Insurance · 11 weeks to launch

Turning a 3-day insurance quote into a 9-minute web flow

A self-serve quoting engine that took small-business insurance from a 3-day broker email chain to a 9-minute online flow, without breaking a single underwriting rule.

median quote time, down from 3 days: 9 min; median quote time, down from 3 days
quote requests completed: +31%; quote requests completed
underwriting rule violations since launch: 0; underwriting rule violations since launch

The challenge

Client: Commercial insurance brokerage
Services: Custom Software, Web Development, UI/UX Design
Timeline: 11 weeks to launch

Every quote started the same way: a small-business owner filled out a PDF, emailed it to a broker, and waited. Three days of back-and-forth later, a third of them had already bought from a competitor who quoted the same day.

The underwriters were the hard constraint. They had seen 'quoting tools' before, ones that bound policies they never would have approved. Whatever we built had to encode their rulebook exactly, and prove it.

What we did

The approach, decision by decision

01
Encoded the underwriting rulebook as testable logic
Sat with underwriters for a week and turned their tribal knowledge into versioned rules with a test for every edge case they could remember, and the ones in their claim history they'd forgotten.
02
Rebuilt the application as a conversation
Replaced the 40-field PDF with a progressive flow that asks only what the selected coverage actually requires. Most applicants answer 12 questions, not 40.
03
Kept brokers in the loop for the gray areas
Quotes the rules engine can't price route to a broker queue with everything pre-filled, so the humans handle judgment instead of data entry.

The results

Median quote time fell from 3 days to 9 minutes for 71% of applications.
Completed quote requests rose 31% in the first quarter after launch.
Zero underwriting violations: every automated quote passed the compliance audit.
Brokers now spend their day on complex commercial accounts, the work they're paid for.

Built with

Next.js
Express
MySQL
AWS
Terraform
Redis

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