Insurance distribution concepts

Nextera Link automates insurance distribution. The automation is straightforward once the underlying model is clear, and most implementation friction comes from decisions about that model rather than from the software.

Agents use Link as a mobile app on their own devices, not as a back-office application. That shapes the whole model on this page: one agent, their own work, often in front of a customer, and often with no signal.

The lifecycle everything hangs off

Quote → Lead → Submission → Issued policy.

Four states, and every distribution system is fundamentally an argument about what happens between them.

1. Quote. A price for a described risk, produced from the product’s rating rules. A quote is an offer with a validity period, not a record of intent.
2. Lead. A person or organisation who might buy, with an owner and a next action. The critical property of a lead is that it belongs to someone; unowned leads are where pipelines leak.
3. Submission. The completed application sent to the insurer for acceptance — underwriting information, declarations, documents.
4. Issued policy. The insurer has accepted, the policy is on risk, and the premium is due.

In Nextera Link those four are four separate records, each with a status of its own:

Stage	Record in Link	Statuses used
Lead	Lead	New, Contacted, Interested, Proposal Sent, Negotiating, Won, Lost, Dormant
Quote	Illustration	Draft, Calculated, Shared, Accepted, Converted, Cancelled, Expired
Submission	Application	Draft, Submitted, Awaiting Registration, Awaiting Document, Under Review, UW Required, UW Approved, UW Declined, Awaiting Payment, Payment Received, Submitted to Carrier, Issued, Rejected, Expired, Cancelled
Issued policy	Policy	Active, Lapsed, Cancelled, Surrendered, Matured, Terminated

The Lead statuses above are the pipeline status — the position in the funnel, and the only one the agent moves themselves. Separately from that, every Lead also carries a data completeness status: Draft while its required fields are still incomplete, Active once they are filled in.

This chain of records is what answers the two classic failure modes, and both are structural rather than personal. Stalling between states — a quote nobody followed up, a submission waiting on a document nobody chased. And re-keying between states — where the quote lives in one system and the submission in another, so data is retyped and diverges.

In Link, each stage is created from the one before it and keeps the link back. An Illustration records the Lead it came from, an Application can only be created from an Accepted Illustration and carries the product and its plan, a Policy carries its Application number, and every Commission row points at a Policy number. That chain is what makes “where did this case stall?” answerable without matching two systems. What is still entered by hand is the party data: the policy owner and the insured are entered in the Illustration wizard, then entered again on the Application form along with the beneficiary, the health questionnaire and the documents.

Illustration status transitions run in one direction only — Draft → Calculated → Shared → Accepted → Converted — with Cancelled and Expired as the ways out. There is no step backwards, and an Illustration can only be edited while it is Draft or Calculated. Its validity follows a system setting — 30 days from creation by default — and after that it becomes Expired.

Producers, channels and hierarchy

The word for anyone who sells is a producer. Producers are organised into channels, and channels are the axis almost everything else is configured along.

Channel type	Characteristic
Tied agent	Sells for one insurer only
Independent agent / broker	Represents the customer, places with several insurers
Bancassurance	Distribution through a bank’s channels — see Nextera Flow
Direct / digital	The insurer sells without an intermediary
Affinity / partnership	Distribution through a non-insurance brand’s customer base

Nextera Link serves the agency channel: its users are agents, they sign in with an Agent Code, and every product in the catalogue carries its own marker for the channel it may be sold through.

Producers usually sit in a hierarchy — agent under a unit head under an agency under a region — and that hierarchy does three jobs at once: it determines who can see what, who manages whom, and how override commission flows upward. Getting the hierarchy wrong is expensive to correct later because commission history is calculated against it.

Link’s hierarchy uses four levels, and every agent has exactly one upline:

Code	Level
AG	Agent
SA	Senior Agent
UM	Unit Manager
AM	Area Manager

Alongside that hierarchy, every agent is placed in a Branch and a Region. An agent sees their own position through Profile → My Hierarchy, which shows three sections: UPLINE, YOU, and DOWNLINE as a tree.

A move within the hierarchy is not an overwrite. Each move records a new placement with an effective date and a reason for the change, while the old placement is closed with an end date — so any period can still be tied back to the placement in force at the time. Placements that would form a loop are rejected.

Channel conflict is what happens when two channels can approach the same customer with the same product. It is a commercial decision, not a technical one, but the system has to express whatever the commercial decision was — usually through some combination of lead ownership rules, product eligibility by channel, and territory.

Appointment and licensing. In most markets a producer must be licensed to sell and formally appointed by the insurer. Both have expiry dates. A distribution system that does not track them will eventually let an unlicensed producer bind business, which is a regulatory problem rather than a data problem.

Link holds both on the agent: a license with its type, number, issue date, expiry date and status, and a contract with a commission level, start and end dates, a vesting period, and a termination reason. Agents open them themselves at Profile → Licensing & Certificates.

The product catalogue

The catalogue is the single definition of what may be sold, and it carries four distinct kinds of rule that are easy to conflate:

• Product and variants — what is being sold, and the versions of it. In Link it runs three deep: a Product (code, name, category, channel, currency) holds several Plans — base plans and riders — and each Plan can have several Plan Options.
• Eligibility rules — who may buy it and who may sell it. A product carries minimum and maximum entry ages, minimum and maximum sum assured limits, coverage term limits, and an age rule deciding how age is counted: LB last birthday, NB next birthday, or RB round birthday.
• Rating — how the price is calculated from the rating factors. Each Plan points at a rate table, and each rate table declares for itself which factors it uses: currency, age, gender, occupation class, plan option, premium period, policy year, payment mode, risk type, and member type. Inside are rate rows per combination of factors — configuration, not code.
• Availability — effective dates. A product has an effective date, a termination date, a status and a version number; a rate table has an effective date and version number of its own.

Eligibility is not a check that catches up afterwards. Link applies it as the illustration is built, on the device, even with no signal, and blocks the next step with a message naming the limit — an insured’s age past the product’s maximum, say, or a sum assured below the minimum.

That last point is the one most often missed at implementation. If you cannot reproduce a quote issued three months ago, you cannot defend it in a complaint. Link stores the calculated figures on the Illustration itself, together with its status history, and the server recalculates the premium on sync and flags a premium discrepancy where the result differs from what the device sent.

Commission

Commission is where distribution systems earn their reputation, because it is the number producers check personally.

Structures you will meet:

• First-year and renewal commission — a high percentage in year one, lower thereafter. Standard in life and health.
• Level commission — the same rate every year, used where persistency matters more than acquisition.
• Override — commission paid to a manager or agency on business written by producers beneath them in the hierarchy.
• Bonus and contingent commission — paid on achieving volume, growth or loss-ratio targets, and therefore only calculable after the measurement period closes.

Link groups these into five types on each commission row — FYC (First Year Commission), Renewal, Override, Bonus and Persistency — and presents them as a commission statement per agent per month. A statement holds a gross total, subtotals by type, tax, total chargebacks and a net total, with a status of Pending, Confirmed or Paid. Inside it, each row points at one policy along with its annualized premium, commission type, rate and amount.

Clawback is the recovery of commission already paid when a policy lapses or is cancelled within a defined period. It is the single most disputed calculation in distribution, for two reasons: it usually runs on a sliding scale by month of cancellation, and it has to reach backwards through the hierarchy to recover override as well. Any commission design should be tested against clawback before it is signed off.

In Link, clawback appears as Chargeback

What the market calls clawback appears in the application as a chargeback. Each chargeback is recorded on its own with a policy number, an amount, a reason and a date, then appears in the statement summary as a deduction headed Chargebacks against the net total for the current period.

Reconciliation closes the loop: what was calculated, what was approved, what was paid, and what remains. A commission engine that cannot show that chain per producer will generate support tickets forever. That chain is what Link shows the agent — a statement per month, its detail per policy, its chargebacks separately, and the statement itself downloadable as a PDF.

The metrics that actually mean something

Metric	What it tells you
Quote-to-issue conversion	Whether the pricing and the process are competitive
Time in stage	Where the pipeline is stalling, which is almost never where people assume
Producer activation rate	The share of appointed producers who wrote anything this period — usually the most uncomfortable number in the pack
Persistency	The share of policies still in force after 13 or 25 months. Low persistency turns first-year commission into clawback
Average premium per policy	Whether growth is coming from volume or from mix

In the application, the daily numbers appear on the Dashboard as an Overview — Total Policy Due, Utilize, % Utilized, Monthly Policy Due, Premium Collection and Visits/Day — with a My Agent or All Agent choice for anyone who has a downline. Targets per period sit in Productivity, whose metrics are AP (annualized premium), Policy Count, FYC, Lead Conversion and Persistency, each showing the target against the achievement. Leaderboard and Sales Contests use the same metrics plus Recruitments.

Persistency deserves emphasis. A distribution operation optimised only for new business will happily write business that lapses, pay first-year commission on it, and then spend the following year clawing it back. Persistency is what distinguishes a book from a rush.

How these concepts map to Nextera Link

Concept on this page	Where it is in Nextera Link
Producing a consistent price from rating and rules	Illustration — the Illustration tab
Owning and progressing prospects so nothing stalls	Leads — the Leads tab
Moving an opportunity through defined stages to issue	Applications, with the Application Tracker
Products, variants, eligibility and rating rules	Product Catalog — More → Sales Tools
Producers, hierarchy, licences and contracts	Profile — My Hierarchy and Licensing & Certificates
Issued policies	Policies — More → Pipeline
Calculating and tracking commission and chargebacks	Commission — More → Account
Agent certification and development	Training — More → Growth

Link has no Quotation, Sales workflow or Channel management module

If you have come from material naming a Quotation, Sales workflow or Channel management module — those names do not exist in the application. The work is real: quoting is done in Illustration, the sales workflow is the Application status sequence, and channel management appears to the agent as Profile — hierarchy, licences, contracts — while its administration happens outside the agent application.

Next

• Preparing to sell through Nextera Link
• The Nextera Link module map
• Glossary