I dipped in and out of an old Encyclopaedia Britannica to learn English when I was young. To my mind those oversized, mould-smelling books contained all the knowledge in the world – or at least all of it from 1876, the year they were published. The books were cool.

The creaky volumes contained some fascinating entries. I remember vividly the article about atomic theory, which seemed not quite to believe the idea that we are all made up of tiny electrocharged particles. Just as memorable was the article about bleeding with leeches. This slightly shocking medical practice was considered perfectly valid by the good books’ compilers.

Learning has changed since then. Instead of reading, we watch. This week I received an email inviting me to view a webinar entitled: “Smarter bordereaux management for a new era of delegated authority.” It reminded me of bleeding with leeches.

You wonder why. It’s because innovations intended to improve bordereaux management are akin to breeding better leeches to improve medical bleeding. The effort serves only to fine-tune an outdated process which has been superseded by very much more practical approaches.

We got here quickly. When I first underwrote delegated authorities, I was gratified just to receive a bordereau, even one spewed noisily from a dot-matrix printer. Now, more than likely, I’d be emailed an Excel spreadsheet, and face (at best) an hour or two of data-field reconciliation.

An up-to-date underwriting platform does away with such anachronisms. It feeds individual risk information from the MGA directly to the carrier. There’s no need for a physical or even a digital list of risks. Via the magical connection of an API, the underwriters’ systems are directly linked to those of their capacity providers. Every time the agent writes or even quotes a risk, the details are automatically, immediately transferred to the market/s standing behind them (respecting data privacy laws, of course).

I know, I know. Capacity providers still need bordereaux for various internal and reporting purposes (outwards, for example). But if the receiving platform is sufficiently robust and prepared, it can be tasked, with a single click, to create the list internally, automatically. Like magic it will be formatted precisely to satisfy whatever paper-pusher has demanded it.

Gone are the days when reams of paper or even standalone files must be copied and delivered, let alone rekeyed. If carriers insist on bordereaux box-ticking, they can make the docs themselves. They’ll almost certainly be less error-riddled.

Just imagine: it makes everyone’s job easier. Data-hungry, time-poor underwriters needn’t waste a moment on mundane cut-and-paste. Carriers don’t have to decipher and reconcile disparate data in their clients’ number-rich missives. When brokers are connected too, they can interrogate for clients’ risks at every point along the chain: where they’ve been, where they’re going, and what’s happening next.

We need to deliver this dream of real-time, tailor-made, class-specific data in a universal format which everyone understands. Every digital iteration is anchored to an immutable corporate data treasury which is always current and never hallucinates. It all goes straight into the hands of those who need it, in a user-friendly format that tells them only and exactly what they need to know.

Forget drawing better maps. We need GPS. We must stop trying to make bordereaux better, and lead the market to massively more efficient solutions. We can do it: the solutions I propose are no more complicated than the multi-player online video games your children play while you work late, compiling bordereaux.