A tie-up is a two-way promise: you send a partner your freehand cargo on their lanes, they send you their nominations on yours — often with the profit on a shared file split down the middle by handshake convention. Almost nobody counts both directions. Keeping the ledger — freehand sent versus nominations received, per partner, per lane, with the margin attached — is the difference between a renewal conversation and a renewal negotiation.
What does a tie-up actually promise?
The formal part is the agency agreement: lane exclusivity, payment terms, lien rights. The informal part is the engine — reciprocal traffic, and on many reciprocal files a profit share split evenly between the two desks, a convention so old nobody writes it down. Both halves assume balance: I feed you, you feed me. The agreement gets signed once; the balance is supposed to take care of itself.
Why does nobody keep the ledger?
Because the industry built magnificent infrastructure for meeting and almost none for counting. Globalia pre-books 32 one-to-one meetings per member at its annual conference — and expels members who miss two consecutive editions. The relationship is maintained in person, annually; the traffic happens in email and WhatsApp, daily; and no system joins the two. What fills the gap is memory, and memory is a partisan bookkeeper: every desk vividly recalls the files it sent and hazily recalls the ones it received. Both sides of an unbalanced tie-up can sincerely believe they are the generous one.
What should the ledger count?
- Freehand sent: files you routed to the partner — count, volume, and the margin the shared business contributed.
- Nominations received: routing orders they sent back, on the same terms of measurement.
- RFQ behaviour both ways: how fast each side quotes the other, and how often the quote wins.
- Settlement conduct: SOA discipline, dispute frequency, netting cleanliness — an imbalanced ledger plus slow settlement is two warnings, not one.
- Protection status: whether coverage still applies as volumes grow past program caps.
What changes at renewal when you have numbers?
The shape of the conversation. “We sent you 41 files last year and received 6” is not an accusation — it’s an agenda, and it works in every direction. Sometimes the numbers vindicate a partner everyone had quietly soured on; sometimes they expose the charming one; often they simply move volume to the quiet agent who reciprocates one-for-one. The desk keeps this ledger automatically — both directions, per partner, per lane — alongside the scorecards described in the complete guide. To see what an unbalanced tie-up costs in margin, the calculator will do the arithmetic with your numbers.
A counted ledger protects good partners as much as it exposes bad ones. The agent who reciprocates deserves to have it on the record — especially in the year their conference performance was quieter than their operational one.
From reading to running.
Everything above runs live in a working partner desk. Bring one lane you don't serve yet and watch the shortlist, the RFQs and the comparison happen.
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