Co-op balance and reimbursements

Co-op Overview

Understanding your co-op balance

Agents and agencies are accustomed to various forms of marketing co-op support, such as:

• [most commonly] A dollar amount per app (either the same throughout the year, or limited by AEP, OEP and rest-of-year)
• 50/50 reimbursements
• A set dollar per month or per year reflected approximate production
• An upfront amount to give an agent / agency time to build up production
• 50/25/25 reimbursements where Agency Principals and the Top-of-Hierarchy split a downline agent payment 50%

Typically the only enrollments that counts towards marketing co-op are:

• MAPD or MA-only plans; Medicare Supplement, PDP and other plans are excluded
• New plans to the carrier; in other words, plan-changes within the same carrier are NOT included
• In some cases, only AEP enrollments are counted

All co-op must be reimbursed via Spark’s reimbursement form, which is accessible in the Marketing section of the platform.

What Spark Supports

What Spark supports today for Agency Principals direct-to-Spark is tracking of:

• Marketing $ Earned (if on the dollar per app policy): we track the number of eligible enrollments and the value per app by the carrier.
• Marketing $ Spent: we track how much $ reimbursements have been submitted
• Marketing $ Remaining: the difference in Marketing $ Earned and Marketing $ Spent

We know it is difficult to track all of these agreements, and to manage payments to downlines. Consequently, we also support downline-management of co-op agreements if the co-op is standard across all of your agents. In other words, if every one of your agents and agencies receives the same co-op structure, we are able to manage it on your behalf.You just tell us the co-op structure and we’ll manage it through our platform. However, if you have bespoke arrangements with agency principals, we are unable to support it.