programme structures are correct. Structure errors propagate into accounting and claims, so this validation is not optional.
- A placement lead for the facultative and market-facing workflow.
- A technical accountant who understands your ceding commission and brokerage arrangements in detail.
- A settlement or credit control owner for opening balances and aged debt.
- Someone who owns the GL interface on the finance systems side.
What “done” looks like
Section titled “What “done” looks like”Your first cycle is complete when:
- Counterparty master data is loaded, deduplicated and owned by someone.
- Every open treaty and facultative placement is represented with its correct structure and participations, reconciled to your prior records.
- A new placement can be taken from submission through to signed lines and binding without leaving the system.
- A claim can be advised, applied across cessions, and each reinsurer’s share tracked to recovery.
- A technical account is produced for a treaty period and agrees with your existing calculation.
- A settlement is reconciled against that account, per counterparty and in the correct currency.
- At least one bordereau is produced in a counterparty’s expected format and accepted by them.
- Aged debt and outstanding balances reporting reconciles to finance.
Step 5 is the real test. Everything before it is data entry; a technical account that agrees with your existing calculation proves the structure, the terms and the conventions were all loaded correctly.
Working through it in the product
Section titled “Working through it in the product”Getting access
Section titled “Getting access”See Getting access to Nextera products. Nextera Bright normally runs
at bright.nextera.id.