The CoverForce Blog

Bindable RC: Solving the Friction Between Carriers and Brokers

The commercial insurance world has no shortage of inefficiencies. But from a technology perspective, few bottlenecks have caused more friction — or more false optimism — than the limitations of RC1 and RC2 (Rate Call 1 and 2). These protocols, initially intended to simplify quoting, have instead created a fragmented landscape of partial answers, dead-end workflows, and wasted energy across the distribution chain.

At CoverForce, we didn’t set out to build just another quoting tool. We built CoverForce to solve the actual pain we saw on both sides of the carrier-broker equation — bindability, workflow alignment, and full-cycle connectivity across commercial P&C.

And that required throwing out the assumptions embedded in RC1 and RC2.

The Problem with RC1 and RC2

RC1 and RC2 weren’t bad ideas. At a high level:

• RC1 returns a price based on minimal input — think of it as an “indication.”
• RC2 returns a refined price after more detailed underwriting questions.

In theory, this two-step process sounds efficient. In practice, it creates downstream chaos.

Here’s why:

• It’s not bindable.
  Even after getting RC2, agents still need to go to the carrier portal, rekey data, answer additional “hidden” questions, and re-run quotes.
• It breaks agent trust.
  The price you show them initially is rarely the price they’ll get. And after one or two bad experiences, they don’t come back.
• It adds work instead of removing it.
  The promise was efficiency. The reality is parallel workstreams, dual entries, and no visibility into why quotes change or fail.
• It punishes good-faith distributors.
  Wholesalers, brokers, and networks try to steer business to API-enabled carriers — only to find they’re funneling their producers into half-baked quoting flows.

Our Approach: Start with Bindability in Mind

When we built the CoverForce platform, we decided early on that bindability had to be the foundation — not a future phase.

Here’s how we’ve approached it differently:

• We work directly with carrier engineering teams to support full quote → bind → issue via API.
• We don’t mask RC2 as final. If a carrier isn’t ready for bindability, we make that transparent.
• We’ve built layered carrier logic into our platform that deduplicates questions, applies crosswalks, and supports downstream requirements in real-time — so that a quote is never just a guess.
• Our UX only shows what’s necessary for the bindable carriers active on the quote, cutting down agent time per submission.
• We don’t charge carriers per API call. That misaligned incentive model slows adoption and penalizes exploration.

Most importantly, we don’t view ourselves as a portal company. CoverForce is an infrastructure partner for carriers, brokers, and wholesalers who are serious about digitizing distribution — with underwriting integrity intact.

What That Means for the Market

• If you’re a carrier: our goal is to drive real quote volume that converts — not fake signal noise.
• If you’re a wholesaler or MGA: you’ll be able to extend your carrier access with control, visibility, and trust in what your producers see.
• If you’re a retail brokerage or network: your CSRs and producers finally get a quoting experience that delivers the right quote, the first time.

Where We Go From Here

API-based quoting is here to stay — but what matters is how it’s implemented. The industry doesn’t need another shiny UI sitting on top of inconsistent data and carrier portals.

It needs:

• Carrier-grade data integrity
• Full-cycle workflows
• No surprises at bind

That’s the standard we’re building for. And if you’re a carrier or distributor working toward the same vision, let’s build it together.

In commercial insurance, technology has long been the barrier and the bottleneck. Legacy systems, siloed workflows, and half-connected solutions made it difficult for underwriters to underwrite, IT to innovate, and distribution partners to actually distribute.

But that’s changing — fast.

We’re entering the era of enablement. From broker to wholesaler to carrier, the winners in 2025 won’t be those who build the most portals — they’ll be the ones who free their teams from them. The next generation of insurance platforms isn't about adding another screen — it’s about removing the friction between quoting, binding, and scaling.

What’s Driving the Shift?

1. API Quote Volume Is Surging

Carriers are seeing significant increases in quote volume through API-enabled partners. That’s because submission velocity is no longer limited by how fast a producer can toggle through portals — it's tied to how well workflows are orchestrated.

As more business flows through these automated pipelines, underwriters are engaging only where they’re most needed: edge-case risk selection, program creativity, and judgment calls. For everything else? Let the system handle it.

“The idea of API quotes being ‘small ball’ is no longer true. The average API-placed premium has jumped. It’s not just for $500 BOPs anymore.”

2. The Role of IT Is Evolving

IT teams have historically been tasked with stitching together disjointed technologies: AMS → Portal → CRM → Carrier → Custom Workflow Tools.

But with the rise of modern, API-first platforms like CoverForce, IT teams are shifting from building the bridge to owning the architecture. That means:

• Fewer vendor maintenance cycles
• Cleaner data schemas
• Easier integrations
• Greater scalability

Modern infrastructure frees IT to focus on high-leverage work: security, data intelligence, and platform extensibility — instead of troubleshooting another .CSV export.

3. Underwriters Are Freed Up for Strategic Work

When quoting is truly digitized — meaning clean submissions, de-duplicated data, and bindable logic — underwriters stop being human portals. They become decision-makers again.

Instead of chasing clarifications, parsing PDF supplements, or triaging inboxes, they’re spending more time:

• Analyzing pricing trends
• Collaborating on appetite expansion
• Supporting complex risks and program strategy

This shift turns underwriting teams into growth partners — not workflow chokepoints.

Why It Matters for Distribution

Distribution isn’t just sales. It’s the ability to get the right product to the right buyer at the right time — at scale.

When underwriting, IT, and distribution teams are all playing from the same stack, something magical happens:

• Product velocity increases
• More business flows through trusted channels
• Better data fuels appetite and pricing decisions

The takeaway? The best distributors in insurance aren’t just those with the biggest rolodex — they’re the ones with the least friction between submission and bind.

Closing Thought: Legacy Systems Aren’t the Enemy — Siloed Thinking Is

It’s not just about adopting new software. It’s about rethinking how your teams collaborate, how workflows are automated, and how data flows across your organization.

At CoverForce, we work with underwriters, IT leaders, and distribution heads every day — and the message is clear: the teams who modernize their infrastructure now are the ones who will outpace the market later.

In commercial insurance, broker codes are how producers get credit, access, and commission for the business they place. It’s the credential that connects the agent to the market.

Historically, Broker Codes Have Been a Point of Restriction

You’re either appointed or you’re not.
You either go direct, or you go through a wholesaler.
You work through a network, or you maintain your own access.

But at CoverForce, we’re helping unlock a new model—where broker codes are flexible, layered, and built for collaboration.
Not just restriction.

Because in today’s world, how you access a market shouldn’t be limited by static code setups. It should be enabled by connected infrastructure.

Here’s What’s Changing

Agents often ask:

• Can I quote through my wholesaler and still track my business?
• Can I work through my network and still see which markets I’m using?
• Can I load my own broker codes while still accessing shared carrier access?

The answer is yes.

CoverForce Allows:

• Agency networks and wholesalers to extend their carrier codes to appointed retail agents
• Retail agents to load and prioritize their own direct carrier codes
• Business to be booked cleanly under the correct relationship—every time

This is not a workaround. It’s infrastructure that respects:

• Ownership
• Channel structure
• Reporting visibility
• Producer-level tracking

How It Works: Code Flexibility, Built In

In a typical flow:

A retail producer logs into CoverForce. The system checks for available access based on:

• That agent’s direct carrier codes
• Their wholesaler’s codes
• Their network’s codes

The quote is returned—and the bind request routes to the appropriate party. The business is booked under the correct code, regardless of how it was accessed.

This ensures:

• The retail agent is always credited
• The wholesaler or network partner maintains control
• The carrier has accurate distribution data

Everyone wins. No double submissions. No confusion. No phone calls asking, “Who placed this?”

Why This Matters

For Agents:

You no longer have to choose between access and control.
You can use shared carrier access through trusted partners—but still see your own pipeline, use your own codes, and bind with clarity.

For Wholesalers & Networks:

You can extend access without giving up visibility.
You support your producers with more efficient tools, but still own your relationships and data.

For Carriers:

You see cleaner submissions, better data, and more structured producer-channel mapping.
You know who placed what—and why.

The Bigger Picture: Building a Connected Ecosystem

We’re not just digitizing quoting.
We’re creating the framework for flexible, collaborative distribution.

By allowing code layering and extension, CoverForce supports:

• Multi-channel appointments
• Downstream access clarity
• Scalable partner relationships

It’s not about controlling access. It’s about enabling production—without the chaos.

We’re building the ecosystem where:

• Producers don’t have to guess where to route business
• Partners don’t lose visibility just because a retail agent has access
• Everyone can scale without losing sight of who owns what

Conclusion

CoverForce is building the infrastructure to reflect the real-world relationships that drive this industry.

If you're:

• A network looking to empower your members
• A wholesaler wanting to extend access cleanly
• A carrier looking for better downstream visibility
• Or a retail agent ready to own your production—direct or downstream

Let’s talk about how code extension works, and how it’s changing the game.

In commercial insurance, timing is everything.

Agents move fast. Markets change fast. Insureds expect answers—yesterday. And yet, across the industry, submission workflows are still slowing down the business.

Manual intake. Disconnected portals. Redundant forms. Submissions that sit in inboxes waiting for triage.

And the cost isn’t just inefficiency. It’s lost premium—plain and simple.

At CoverForce, we’ve seen this across the ecosystem. When submissions slow down, deals fall apart. And when that happens at scale, carriers, wholesalers, and producers all lose.

Let’s Talk About Where It Breaks Down

1. Retail Agents Are Submitting Through the Path of Least Resistance

If a wholesaler or carrier is slow to respond, producers default to someone else. It doesn’t matter if the appetite is better or the rate is sharper—speed wins business.

If it takes:

• 3 days to respond with questions
• 5 emails to clarify the insured class
• A phone call just to confirm market access

…you’ve already lost the deal to someone else.

2. Wholesalers Are Flooded with Submissions They Can’t Triage

Wholesalers receive hundreds of submissions every week—but most of them arrive as PDFs, emails, or forms missing key data.

That means:

• Manual rekeying
• Sorting through submissions with no prioritization
• Delays getting quotes back to retail partners

The longer it takes to turn around a quote, the more likely the agent has moved on.
Volume without velocity = missed revenue.

3. Carriers Are Reviewing Submissions That Will Never Bind

Carriers spend valuable underwriter time reviewing submissions that:

• Are incomplete
• Are outside appetite
• Came through the wrong channel
• Are already being quoted by a competitor

This costs time, money, and—over time—erodes trust with distribution partners.

The Unseen Cost: Lost Premium and Frustrated Producers

When submissions stall:

• Retail producers lose confidence
• Wholesalers lose the relationship
• Carriers miss opportunities to write clean, profitable business

And no one sees it clearly because the submission broke outside the system.

It’s not tracked. It’s not flagged. It’s not escalated.
It just disappears—quietly.

So What Can Be Done?

We don’t need to add more software.

We need to:

• Streamline submission intake so producers don’t default to email
• Structure data at the start so underwriters get what they need faster
• Surface appetite early to avoid wasted time
• Track quote turnarounds and drop-offs to identify where the slowdowns live

At CoverForce, we help carriers and wholesalers not just digitize quoting—but actually move deals through the pipeline faster.

Because quoting tools are only as valuable as the workflow they support. And if the workflow is slow, the system isn’t working.

Want to see how faster submission handling leads to more bound business?
Let’s talk about speeding up the moments that matter.

Wholesalers Must Embrace APIs to Stay Competitive

For most wholesalers, growth looks like more submissions, more appointments, more downstream demand. But with that growth comes a new problem: the operational load doesn’t scale with the business.

Email submissions, manual triage, back-and-forth underwriting, fragmented quoting tools—it’s all still running on people power. And as submissions increase, so does the friction.

That’s why the smartest wholesalers aren’t just hiring more—they’re thinking differently about product delivery. And increasingly, that means one thing:

Connect your products digitally. And connect them via API.

The Old Model: Manual Workflows with Market Leverage

Wholesalers used to win by:

• Having deep relationships with producers
• Offering exclusive or hard-to-place markets
• Being responsive, even if manually

But today’s agents don’t want to wait three days for a response. And your best carrier partners don’t want to underwrite 100 submissions to find one bind.

Market access is no longer enough. What matters now is: How easy are you to transact with?

What Digital-First Agents Expect

Modern producers are moving fast. They want:

• Instant quoting, even if it’s indicative
• Easy submissions without duplicated entry
• Clarity on appetite before they waste time

If you’re relying on a team to manually read, route, and rekey every inbound submission, you're not just slowing down your internal ops—you’re missing premium that never makes it to you.

Why APIs Matter More Than Ever

An API isn’t just a tech feature. It’s how your products stay accessible, discoverable, and integrated into the systems where producers are already working.

• Your quoting endpoints can plug into producer workflows
• Your appetite can be surfaced contextually—before submission
• Your bindable products can be distributed across partners and platforms

Most importantly, APIs give you visibility. Instead of relying on email volume as a proxy for demand, you can track quote volume, drop-off rates, and where agents are defaulting to other markets.

What Happens When You Don't Make the Shift

• You get left out of the quoting flow.
• Your markets get underutilized.
• You spend more time cleaning up messy submissions than generating revenue.

This isn’t about being replaced—it’s about being included in a future that’s increasingly digital by default.

What to Do Next

Digitizing your products doesn’t have to mean building a portal from scratch. In fact, most producers don’t want another portal.

• Structure your intake process
• Define your API endpoints (even basic ones like appetite or quote requests)
• Partner with platforms that can distribute your products into the market where producers already work

At CoverForce, we help wholesalers plug into modern workflows without needing to become a tech company. We sit in the middle of the ecosystem—connecting retail, carrier, and wholesaler workflows—so you stay visible and competitive where it counts.

If you're still waiting for the submissions to come in, you're already behind.
Let’s talk about how to keep your products accessible—and your business scalable.

The Future of Insurance Distribution Belongs to Connectors

For decades, insurance distribution was powered by proximity — relationships, rolodexes, and regional partnerships. But today, in a post-COVID, API-enabled, and efficiency-obsessed ecosystem, the future doesn’t belong to those with the biggest networks. It belongs to those who know how to connect them.

Legacy Distribution Is Breaking at the Seams

Insurance still runs on a patchwork of portals, PDFs, and phone calls. But that fragmentation is becoming unsustainable. Agents are tired of duplicating data. Underwriters are tired of low-quality submissions. And carriers are tired of flying blind without insight into what’s flowing through their appointed channels.

The result?

• Good business falls through the cracks
• Tech stacks don’t talk to each other
• Quote-to-bind ratios suffer across the board

The Most Valuable Players Aren’t the Biggest — They’re the Best Connected

What’s emerging now is a new class of insurance distributors: the connectors.

They’re not trying to “own” the entire journey. Instead, they:

• Build bridges between producers, markets, and systems
• Capture structured data once and use it everywhere
• Deliver speed, clarity, and visibility at scale

They win because they understand the #1 rule in insurance today:
Whoever creates the cleanest, fastest path to bind wins.

How Connectors Are Changing the Game

Smart wholesalers, agency networks, and MGAs are no longer just opening doors — they’re digitizing the entire corridor:

• Digitized intake that auto-generates ACORDs and routes intelligently
• Embedded APIs that deliver real-time appetite and quote responses
• Visibility for every stakeholder across the submission journey
• Bindable experiences that reduce time to revenue
• Structured data that powers underwriting insights

They’re doing more than “enabling quoting” — they’re redefining what it means to distribute insurance intelligently.

The Connector Model Is the Insurance Infrastructure of the Future

At CoverForce, we’re not just building quoting tools. We’re building distribution enablement infrastructure — a connective layer that turns submission chaos into coordinated, scalable action.

When carriers, agents, and wholesalers are finally speaking the same language (read: structured, API-driven data), the entire market wins:

• Brokers place more business, faster
• Carriers write more of the right risks
• Insureds get a modern, confidence-building experience

Conclusion: The Market Is Evolving. Are You?

Legacy distribution was built for access.
Modern distribution is built for connectivity.

The winners in this next chapter won’t be those with the biggest rolodexes — they’ll be the ones who know how to orchestrate quoting, underwriting, and data across the entire insurance value chain.

If you're ready to stop juggling systems and start scaling intelligently, it’s time to think like a connector.

Let’s talk.

True Bindability in Commercial Quoting: Why Terminology Matters

In commercial insurance, words like “instant quote,” “real-time pricing,” or “bindable rate” get thrown around a lot. But as anyone who’s followed a submission all the way through knows… not all "bindable" quotes are created equal.

At CoverForce, we’ve worked closely with carriers to build a platform that delivers true bindability—not just a rate preview or placeholder price. Because when a producer sees a quote, they shouldn’t have to ask: “Is this real?”

Here’s the Problem: "Bindable" Has Been Watered Down

Most platforms in the space stop at what’s known as Rate Call 1—an initial pricing output based on limited data and soft eligibility logic.

It looks like a quote.
It feels like a quote.
But when you hit "bind"? You’re met with…

• Appetite misalignment
• Missing questions
• Required underwriter intervention
• Or worse—starting over in a separate portal

That’s not bindable. That’s indicative at best—and misleading at worst.

CoverForce Built for True Bindability—By Design

We didn’t build this platform with assumptions. We built it with carrier collaboration.

CoverForce integrates:

• Crosswalks across appetite, eligibility, and question sets
• Cross-checks to ensure accurate class codes, limits, and state-specific logic
• Underwriter-reviewed logic trees that reflect real-world decision-making

So when a quote is returned on CoverForce marked as bindable, it means:

• No follow-up portal logins
• No additional underwriting interviews
• No rekeying required
• It can be bound—right there, right now

This is possible because we’ve worked with our carrier partners to align logic, not just pricing.

Why This Matters to the Whole Ecosystem

For Producers:

You save time. You avoid false starts. You write more premium.
No more chasing quotes that go nowhere or redoing work after the “quote” falls apart.

For Wholesalers:

You receive clean, complete submissions with real binding potential—not just soft estimates.
You stop wasting time triaging junk data or managing client expectations based on an unrealistic rate.

For Carriers:

You improve quote-to-bind ratios, protect your underwriting teams, and deliver a better experience to the field.
You know that what’s hitting your systems has already passed real logic gates.

Indicative Quotes Are Fine—Until They’re Not

There’s a place for quick, early-stage pricing.
But let’s not confuse that with bindability.

Because producers build trust with insureds based on what they show them. And if that quote changes dramatically—or worse, isn’t actually eligible to bind—you don’t just lose the deal. You lose credibility.

When CoverForce Says Bindable, We Mean It

We believe:

• Terminology should reflect reality
• Tech should reflect underwriting, not override it
• A quote should get you closer to binding—not farther away

That’s why bindable on our platform means bound-ready.
No more “We’ll get back to you.” No more “Now log into this other portal.”

Just real quotes. From real carriers.
With real binding potential—built in from the start.

Let’s redefine what quoting should feel like.
Let’s make bindable mean something again.