The Hidden Costs of Slow Submission Workflows in Commercial Insurance

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.