Persistency, lapse, and retention defined
Persistency is the share of policies, or premium, still in force after a set period, most commonly measured at 13 months, once a policy has survived its first renewal. Lapse rate is its mirror: the share that terminated for non-payment or cancellation. Retention is the broader picture of what stays versus what leaves.
AgencyGrid computes all three from carrier status data. Because every policy carries an effective date and a current status, the platform can measure a true 13-month persistency cohort rather than a rough snapshot, and break it down by whatever dimension you care about.
- ✓ 13-month persistency by agent, product, and carrier
- ✓ Lapse rate and voluntary vs. involuntary terminations
- ✓ Premium-weighted retention across the whole book
Catch at-risk policies before they lapse
A lapse rarely happens without warning. A status flip to pending-cancellation, a missed draft, a grace-period flag: these show up in carrier files before the policy is gone for good. AgencyGrid reads those signals as each carrier SFTP feed loads and surfaces the affected policies to the writing agent and their manager while the client can still be re-engaged.
The result is a working retention list, refreshed every cycle, instead of a post-mortem. Agents chase the policies that are salvageable rather than reconciling the ones already lost.
Persistency you can hold agents to
Because persistency is tracked per writing agent and rolled up the hierarchy, it becomes a metric managers can actually coach on. You can see which agents write business that sticks and which write business that lapses in month four, a distinction street-level production numbers completely hide.
That view also protects the agency financially: weak persistency is an early indicator of chargeback exposure, and seeing it by agent lets you act before the clawbacks arrive. It is also the number that most moves a book of business valuation when it is time to sell or borrow.