This article was created in partnership with Ascend.
What should we automate next - that’s the question in today’s AI-driven market. According to data from Reagan Consulting’s 2025 Best Practices Report, 60% of $25M-$100M revenue brokers have already invested in AI in some form, while that number increased to 84% of firms over $100M of revenue.
One big mover in the AI-driven insurance space is Ascend. A complete accounting automation platform powered by AI and purpose-built for insurance brokers, MGAs, and carriers, Ascend makes insurance businesses more profitable by increasing revenue and decreasing operational expenses through administrative process automation and treasury management.
Recently, Ascend made global headlines for automating direct bill commission reconciliation – but for CEO Andrew Wynn, this was only the beginning.
“Commissions reconciliation is just the tip of the iceberg for brokers to tackle the broader problem of managing unapplied cash across both agency and direct billed policies,” explained Wynn. “AI is uniquely positioned to help brokers address this problem because of its ability to help read, extract, and process financial documents whether its carrier invoices, commission statements, client invoices and match this data against entries inside a general ledger.”
Unlike direct bill, agency bill accounting workflows involve an additional layer of complexity. Teams not only need to reconcile the cash received but also review and approve outstanding accounts payables before disbursement workflows can be approved – but both require brokers to correctly track deposits, create and match receipts to apply cash to accounts.
Unapplied cash also remains a persistent pain point for brokers, often lingering unresolved at month-end. Wynn believes Ascend’s comprehensive approach is designed to address both the technical and operational gaps contributing to this friction.
“Especially for brokers who have grown through acquisition and are looking to recapitalize or even go public, auditors and regulators use the threshold of unapplied cash exceeding 5% of net income to trigger escalations,” he noted.
Ascend’s platform confronts this challenge directly through four core capabilities:
The foundation of these capabilities, however, lies in recent technological breakthroughs - notably the rise of agentic AI.
“From a technology perspective, the models have continued to improve so that not only can they process documents with higher degrees of accuracy and confidence,” Wynn explained. “But the evolution into agentic AI where these models can automate end-to-end workflows - fetch documents, review exceptions and make suggestions, provide insights is what makes the next evolution of this technology really interesting.”
However, Wynn is quick to credit human insight as central to Ascend’s development strategy – noting that it’s a blend of human and tech that makes the process so seamless.
“It really began at the human level where companies like Ascend spend countless hours with accounting teams to really understand the process, the pains, the desired outcomes to build products that align with what finance teams want, just because they traditionally have been under-served when you look at traditional vendors within insurance.”
And, looking ahead, success for Ascend will be measured in real operational gains.
"One such example of this automation in practice is with a top 20 publicly traded broker, " said Wynn. "Their unapplied cash balance at the end of the month was causing issues with the SEC as internal control deficiency under SOX 404. After deploying Ascend's Cash Application solution, they were able to cut that balance by more than half and reduce the average time it took their team to reconcile cash from 8 days down to three."
Ultimately, Ascend’s mission is about elevating finance teams. As Wynn told IB, they’ve been able to allow teams to spend significantly less time working on transactional, low-value tasks, and more time on strategic initiatives.
“[It’s about] unlocking a new dimension of value brokers can get from their accounting and finance organizations.”
