There is no shortage of technology promising to make insurance brokerages faster. Artificial intelligence can take on repetitive work. New connections can move information between systems. Analytics can make business performance easier to see. Yet a faster tool does not automatically make for a faster brokerage.
That distinction is at the heart of a conversation with Dimitrios Argitis, Vice President and General Manager of Vertafore Canada, and Stacey Miranda, Vice President, Product Management. Their interest is less in the number of technologies a brokerage adopts than in what changes after those technologies arrive.
“We all want to move faster, but we also have to move smarter,” says Argitis. “At Vertafore, we define broker velocity as speed with intentional outcomes.”
The company describes the broader philosophy as Broker Velocity with Confidence. In practice, Argitis says, speed needs a destination: a clearer workflow, a better customer experience, more capacity for growth or information that helps someone make a decision. It also needs guardrails. A change that saves time but introduces fragility elsewhere may not be progress at all.
It is a useful distinction at a moment when brokerage leaders are balancing competing demands. Customers expect responsive service, employees need workable processes, and the range of technology choices is expanding. The hard question is not whether to innovate. It is where to direct attention first.
For Miranda, the opportunity is bigger than making individual tasks a little quicker. It is about reconsidering how work is distributed across a brokerage: which activities depend on human judgement and relationships, and which can be handled by technology. Repetitive data entry, routine information gathering and administrative hand-offs are obvious places to examine, but the implications extend to the brokerage’s wider operating model.
“It’s about looking at the work being done across the organization and asking what genuinely requires human expertise, and what technology could take on instead,” Miranda explains. “How do we eliminate repetitive tasks, make meaningful information available to the right people at the right time, and create more capacity for employees to focus on their customers?”
That approach starts with the brokerage’s business priorities and the experience of people throughout the organization. It also changes the ambition: instead of helping someone enter the same information faster, why not remove the need to enter it again? Instead of asking employees to assemble information manually, why not make the relevant insight available when a decision is being made?
These are not simply user-interface questions. They affect how a brokerage deploys its people, scales service and creates time for advice and customer relationships. The aim is not to automate everything indiscriminately, but to decide deliberately where human expertise creates the most value.
It is also why a request for a particular technology is often only the beginning of the conversation. An integration, for example, is valuable not because it exists, but because it can remove a hand-off, connect information to a decision or allow a process to continue without manual intervention.
Sometimes that calls for automation; sometimes for a different workflow, better access to information or more effective use of an existing capability. The question remains whether the change improves how the brokerage operates, not whether it adds another tool.
Data presents a similar challenge. Brokerages have long collected extensive information about customers, policies and production. The opportunity now is to connect that information more closely to decisions rather than simply generate additional reports.
“It goes back to understanding what you want to measure, and when you get that metric, what does that trigger as an action in your organization?” Argitis asks.
That second half of the question matters. A retention figure is useful, but what happens when it changes? A production trend may be interesting, but who needs to see it, and what can they do differently as a result? An executive overview and a service team’s operational view need not look the same.
Argitis and Miranda describe a spectrum of needs. Some brokerages have the resources to combine information from several sources and develop sophisticated analysis. Others want a more immediate way to understand a few key indicators. Neither approach is inherently better; the appropriate level of complexity depends on the decision being supported.
Vertafore’s Data Abstract and Insights Dashboard offerings reflect those different needs, but the larger issue applies well beyond any particular product. Data becomes valuable when people trust it, can reach it and understand what action it calls for.
It also raises a question that is becoming more urgent as AI tools proliferate: if a brokerage cannot readily connect information to a workflow today, what would an automated system need in order to act on that information tomorrow?
The expanding market for specialist technology creates another trade-off. A brokerage can increasingly select tools suited to its own business model, but each additional tool has to work within an operating environment that employees can rely on.
“One of the core pillars of our strategy is ecosystem enablement, which is aligned with our guiding principle of focusing on flexibility and choice,” Argitis explains.
“The idea that one vendor is going to be the best at everything and provide every solution just isn’t realistic in a world where best-of-breed solutions are emerging all the time.”
For a BMS provider, that is a notable acknowledgement. It shifts the discussion from how many features sit inside a single product to how well a brokerage can assemble and maintain the capabilities it needs. The underlying management system still has to do its job, but its ability to exchange information with other systems increasingly shapes what is possible around it.
Argitis points to APIs, partner integrations and data accessibility as areas of investment. The architectural details may be invisible to most brokerage employees. Their effects are not: information can move with fewer manual interventions, and a change in one part of the technology environment need not force a wholesale change elsewhere.
Flexibility is not the same as accumulating tools indiscriminately. Every connection introduces decisions about reliability, security, ownership and ongoing maintenance. The useful question for brokerage leaders is whether their technology environment leaves them free to adapt without making daily operations harder to manage.
AI brings that tension into sharper focus. It may help interpret incoming communications or support a targeted administrative process, but the value depends on access to appropriate information and a dependable way to fit the result into existing work. “It’s not about buying technology for technology’s sake,” Argitis says. “You have to be very targeted and very thoughtful, using careful velocity to drive real business outcomes.”
The final test of a technology investment arrives after implementation. A system can be available, configured and technically sound while its intended benefits remain uneven across the organization.
“Implementation isn’t adoption,” Miranda says. The distinction matters because a technology investment does not deliver its intended outcome merely by going live.
For Miranda, realizing that value is a strategic responsibility shared by providers and brokerages. It calls for designing the change around the intended business result, then supporting people as responsibilities, processes and ways of working evolve.
How that happens will differ. A new employee may need foundational training, while an experienced team may need only a focused explanation of a changed workflow. Managers may want a consistent approach across offices without losing the flexibility to account for different roles. Learning has to remain available after the initial launch, not disappear when a project is declared complete.
There is a second kind of confidence at stake as well. Insurance brokerages cannot treat reliability or the protection of customer information as optional while experimenting with new capabilities. Pilots, testing and disciplined deployment give organizations ways to learn without placing every user or process at risk at once.
That brings the discussion back to Broker Velocity with Confidence: progress is not defined by the number of tools introduced or the speed of a launch, but by what a brokerage can accomplish as a result. The choices about automation, information, integration and adoption all begin with a business outcome.
For Argitis and Miranda, the test is whether technology gives brokerages greater capacity to serve customers, make informed decisions and adapt as their businesses evolve - while preserving the reliability and trust on which those businesses depend.
This article was created in partnership with Vertafore Canada
