How an independent insurance broker has saved almost 1,300 hours of paperwork.

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," he says.

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.

Each insurer has its own forms and its own contact for each kind of request. "We're actually building here a little ERP system for our insurance brokers," Alexander says, meaning one system for the work across every insurer.

None of the work is hard, and the trouble is the volume. "It's all very easy to do, but because they have so much volume, that's why they all get stuck," he says.

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

Marco introduced kwapso to two more brokers, and all three now run similar apps. Each one is built around that broker's own way of working.

The first app took almost a year to reach its current shape. Alexander thinks it could have been built in Glide in about three months if the requirements had been known, and the rest of the time went on learning the industry with Marco.

"Transferring his words into what the system needs to do, it was a lot of back and forth. When do we send the follow-up to the insurance? When not? What do we need to track?" he says.

For the next two brokers, kwapso started from what it had already built. Alexander showed each one the full set of workflows and asked where their business was different.

That took about two weeks of requirements, then two to three months of building and testing. "That's quite straightforward," he says.

kwapso has kept these as separate custom apps rather than turning them into one product. Every broker tracks different data and has their own rules for things like when a follow-up goes out.

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.

Alexander sees the app as giving Marco more control than he had inside the network. "He has way more freedom to work in his own app, and it's all his data," he says.

For each automation, kwapso worked out with Marco how long the job took before and how long it takes now, then multiplied the difference by how often it ran. The counts come from the app, and the minutes are estimates.

The total since the apps went live comes to 1,287.8 hours of manual work and €88,892. The analysis costs the time at €65 an hour, and €75 for the mandate.

In 2026 alone, to 4 November, seven automations saved 825 hours. That is about five months of full-time work, and €54,270 at the same rates.

The app also hands out the work. It created 3,126 tasks for the back office in 2026, two thirds of all their tasks, including 713 birthday reminders.

Marco puts the saving another way, saying the apps save him at least one full-time employee. His three back-office staff look after more than 1,000 customers, where other brokers he talks to manage 300 to 400 with the same number.

Running the two Glide apps and DocsAutomator costs about €300 a month, Alexander says. The figure moves with the number of documents generated and the number of users logging in.

The customer base has grown from about 500 to more than 1,000 since he went independent. Alexander says the three back-office staff can handle that many customers because the automations take so much routine work off them.

No single task explains the saving. "Nothing is complicated, but if you have a thousand customers, it's very likely that every day you have to do ten, fifteen different forms," Alexander says.

The margins set the limit. Alexander says brokerage doesn't pay enough to hire the back-office staff it would take to do all of this by hand.

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 says.

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," he says.

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 says, and his team worked through them one step after the next.