Introduction
What happens when the personal lines book that carried an agency for years stops feeling safe? Rising home and auto rates, constant remarketing, and carriers pulling back have pushed a lot of independent agencies to look at commercial lines as the way to build a more resilient book. The appetite for the business has always been there. The submission process is what gets in the way.
On this episode of the Insurtech Leadership Podcast, host Joshua Hollander sits down with Michael Rabinowitz, who leads commercial lines product for EZLynx at Applied Systems. Rabinowitz started on the agency side when commercial rating meant loading a floppy disk of carrier rates every month, and he has spent nearly three decades trying to make the work simpler.
They get specific about why commercial has stayed hard, what changes when real-time carrier quoting moves inside the submission, and where AI actually helps an agent who is new to commercial.
Guest Bio
Michael Rabinowitz leads product management for the commercial lines business at EZLynx, part of Applied Systems, the largest provider of cloud software for insurance agencies in North America. His career in insurance spans nearly 30 years. He started on the agency side handling commercial submissions, then moved to the technology side around 2000 to work on some of the industry's early multi-carrier commercial rating. At EZLynx, he led the rearchitecture behind Instant Commercial Quoting, which brings real-time carrier rates into the EZLynx submission workflow. His focus has stayed consistent across all of it: build the tools he would have used as an agent, and make commercial simple enough that more agencies take it on.
Key Topics
-The resilient book - Why the personal lines hard market, with higher rates and heavier remarketing, is pushing agencies to diversify into commercial to stabilize the business.
-The four-times problem - How one small commercial submission can mean entering the same data into three or four carrier portals, often eating the entire commission on the account.
-Commercial by accommodation - Almost every personal lines agency already writes a few commercial policies for long-time customers, which makes commercial an extension of existing relationships rather than a cold start.
-Real-time appetite - Why carrier appetite now shifts day to day, and how live rating inside the submission changes which carriers get seen first.
-AI as an accelerant - How AI helps with class-code and NAICS lookups and catches misclassification, like the ice cream shop that is really a manufacturer, so newer commercial agents build confidence.
-Get out of the way - Rabinowitz's product philosophy that technology should cut context switching and re-keying, not add one more interface to learn.
-Carriers and friction - Why carriers that make real-time connectivity easy will earn the first look, and the ones that do not may get left off the submission.
Notable Quotes
"For me to be doing my job correctly required me to enter in the data four times. That is a tremendous amount of time wasted for maybe a two thousand dollar premium. I've probably eaten up my commission, if not more, just on that activity alone."
"I can't afford to have technology get in my way. Technology either helps me be more productive, or it causes me to lose opportunities."
"They're not an ice cream store, they're actually an ice cream manufacturer. If you misclassify a business and bind the policy and there's a claim, that's a headache down the road waiting to happen."
"If they have to go to five markets and only three are on real-time rating, they may go to those three first. As a carrier, you might get left off of a submission."
Resources
Guest:
EZLynx: https://www.ezlynx.com/
Applied Systems: https://www.appliedsystems.com/
Michael Rabinowitz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rabinowitz-32998138/
Host & Organization:
Joshua R. Hollander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
Horton International (USA): https://www.horton-usa.com/
Insurtech Leadership Podcast (LinkedIn Showcase): https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/insurtech-leadership-show
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