What Is a Bordereau? Premium, Risk and Claims Bordereaux Explained

On this page (10)

1. TL;DR
2. What does a bordereau look like?
3. What are the types of bordereaux?
4. Who sends bordereaux, and to whom?
5. How does a bordereau move from MGA to carrier?
6. How often are bordereaux due?
7. What are the Lloyd’s Coverholder Reporting Standards?
8. Why are bordereaux so hard to process?
9. How does software handle bordereaux?
10. FAQs

TL;DR

• A bordereau (plural bordereaux) is a periodic report, usually a spreadsheet, that lists the individual policies, premiums or claims an MGA, coverholder, TPA or ceding insurer handled on a carrier's or reinsurer's behalf during a reporting period.
• There are three kinds: a risk bordereau (policies written), a premium bordereau (premium paid, commission, taxes and net premium due) and a claims bordereau (claims paid, reserved and incurred).
• In the Lloyd's market the content is set by the Lloyd's Coverholder Reporting Standards, now version 5.2, which mark each field as mandatory or conditional. Lloyd's does not mandate a file format.
• In the US, the NAIC Managing General Agents Act requires an MGA to render accounts detailing all transactions and remit funds to the insurer at least monthly. Minnesota and Delaware have the same rule in statute.
• Bordereaux arrive in every layout, so carriers map each sender's columns to a standard, validate the rows and send errors back. Bordereaux platforms and document extraction tools automate that work.

A bordereau is how a carrier finds out what was done in its name. When an insurer hands underwriting or claims authority to someone else (a managing general agent in the US, a coverholder at Lloyd’s, a third-party claims administrator), that party writes the policies, collects the premium and pays the claims, then reports every one of them back on a schedule. IRMI’s glossary defines it as a report providing premium or loss data with respect to identified specific risks, furnished periodically to a reinsurer by ceding insurers. The same word now covers the MGA-to-carrier reports, which is where most of the volume sits.

What does a bordereau look like?

Most bordereaux are spreadsheets with one row per policy transaction or per claim. Lloyd’s says that if you report claims on a spreadsheet, each claim should appear as one row. Here is a made-up premium bordereau for one month of a small property binder, so the shape is clear. The figures are invented round numbers.

Certificate ref	Insured	Transaction	Inception	Gross premium	Commission %	Commission	Net premium due
CERT-0101	Example Bakery LLC	New business	2026-10-03	$1,200	25%	$300	$900
CERT-0087	Example Dental PC	Additional premium (endorsement)	2026-10-14	$200	25%	$50	$150
CERT-0042	Example Auto Body Inc	Return premium (cancellation)	2026-10-21	-$400	25%	-$100	-$300
Month total				$1,000		$250	$750

A real one adds dozens of columns: the binder’s unique market reference, the reporting period start and end dates, risk location, sum insured, deductible, each tax and its jurisdiction, and the intermediaries involved. Negative rows are normal. The Lloyd’s premium procedure notes that negative values on an endorsement mean the report is transactional, recording each movement instead of restating the policy.

A claims bordereau row carries the money split by period. Using the Lloyd’s field names, an invented open claim might show: previously paid indemnity $4,000, paid this month $1,000, indemnity reserve $5,000, so total incurred indemnity is $10,000. Fees (adjusters, defence, TPA) are reported in their own paid, reserve and incurred columns.

What are the types of bordereaux?

Type	What it reports	Typical fields (Lloyd’s v5.2 names)	Who uses it
Risk bordereau (risk written)	Every policy bound in the period, with its details	Certificate ref, insured name and address, location of risk, risk inception and expiry dates, class of business, sum insured, deductible, limit of indemnity	Underwriters and exposure managers checking the business stayed inside the binder, plus tax and regulatory reporting
Premium bordereau (premium paid)	Premium transactions and the money due	Transaction type, gross premium paid this time, commission % and amount, each tax and levy, net premium, settlement currency and rate of exchange	Accounting and credit control, to reconcile cash received
Claims bordereau	Every open or moved claim in the period	Claim reference, claimant, date of loss, location of loss, cause of loss, claim status, paid this month, previously paid, reserve and total incurred (indemnity and fees separately), denials and referrals	Claims, reserving and finance teams; reinsurers

Lloyd’s version 5.2 combines risk and premium in one standard, which it calls risk and paid premium transaction information. In its October 2020 Market Bulletin Y5311, Lloyd’s proposed removing the risk fields from the premium bordereau so that reporting would be done on three separate bordereaux: Premium Paid, Claims and Risk Written. You will see both the combined and the split layout in the market.

For property business, the risk bordereau starts to look like a schedule of values. The v5.2 field list includes location of risk, number of locations, and buildings, contents and business interruption values. Teams that already pull those fields out of property schedules use the same kind of tooling covered in SOV extraction software.

Who sends bordereaux, and to whom?

Bordereaux flow from whoever holds delegated authority to whoever carries the risk.

• MGAs to carriers (US). The NAIC Managing General Agents Act requires every MGA contract to say the MGA will render accounts to the insurer detailing all transactions and remit all funds due on not less than a monthly basis. Minnesota puts the same requirement in § 60H.04(b) and Delaware in 18 Del. C. § 1804(2). Adoption of the model varies, so check the state where the MGA operates; those are the two statutes checked here.
• Coverholders to Lloyd’s syndicates. A coverholder’s binding authority agreement requires it to regularly report risk, premium and claims information to the syndicates. The report often travels through the London broker, which adds its own references.
• Claims administrators to carriers. At Lloyd’s, the standards apply to TPAs with claims authority, now called delegated claims administrators (DCAs), and a coverholder without claims authority may not be expected to send a claims report at all. In the US, the NAIC model requires an MGA with claims authority to report all claims to the insurer in a timely manner and send the claim file once a claim exceeds set limits, involves a coverage dispute or has been open more than six months.
• Ceding insurers to reinsurers. This is the original meaning in IRMI’s definition: the cedent lists the individual risks and losses ceded under a treaty.

How does a bordereau move from MGA to carrier?

1. 1
   MGA / coverholderBind and transact

   Writes policies, endorsements and cancellations, collects premium and, with claims authority, handles claims inside the limits of the contract.

2. 2
   MGA / TPACompile the period

   At period end, exports risk, premium and claims bordereaux from its policy and claims systems for that binder.

3. 3
   MGA or brokerSubmit

   Sends the files to the carrier or managing agent, at Lloyd's either through the London broker or syndicate or straight into Delegated Data Manager.

4. 4
   Carrier / managing agentMap and validate

   Maps the sender's columns to a standard, checks each row against the binder and flags missing or wrong data.

5. 5
   BothCorrect and reconcile

   Errors go back to the sender; premium is matched to cash received and claims to the funds held.

6. 6
   CarrierUse the data

   Feeds accounting, reserving, tax and regulatory returns, and the oversight of the program.

Sources: Lloyd's Coverholder Reporting Standards v5.2 user guide; Lloyd's DDM premium and claims SOPs; NAIC Managing General Agents Act.

The carrier’s oversight does not stop at the spreadsheet. The NAIC model requires the insurer to conduct an on-site review of the MGA’s underwriting and claims operations at least semi-annually, and Delaware’s § 1805(c) has the same rule.

How often are bordereaux due?

The contract sets the schedule. Monthly is the floor most programs are built around: US MGA law sets “not less than a monthly basis” for accounts and remittance, and the Lloyd’s claims fields are framed as “paid this month” and “change this month”. The Lloyd’s user guide asks for the reporting period start and end dates on every report and says they must always be given where the report is for longer than a month, which allows for quarterly or other periods where the binder permits them.

In the Lloyd’s market, bad data has a cost. Bulletin Y5311 said corrections must be made no later than the submission of the subsequent bordereau, and that under the planned Conditions of Trade, non-compliance would mean premium payment not being processed by Lloyd’s central settlement.

What are the Lloyd’s Coverholder Reporting Standards?

The standards are Lloyd’s list of the regulatory, tax, premium and claims data that coverholders and claims administrators must report into the Lloyd’s market, for all classes of business in all territories. The current version is 5.2, dated 20 August 2019. Lloyd’s standards page carries the standards, the user guide, a premium reporting template and a claims reporting template.

A few points people get wrong:

• Not every field is required. In the user guide’s field tables, red fields are mandatory and yellow fields apply only for certain territories or classes. US business picks up fields such as state of filing, NAIC code and surplus lines broker details; Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and others have their own.
• The format is open. Lloyd’s says it has not mandated that a particular format is used for reporting. Lloyd’s worked with ACORD so that ACORD XML can meet the standards, and ACORD publishes Delegated Authority Standards, including binding authority premium and claim transaction specifications, which participating Lloyd’s coverholders can download.
• It is mandatory for syndicates to collect. Lloyd’s mandated that syndicates request and collect data in line with the standards for binding authorities incepting or renewing from July 2017.

On the receiving side, the market’s shared platform is Delegated Data Manager (DDM), formerly DA SATS and powered by Charles Taylor InsureTech’s Tide application. LIMOSS describes it as a platform that maps, cleanses and validates bordereaux data and then outputs it in a standard format, converting incoming files to the agreed Coverholder Reporting Standards.

Why are bordereaux so hard to process?

LIMOSS describes the problem this way: insurers receive a huge number of bordereaux in different formats, but the quality and completeness of the data can vary greatly. Each MGA exports from its own system, names its columns its own way and changes them when it upgrades. A carrier with many programs can get a different layout for the same three reports from each one.

Lloyd’s own procedures read like a list of what goes wrong. The DDM premium procedure tells users to make sure the bordereau does not contain lots of macros or formulas, use XLSX and check the file isn’t password-protected. It warns about header rows spread over several rows, merged cells, duplicate headings and headings that change, and says not to assume sheets share the same headings. It also notes that a premium entry can be split across several rows that have to be combined, and that a missing unique reference may mean passing the bordereau back to the broker or coverholder.

Common problems on the receiving desk:

• Column drift. A renamed or reordered column breaks any mapping built on position.
• Missing keys. A certificate reference that changes on endorsement makes it impossible to tie a cancellation to the original policy.
• Out-of-authority business. A risk outside the binder’s classes, territories or limits that should have been referred.
• Money that doesn’t tie. Net premium on the bordereau that doesn’t match the cash remitted, or claims paid that don’t match the claims fund.
• PDFs and scans. A bordereau that arrives as a PDF or a scanned report needs extraction before any validation can start.

How does software handle bordereaux?

The work splits into three jobs, and different tools cover different parts.

1. Getting data out of the file. For spreadsheets this is column mapping. DDM uses a once-per-sender questionnaire that maps the bordereau’s columns to standard fields and is then reused for later submissions from the same sender. For PDFs and scanned reports it is extraction, the same problem as loss runs and schedules; the best insurance document extraction software compares tools that turn insurance documents into structured data.
2. Checking the data against the contract. Send, an underwriting platform, describes its bordereaux ingestion as mapping incoming records to the correct contract sections, products and sub-coverages, validating them against contracted rules and preventing invalid records from flowing downstream. It also tracks reporting schedules, so the carrier can see which submissions are expected and which are missing. Send and similar systems are compared in underwriting workbench software.
3. Running the program. Lloyd’s Y5311 bulletin names managing agents’ own bordereaux management systems, including VIPR, Watertrace and Bindercloud, as the reason it accepted “trusted source” submissions into DDM. These systems hold the contract terms, chase late reports and pass clean data to accounting and reserving.

When comparing tools, test them on files from your messiest senders. Ask how a mapping is updated when a sender renames a column, whether validation rules can read the actual binder terms (classes, territories, limits, commission), and whether the tool reconciles bordereau totals to cash. If claims bordereaux are part of the scope, check that the tool keeps paid, reserve and incurred separate for indemnity and fees.

For the claims-history document that underwriters use at the account level, see what a loss run report is.

FAQs

What is a bordereau in insurance?

A bordereau is a report listing individual risks, premiums or claims, sent at regular intervals by the party that handled them (an MGA, coverholder, TPA or ceding insurer) to the party carrying the risk (a carrier, Lloyd's syndicate or reinsurer). It lets the risk carrier see and account for business it did not write itself.

What is the difference between bordereau and bordereaux?

Bordereaux is the plural. One monthly claims report is a claims bordereau; the set of risk, premium and claims reports an MGA sends each month are its bordereaux.

How often are bordereaux sent?

The binding authority or agency contract sets the frequency. Monthly is the common baseline: the NAIC model act and the Minnesota and Delaware statutes require MGAs to account to the insurer at least monthly, and Lloyd's claims fields are framed as amounts paid or changed this month. Some contracts allow longer periods.

What is the difference between a claims bordereau and a loss run?

A loss run is a carrier's claims history for one insured, used by underwriters when the account is shopped or renewed. A claims bordereau goes the other way: the MGA or TPA reports every claim it is handling across a whole book of business to the carrier, period by period, so the carrier can fund payments, set reserves and monitor the program.

What are the Lloyd's Coverholder Reporting Standards?

They are Lloyd's list of the regulatory, tax, premium and claims data that coverholders and claims administrators must report to Lloyd's syndicates. The current version is 5.2, with a user guide and premium and claims spreadsheet templates on Lloyd's website. Lloyd's mandated that syndicates collect data in line with the standards for binding authorities incepting or renewing from July 2017.

What is bordereaux management?

Bordereaux management is the carrier-side or broker-side work of receiving bordereaux, mapping each sender's columns to a standard, validating the data against the contract, chasing missing or late reports and passing clean data on to accounting, reserving and regulatory reporting. Managing agents at Lloyd's often run dedicated systems for it, and the market's shared platform is Delegated Data Manager.