Reinsurance Without Blind Spots: Building a Control-Ready Backbone with Duck Creek Reinsurance

By Akshay Relan, Vice President – Business Development, Americas at Xceedance

Reinsurance sits at the crossroads of balance sheet protection, earnings stability, and strategic growth. But in many organizations, the operating reality behind that mission hasn’t kept pace with today’s volatility and scrutiny. Assumed, ceded, and delegated authority portfolios are still frequently managed through inboxes, offline spreadsheets, and disconnected legacy tools—systems that were never designed to provide auditability, transparency, and speed at scale.

That gap matters. When the reinsurance function runs on fragmented processes, the cost isn’t just time. It shows up as missed recoveries, inconsistent contract interpretation, slow close cycles, weak controls, and uncertainty when leadership—or regulators and rating agencies—need clear answers. The organizations that are pulling ahead are treating reinsurance operations as a capability to modernize, not a back-office patchwork to tolerate.

The hidden risk in “good enough” reinsurance workflows

If your contracts live across PDFs and shared drives, bordereaux arrive in inconsistent formats, and recoveries are chased through follow-up emails, you’re not alone. But these symptoms tend to compound:

• Version chaos across contracts, endorsements, and renewals makes it hard to prove terms and decisions.
• Manual validation of bordereaux and statements consumes time and still leaves room for leakage.
• Siloed tracking of inwards, outwards, and retro structures obscures the true net position.
• Claims and recoveries become reactive, with ownership and escalation dependent on tribal knowledge.
• Leadership reporting becomes a reconciliation exercise instead of a decision-ready view.

In a world of event-driven volatility, this creates operational fragility and capital risk. The goal of modernization is to replace that fragility with a single, connected backbone that makes the “right way of working” the default—controlled, auditable, and scalable.

Reinsurance isn’t “just another module”

A common modernization pitfall is treating reinsurance as an add-on to primary insurance workflows. Reinsurance has its own mechanics and complexity: multi-layer and multi-year programs, multi-currency accounting, profit commissions and sliding scales, reinstatements, event and aggregate triggers, bespoke wordings, and heavily negotiated terms. Add delegated authority—coverholders, MGAs, binders, facilities—and the operational throughput becomes significant.

When technology doesn’t reflect that real-world complexity, users inevitably revert to spreadsheets. The platform may look clean on paper, but it gets bypassed in practice. Modernization succeeds only when the operating model and the system are built around how reinsurance actually works.

The operating backbone: why Duck Creek Reinsurance (and how to make it real)

Duck Creek Reinsurance is designed specifically to handle reinsurance end-to-end: contract structures, technical accounting, bordereaux processing, claims and event management, and the ability to connect inwards, outwards, and recoveries. But the platform is only one part of the equation. The difference comes from implementing it as an operations backbone—embedded into day-to-day workflows—rather than a passive system of record.

At Xceedance, we take a practical approach built around four steps:

1) Start with the operating model—not the screens

Before configuring anything, define how reinsurance operations should run: contract lifecycle, inwards and outwards flows, technical accounting and close cadence, bordereaux ingestion and query handling, recoveries ownership and escalation, and the control points that matter (approvals, segregation of duties, documentation, audit evidence). This becomes the blueprint for workflows, roles, data standards, and measurable outcomes—like exception rates, dispute volumes, and recovery realization.

2) Configure for real deal mechanics and daily usage

Modern platforms earn adoption when they match reality. That means capturing treaty and facultative terms accurately (layers, shares, currencies, commissions, reinstatements, bespoke conditions), standardizing technical accounting with validations and traceability, embedding role-based approvals and audit trails, and integrating with underwriting/policy systems, claims, GL/treasury, exposure management, and reporting environments. The result: fewer workarounds and faster, more predictable close cycles.

3) Fix bordereaux and partner data quality at the source

Data quality is the multiplier. If bordereaux are weak, everything above them is noisy. Modernization requires standardized templates and mappings, automated validation and normalization, rules to catch missing fields and inconsistencies before ingestion, enrichment for exposure attributes, and structured feedback loops that help cedents, coverholders, and MGAs improve over time. Bordereaux stops being a monthly fire drill and becomes a reliable operational input.

4) Link inwards, outwards, and recoveries so value stops leaking

The most valuable outcome is a connected view of risk, protection, and cash. When inwards positions are explicitly linked to ceded and retro structures, claims events can trigger systematic identification and pursuit of recoveries, expected vs. actual recoveries can be tracked and explained, and net positions become visible by counterparty, line, territory, year, and event. This is where organizations protect real money—by reducing missed recoveries and improving the effectiveness of purchased protections.

What a modern backbone delivers across the business

A connected reinsurance operating model improves outcomes for everyone: operations gets clear accountability and predictable close cycles; finance gets reliable balances and recoverables; underwriting, actuarial, and risk gain trustworthy exposure and profitability views; and audit/compliance benefit from embedded controls and end-to-end traceability. Instead of rebuilding narratives for stakeholders after the fact, you can answer confidently—with one version of the truth.

Next step: turn this into a practical modernization plan

If you’re exploring how to move from spreadsheets and fragmented tools to a controlled, auditable backbone, I’d be glad to walk through what this could look like for your portfolio—treaty, fac, and delegated authority included.

Book a working session with me here: https://calendly.com/akshay-relan/meeting.