Your next DFS exam
is reading your vendor contracts.

What the assessment actually delivers.

A written sovereignty-posture document, organized the way your next DFS exam team will organize their findings. Three to six pages, named observations, sourced to your environment, with a remediation order written for a cooperative's procurement reality (not a sales-cycle reality).

The deliverable is yours. Keep it, share it with your board, drop it into your next exam workpaper file. There is no obligation to engage Sterling for any remediation work. If we can help, you will know. If you do the work in-house from the assessment alone, that is also a good outcome.

The threat surface, named.

Four exposures sized specifically for a mutual or cooperative carrier in New York or an adjacent state. None of these are hypothetical. All of them are showing up in current DFS examinations and in the industry trade press.

The two-hour cycle, sized to your reality.

The general success.build/risk evaluation is built for organizations where one person wears the operations, vendor, compliance, and AI hats simultaneously. A two-hour cycle works for that buyer.

A mutual carrier is a different shape. Your board meets monthly or quarterly. Your procurement reality includes a finance committee, an audit committee, and an examination team. A two-hour deliverable would not survive the first review meeting.

So the mutual-carrier assessment is shaped differently:

• One 45-minute discovery call with the carrier's operations leader or CEO. Named scope: which vendors, which exam findings if any are public, which lines of business, which states.
• One week of homework on our side. We read the most recent published DFS exam report cover to cover. We pull the public regulatory record. We collect the current terms of service for every named vendor. We do not ask you for documents we can find ourselves.
• One 90-minute evaluation session with the operations team or CEO and one or two functional leads (typically operations, IT, and either underwriting or claims).
• One written sovereignty-posture document delivered within five business days. Three to six pages. Named findings, sourced, exam-workbook-shaped. Yours to keep, share, or file as you see fit.

Total elapsed time from first call to delivered document: about ten business days. Total cost to your carrier: zero dollars. The work is honest. We ask the same of you.

Who this is for.

The fit is clearest for New York Article 66 advance premium cooperatives and equivalent mutual property/casualty carriers in adjacent states, in the $15M to $150M direct written premium band, with staff between 25 and 150 people. That sizing is not arbitrary, it maps to the cooperative's procurement reality and to the Sovereignty Maturity Assessment's deliverable shape.

• Multi-county or statewide cooperatives with independent agency distribution, an operations team, and one or two IT generalists but no dedicated CIO.
• Carriers in or approaching a shared-services or affiliation arrangement where vendor selection in the next 12 months will shape the next decade.
• Cooperatives with a recent or imminent DFS examination cycle where IT general controls, vendor management, or governance findings are on the table.
• Mutual carriers with a tight niche (geographic, vertical, or product) and a structural commitment to staying that size rather than chasing scale.
• Statewide administrators serving multiple affiliated cooperatives where the operational backbone is being modernized across the group.

Adjacent structures we also work with

• Town, county, and farm mutuals below the Tier B band (typically under $15M premium) where the engagement scope is narrower and usually exam-readiness-only rather than full sovereignty modernization.
• Credit unions where the cooperative form is the same but the regulator is NCUA (and NYDFS for state-charter NY credit unions) rather than DFS for insurance. The cooperative-member-ownership frame is identical; the regulatory and vendor reality differs. Assessment shaped for credit unions.
• Mutual benefit corporations and cooperative associations outside insurance (member-owned utilities, agricultural cooperatives) where the fiduciary-duty-to-members frame applies even though the regulatory regime is different.
• Fraternal benefit societies with insurance products under state fraternal codes. When the fraternal organization operates as a multi-501 cluster (a 501c8 or 501c10 fraternal beneficiary society alongside a 501c3 charitable arm, often with a 501c2 holding the building), the cluster-stewardship questions route to the fraternal 501s assessment.
• Faith-based mutual aid societies and benevolent associations (Chinese benevolent associations, Latino mutual-aid networks, diaspora chevras, Catholic mutual benefit societies) where the cooperative form is the historical root and the moral frame is tradition-specific. Assessment shaped for religious institutions and diaspora community organizations covers the tradition-specific moral framing; the cooperative-form fiduciary frame at the heart of this page applies in both directions.
• Reciprocal exchanges with attorney-in-fact governance, where the structural alignment is similar but the legal frame differs.

Why us.

Sterling Solutions is a Westchester-based small firm. We do not run on venture capital. We do not have a sales team pretending to be your friend. We do not have an exit horizon. We have published values (success.build/ethos) and a written anti-lock-in doctrine, and the architecture of our own platform proves it: every layer is swappable, every export is clean, your data is yours from day one and on the day you leave.

The Westchester base is not incidental. The oldest cooperatives in our target segment were chartered by Granges and patrons' associations in Westchester, Putnam, and the adjacent Hudson Valley counties more than a century ago. Sterling is a present-day practitioner of the same locality those carriers were built to serve. We understand the form of the business, not just the technical merits.

And we're researching member-ownership and cooperative structures for our own firm. The goal is that as Sterling grows, the people we serve benefit alongside us, rather than the opposite (which is what every venture-backed SaaS model produces by structural necessity). A formal recommendation on the structure will publish later this year. We mention it here because if you run a cooperative, the question of whether your vendors are structurally aligned with you is the question. We take it seriously enough to ask it of ourselves.

The same anti-lock-in doctrine that protects member sovereignty here at mutual carriers protects member sovereignty for credit unions in the parallel cooperative-financial-institution form, and protects multi- generational community records for the faith-based mutual aid societies and benevolent associations where the cooperative form is the historical root of the work. The cluster-stewardship version of the same question, where a fraternal beneficiary society operates alongside a charitable arm and a title-holding entity, is treated at the fraternal 501s assessment. Same doctrine, different shape of the underlying form, same question of whether the vendor stack respects the structural alignment the form was built to deliver.

What this page is not.

This is not a pitch for a six-figure modernization engagement disguised as a free assessment. The assessment is the deliverable. If you read it, file it, do the work in-house, and never speak to us again, that is a good outcome and we are not chasing you for a sales call.

This is not a sovereignty audit you could order from a Big Four firm. Those exist and they cost six figures and they are shaped for carriers with internal procurement teams large enough to receive them. This assessment is shaped for the operations leader or CEO who is reading their own vendor contracts on a Sunday because no one else will.

This is not a generic insurance-vertical consulting offer. The lens is specifically mutual-and-cooperative-carrier-shaped, with Article 66 fiduciary duty and DFS examination posture as the organizing frame. A stock company would get a different evaluation and probably should look at the general success.build/risk page instead.

Tire-kickers, briefly.

The evaluation is honest work. We do the homework on our end. We read your last exam report cover to cover. We pull your vendors' current terms. We come to the evaluation session prepared. We ask the same of you: bring the operations leader who actually owns the vendor relationships, and bring a real intent to read what we deliver. Curiosity is fine. Performative curiosity is not what this offer is for.