Insurers are looking to get closer to distribution partners and become easier to do business with, allowing them to attract more submissions, respond faster and better understand their selected risks, and Applied Systems, through key divisions such as Ivans and Cytora, is well-positioned to support this shift.
Michael Streit, president of Ivans, a provider of automated connectivity services to the insurance industry, told Reinsurance News that insurers are increasingly focused on reducing friction in broker interactions, especially in commercial submissions where the process remains highly manual.
He explained: “As an industry, we have a hard time with commercial submissions. There’s still a lot of friction in the process from insurer to broker to underwriter, and we see that in several ways. One of them is that it doesn’t happen in the system; it happens in email, it happens in phone calls, and it’s very difficult for us to influence changes in the process that happen outside the system.
“Secondly, when we talk to operators, we hear two things. One is that they desperately want closer relationships with their distribution partners, and they want to be the easiest partner to do business with. They know that if they can be the easiest partner to do business with, they’re going to see more submissions, they’re going to close those submissions faster, and they’re going to have a better understanding of the risk of them choosing to build their own portfolio. They want to be closer to their distribution partners, and we think it’s our job to help them do that.”
Streit emphasized that large language models (LLMs) are eliminating trade-offs in the business world by allowing large-scale automation and efficiency without forcing standardization.
“The advent of LL.M.s is removing the trade-offs that already existed. In the past, if we wanted to increase efficiency and automate, we told the ecosystem we could do it, but you have to standardize because we can’t automate something that is customized everywhere.”
He explained that while standardization applies to personal lines, for most commercial lines this is a trade-off that operators are unwilling to make.
“Now, the LL.M. allows you to drive automation and efficiency at scale without forcing standardization. To me, this is the biggest change we’ve seen in the industry, and honestly, it’s the change we aspire to achieve,” Streit said.
In terms of operational strategy, Streit noted that insurers can now improve efficiencies in areas where they were previously unable to improve, particularly through Cytora, a digital risk processing platform for the insurance industry that Applied Systems acquired in September 2025.
“So, let’s take an example from a real client. Previously, they would take a bunch of submissions and collect that information through a series of emails, responses, phone calls and handwritten notes and then send it offshore (either in-house or BPO) who would manually enter that information into an underwriting workbench to notify the underwriter that the risk was ready for assessment, and by the time they heard back from the carrier or brokerage partner, weeks had passed,” he said.
“When that happens, first of all, you’re not going to win as many risks as you did when you first put the cards on the table. Secondly, the risks you win may be ones you don’t want because they’re bad risks.”
Streit continued, “So what’s happening now is they’re getting their information through Cytora. Cytora has digitized it, and all the work that used to go to an offshore BPO is now done on an agency basis. They can get quotes back to the carrier or broker the same day, so their win rate goes up and they’re able to be more selective.”
He describes this as “Phase 1,” the early steps in the maturation process. Insurers are now increasingly looking to incorporate automation into management system workflows and broker workflows, and Applied Materials is helping them do that, he said.
Streit also explained how insurance companies are moving to a more connected end-to-end operating model, working with distribution partners to connect communications more effectively.
He explained: “Now more than ever, these systems are able to communicate with each other and work together. The beauty of infrastructure or architecture is that there no longer needs to be a single platform to do these things. Cytora is built to drive a lot of automation. It can drive the entire end-to-end workflow, but it can do that by using what they call skills and tools. In a modular way, it can call a different set of instructions, which can be like Word explaining underwriting guidance As simple as a document can be, it can be something more complex like other agent systems working in other parts of the infrastructure.
“As a result, the architecture can be more modular, so the burden of starting to drive automation across the entire process, end-to-end or specific steps is much more bearable than it was before, when decisions were very linear and rigid and there were more RPAs than agents.”
Streit also noted that insurance companies are prioritizing investments in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Some of the largest insurance companies in North America have been very vocal about spending billions of dollars on AI technology,” he said. Advertisement
Streit observed that operators have been building AI solutions in-house, often focusing on a certain line of business to replicate the functionality provided by Cytora.
“It’s going to take a while for them to do it. It works great, but as a large insurance company they have a lot of other things to think about. They have a great solution, but it’s 12 years too late compared to what they’re buying from people like us. Months, and they only do one business. A lot of times we see carriers do that, and then they come to us and say, ‘Well, this is harder than we thought, you guys are the experts in building these workflows, and we’re going to outsource part of that to you.’ And then there’s always a spin-off conversation where they say, ‘We have our own perspective on the following issues, we have specific underwriting guidelines that we use, and we have a very unique process that we want to empower field agents to actually do the underwriting. ‘ We said, no problem. Think of us as a building platform. We are passionate about “Buy Build”. It’s not a question of buy versus build, it’s a question of buy build. That’s the dynamic we’re seeing,” Street said.
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