The insurance broker who saved almost 1,300 hours of paperwork.

An independent insurance broker in Upper Austria is handling more than 1,000 customers with just three back-office staff — where brokers he talks to manage 300 to 400 with the same number of people. The difference is a set of apps that have saved almost 1,300 hours of manual work since they went live. This is the story of how they were built.

The facts. An independent insurance broker, run by Marco with three back-office staff · Upper Austria · running on AI since the end of 2024 for the no-code apps, with one AI feature added since to file insurer emails against claims · run cost about €300, depending on the number of documents and of users logging in.

At a glance

• Marco runs an independent insurance brokerage in Upper Austria, with three back-office staff and more than 1,000 customers. His apps were built by Alexander Stadlmair and his team at kwapso, a no-code and AI-code agency, and Alexander is the one telling the story.
• Brokers spend most of their day on back-office work rather than selling. Claims, cancellations and contract changes meant printing an insurer's PDF form, filling it in by hand, scanning it and emailing it with the customer's signed mandate attached.
• Going independent meant every customer had to sign a new mandate, taking about 35 minutes of work in person. A form and an e-signature brought that down to about two minutes, and 945 mandates have been signed this way.
• One Glide app now runs the back office. It requests contracts from insurers, fills in the right PDF for 15 different processes and files insurer emails against each claim with help from AI. Glide is a no-code tool that turns a database into an app people can use on a phone or in a browser.
• The apps have saved almost 1,300 hours of manual work, worth about €89,000, since they went live. In 2026 alone, to 4 November, seven automations saved 825 hours, about five months of full-time work.
• Marco says the apps save him at least one full-time employee. His three back-office staff look after more than 1,000 customers, where brokers he talks to manage 300 to 400 with the same number.
• kwapso has since built similar apps for two more brokers, in about three months each. The first took almost a year, because the team was learning the industry as it went.

Many insurance brokers start inside a partner network, which supplies back-office staff and takes a commission on every policy they sell. The broker can concentrate on selling, but the customers technically belong to the network.

Marco had about 500 customers when he decided to go independent at the end of 2024. kwapso had built his website, so he came to Alexander.

Alexander expected brokers to spend their days selling.

"We always think insurance brokers, they only do selling. But they actually do a lot of back office work, which I also didn't know."

— Alexander Stadlmair

The market has two levels. Insurers give their own agents their own software, while independent brokers work with many insurers and get a folder of PDF templates and an instruction to email when they need something.

Alexander's first Create With case study was the railway company safety4you, and this is his second.

Before: a paper mandate signed in person by every customer

A mandate lets the broker act in a customer's name, writing to insurers, requesting contracts and making claims. Inside the network, this is how it worked.

• The mandate was a paper form, and the customer came into the office to sign it.
• Each signing took about 35 minutes of work in person, for every customer.
• The signed copy then went out with every email to an insurer, attached by hand each time.
• The customers technically belonged to the network, so leaving it meant every one of them had to sign again.

Marco had about 500 customers at that point. "I cannot do this for 500 customers," he told Alexander.

What changed: going independent meant 500 new signatures

Leaving the network was the trigger. Every customer needed a new mandate before Marco could work for them as an independent broker.

"You always have one initial request from these legacy businesses. They always have something that is the most bothering."

— Alexander Stadlmair

What they built: a form, an e-signature and a status for every customer

Marco downloaded his customer list from the partner network and filled in the missing emails and phone numbers himself. kwapso then built the form every customer would fill in.

• One link went to every customer, sent from Marco's phone with the same WhatsApp message explaining the change.
• The form asks for the details a broker needs, like address, birth date and marital status, so signing doubled as a chance to update the records.
• The answers pre-fill the mandate, which the customer then signs with a legally binding e-signature, and a copy goes back to them.
• A Glide app holds every customer, with a status of not sent, sent or signed, the updated details and the signed PDF attached.
• Marco follows up only with customers who haven't signed, because the status shows him who they are.

The form later moved inside Glide, where a customer first chooses whether they are new or existing. It became the onboarding flow for every new customer, and the start of a customer portal.

Since January 2026 the back office can also request a mandate from a customer's record in the app. The customer gets an email with a link to the form, and the signed mandate is saved to their documents.

Requesting a mandate from a customer's record, in kwapso's demo version of the app with invented customers. The customer gets an email with the form and the e-signature, and the signed mandate is filed under their documents.

Result: 945 mandates, each signed in about two minutes

• 945 signed mandates have gone through the app, to November 2026. That covers the customers who moved over with Marco and the new ones since.
• Each one takes about two minutes, down from about 35 in person. Both are estimates made with Marco when they compared the old and new ways of working.
• That one process has saved nearly €39,000, costing the time at €75 an hour.
• In 2026 the app collected 183 digital signatures: 121 mandates, 55 advisory contracts and 7 other documents.
• The same form now onboards every new customer, with nothing for the back office to do until the mandate is signed.

"We always tell him this feature alone was worth it."

— Alexander Stadlmair

Reality check: a mandate signed on a phone has to hold up

A mandate lets someone act in your name, so the objection to collecting one through a link is whether the signature counts. A broker without a valid mandate has no right to act for the customer.

Alexander's requirement from the start was a legally binding signature. The DocsAutomator e-signature the team uses now is approved in Germany and Austria, where the broker works, so check the equivalent rules wherever you are before you copy this.

Your first step: rebuild the form your customers sign in person

Take the form your customers have to come in to sign, and split its fields into the ones you already know and the ones only the customer can give you. Build the second list as a free online form.

Send it to one customer you know well and ask how long it took. If the answer is a minute, you have found your first workflow.

Alexander says Marco is clear that he couldn't run his business at its current size without the app. The objection to any business run this way is dependence, on one app and on the agency that built it.

Take that seriously if you are in the same position, whether your builder is an agency, a freelancer or someone on your own team. Marco's setup answers it in three ways.

The data is his, on a platform others can work on. Inside the partner network his customers technically weren't his, and now his records live in Glide, which many agencies and freelancers build on.

Every email goes from his own Outlook. Requests, claims and changes sit in his own mailbox as well as in the app.

Everything the app does is logged. Insurance needs proof that something happened, so the app records every email it sends and the team can always check that the automation did its job.

"He has way more freedom to work in his own app, and it's all his data."

— Alexander Stadlmair

Start with the thing that bothers them most. For Marco that was 500 mandates, and it took two weeks to solve.

"Once you help them with one thing, they become very open to maybe be helped in other things."

— Alexander Stadlmair

Look for the PDF forms. Alexander found the biggest gains in pre-filling the old forms insurers still use with data the app already holds.

"Insurances are so old school still. Everything is in PDF forms, which you need to fill out."

— Alexander Stadlmair

Send from their own mailbox. Connecting Marco's Outlook means every automated email sits where he would look for it anyway.

Log everything. In a business that has to prove what it sent, a record of every automated action is how people come to trust the automation.

Budget time to learn the industry. The first app took almost a year because so much had to be learned with the client, and the next two took about three months each.

Expect the small things to add up.

"It's all of the little things."

— Alexander Stadlmair

His team worked through them one step after the next.

Case studies are published to help readers understand how other organisations approached a problem. They are not endorsements of a tool or a vendor, and one company's result is not a forecast of yours.

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