The Advisor's Morning Review: A Daily Operating Routine for POSPs

A solo advisor's book does not fail loudly. Nothing crashes. There is no alert. It fails by attrition: a renewal that passed on Thursday while you were closing a new proposal, a claim document the surveyor asked for eleven days ago, a proposal you assume issued because nobody told you it had not. Each of those is small. The book is the sum of them.

The defence is not a longer list. It is a fixed order, run at a fixed time, before the first call of the day. Twenty minutes, five questions, always in the same sequence, because sequence is what stops the review from becoming the day. An advisor who opens his book at 9am and starts wherever his eye lands has not reviewed his book. He has started work on whatever was most visible, which is systematically the thing that shouts rather than the thing that decays.

The order below is by decay rate, not by importance. A renewal that passes its date is not late, it is gone, and the client is either uninsured or somebody else's. A claim document submitted after a deadline may be refused outright. A proposal sitting past its issuance turnaround is a client who has started paying attention. A follow-up slips gracefully. A commission gap stays recoverable for months. Sort by what dies first and the order writes itself.

Everything else in the day is negotiable. These twenty minutes are the part of the practice that is actually a practice.

Open the renewal view first, and read three windows rather than one.

The 45-day window is where the work is. These are renewals that need a conversation rather than a reminder: the health floater where the client's daughter has turned 25 and comes off the cover, the motor policy where the IDV should drop and the premium should be re-shopped, the term plan where the client mentioned a home loan back in March. Forty-five days is enough to have the conversation, get the revised proposal in, and still issue before expiry. Thirty is not, on anything that needs underwriting attention.

The 15-day window is confirmation. Every policy expiring inside a fortnight should have a known state: confirmed and paid, confirmed and awaiting payment, moving to another insurer, or not renewing. "I have sent a message" is not a state. If you cannot say which of the four each policy sits in, that policy is at risk regardless of how warm the relationship feels.

The 3-day window is triage, and it is where the phone comes out. Not WhatsApp. A message at three days is something you have sent. A call at three days is a decision you have obtained. Motor is the unforgiving one, because a break in cover is not a paperwork problem. It is a fresh inspection, and a client driving uninsured in the meantime.

Two things to check while you are in there, neither of which any reminder system will do for you:

• The household view. A client renewing his car while his health floater expires in six weeks is one call, not two, and the second policy is the one that matters. Advisors lose health cover at renewal far more often than motor, because motor has a legal compulsion behind it and health has only you.
• The payment mode. A client on monthly or quarterly mode has several lapse opportunities a year rather than one. Your renewal view should surface him more often than the annual client, not less.

The renewal book is the only part of an advisor's practice where the work is fully known in advance. Every expiry date on it was visible the day the policy was issued. There is no excuse category here, which is exactly why it goes first.

Claims come second because a claim is the only moment when an advisor's value stops being a claim about value.

The list is short by definition. Most advisors have between zero and four claims live at any time, which is precisely why they get lost. A category with four items in it does not feel like it needs a system, right up until one of the four is a health claim where a query letter has sat unanswered for nine days.

Read every live claim against one question: what is the next action, whose is it, and how old is it? Three states, each with a different response.

1. Waiting on the client. Documents requested, not supplied. This is the state that quietly kills claims, because the client believes that having told you is the same as having acted, and the days pass with nobody feeling late. Chase daily. Not politely once, daily.
2. Waiting on the insurer or surveyor. Submitted, no response. Age it. Under seven days, note it. Over seven, escalate through your principal, because your principal has a servicing channel and you have a call centre.
3. Waiting on you. Be honest about this one, and clear it before the review ends.

There is a second-order point most advisors miss. A claim in flight is also a renewal signal. A household with a live claim renews at a rate that depends almost entirely on how the claim was handled, and that judgement is being formed right now, during the days when there is no news at all. The call with no news in it is the one that gets remembered: nothing has moved since Tuesday, the surveyor has your documents, I will call you Friday. Ninety seconds, and worth more than anything you will say at renewal.

The third list is proposals submitted and not yet issued, and it exists because of a specific number.

Under the IRDAI Master Circular on Point of Sales Products and Persons, Life Insurance (IRDAI/LIFE/CIR/MISC/215/12/2019), the policy issuance turnaround time for a POS-Life product must not exceed four working days. That standard is a reasonable one, because POS products are simple, standardised and pre-underwritten by design. Requiring minimal underwriting intervention is what makes a product a POS product in the first place.

Four working days is short enough that this list has to be read daily. A proposal submitted on Monday should be issued by Friday. If it is Friday and it has not issued, that is not a delay to be patient about. It is an exception with a cause: a document that did not attach, a payment not realised, a query raised to an inbox you have not opened, a field that failed validation. Every one of those is fixable in a call to your principal, and none of them fixes itself while you wait.

Read the pending list by age, oldest first:

• Day 1 to 2. Normal. Confirm the proposal is visible in your principal's system, which is a different fact from your having submitted it.
• Day 3. Ask. This is not impatience. It is still inside the window.
• Past the fourth working day. Escalate, and tell the client before he asks. A client who has paid and holds no document is not waiting. He is deciding what he thinks of you.

When it does issue, check the POS Code on the schedule against the proposal you submitted. Every proposal must carry the code and the insurer is responsible for recording it, and the day of issuance is the cheapest day in the policy's life to notice that it did not.

The pattern worth watching is not any single delay but the shape of them. Three proposals stuck in one month with the same cause is not bad luck. It is your submission process failing in a repeatable way, which is a fifteen-minute fix that pays every month after.

Fourth is the list with no dates on it, which is why it is fourth and why it never gets done.

Follow-ups owed are the promises made in conversation: the client who asked what adding his mother to the floater would cost, the referral his colleague mentioned, the term quote for the friend at the wedding. None of these expire on a date. All of them expire, quietly, in about a week, at which point the client has concluded that you are busy, which is the polite version of what he has actually concluded.

The mechanics are trivial. The discipline is not. Anything promised in a conversation gets written down the moment the call ends, with the date you promised it by, defaulting to two working days. The morning review reads the list and does exactly one of three things with each item: do it now if it takes under five minutes, schedule it if it does not, or tell the client it will take longer if it will. The third option is the one advisors never use and clients always appreciate, because "I need until Thursday" is information and silence is not.

This earns a place in a daily routine rather than a weekly one because of how it compounds. A follow-up delivered in two days produces a referral. The same follow-up delivered in ten days produces a policy. Delivered in three weeks it produces nothing at all, and you will never learn it was there, because a book you cannot see the top of looks full.

Last, and only because it decays slowest, is the money.

The reconciliation question is one line: which policies issued this month have no matching remuneration entry? Not "how much did I earn". That number arrives from your principal and there is nothing to do with it. The useful question is about the gap.

A POSP is remunerated by the entity that engaged it, under the contract of engagement, rather than as an independent commission earner facing the insurer. Where the principal is an intermediary, the general market structure is that the insurer pays the intermediary and the intermediary then remunerates the POSP under that contract. Either way the same thing follows: you are paid on the basis of a record your principal holds and you do not. That is the whole reason to keep your own count. Not distrust. Arithmetic that nobody else has a reason to check on your behalf.

What goes wrong is mundane and repetitive:

• The POS Code never made it onto the proposal, or was re-keyed at issuance. The policy exists, the client is covered, and it is not attributed to you.
• A policy issued on the 29th and settled in the following period. That is not a gap, it is timing, and telling the two apart is why you age the list rather than just eyeball it.
• An endorsement or mid-term addition that generated premium and no entry.
• A cancellation reversed twice.

Age every gap. Under 45 days, note it. Over 45, raise it with your principal quoting the policy number, the issue date and the code, which is a two-line message rather than a dispute. Over 90, it becomes a conversation, and you will be asked why you did not notice your own income missing for a quarter.

Two things this routine is not.

It is not a to-do list. A to-do list is generated by whatever happened to you. The review is generated by your book, which is a duller and far more useful source. Your book already contains everything that is going to happen in the next 45 days, written down and dated. Reading it in a fixed order every morning is the whole difference between running a book and being run by one.

It is also not motivation. There is nothing here about attitude. Attitude is what an advisor reaches for once structure has failed, and it does not scale past roughly eighty policies, because effort is linear and a book is not. The routine works precisely because it does not depend on how you feel at 9am on a Wednesday in the second week of a bad month.

The shape, then: twenty minutes, five lists, same order, before the first call.

1. Renewals, in three windows: 45 days, 15 days, 3 days.
2. Claims, each read for next action and its age.
3. Proposals, against the four-working-day POS-Life issuance standard.
4. Follow-ups, promises with dates attached.
5. Commission, gaps aged rather than totals admired.

None of it is difficult. All of it is skippable, which is the actual problem, and the reason the fixed hour matters more than the content of any single list. Skip it on the day the phone rings first and you have not lost twenty minutes. You have lost the only part of the day when you were looking at the whole book rather than at whichever piece of it was loudest.

Advisors holding 300 households are not working harder than the ones who plateau at 90. They are looking at the same five lists every morning, in the same order, and doing the small thing while it is still small.