The following article was written in association with Applied Systems.
The problem with commercial renewal remarketing was never that brokers did not want to do it. It was that the economics rarely justified the effort.
Assembling a submission for a renewal risk - pulling data points, compiling documents, formatting for each carrier's requirements - could take hours. For a small account, that effort cost more than the commission it protected. For any account, it meant brokers defaulted to simply renewing with the incumbent rather than testing the market. Insureds stayed where they were not because their broker had assessed the options, but because assessing the options was too expensive to do properly.
"It wasn't really working for anybody in the whole value chain," said Juan de Castro (pictured), president of Cytora, in an interview at Applied Net 2026 last week. "Brokers would remarket risks less often. Sometimes, especially on a small risk, you're losing money by the time you have to touch it. The broker is already losing money on that risk."
The submissionless renewal initiative, which Applied launched last week, rests on a single question: what would the remarketing process look like if every element of friction were removed?
Days before a risk comes up for renewal, Epic identifies what data points each relevant carrier needs to quote it. Cytora retrieves that information automatically - from structured data in the AMS, from documents held in SharePoint, from a data lake - and pushes it to each carrier's API through Ivans Distribution Platform without any human involvement. Quotes come back and surface inside a new Epic module called Submission Manager.
By the time the 90-day renewal window opens, the broker already has competing quotes waiting. Remarketing becomes a single click.
"There's not a single human involved in that process," de Castro said. "When the renewal is triggered, the broker opens the risk and they already have competing quotes readily available. They can analyze the quotes and move it to another carrier pretty much with a single click."
The commercial implications are direct. Brokers who have been avoiding small-account remarketing because the time cost made it unprofitable can now do it routinely. Brokers executing consolidation strategies - concentrating their book with a smaller set of strategic carrier partners - can move business without the friction that previously made those strategies aspirational rather than operational.
Over 40% of broker and underwriter time was previously consumed by manual data rekeying - pulling information from ACORD forms, populating rating engines, reformatting submissions for individual carrier requirements. Cytora's drag-and-drop document digitization within Epic has automated much of that on the broker side, recovering hours per week that previously disappeared into mechanical tasks.
The carrier-side gains are measurable in different terms. Cytora has case studies showing a 113% uplift in GWP per underwriter - the same underwriting team writing roughly twice as much business in a year, without adding headcount.
The speed argument connects both sides directly. Mid-market risks that previously took days or weeks to quote now return in hours from carriers using the platform. De Castro's analysis across Cytora clients shows that being the first carrier to return a quote increases the quote-to-bind ratio by 50%.
"In insurance, as in many other industries, speed correlates with conversion," he said. "There's a race on being more responsive to brokers because that is a great lever to drive growth without having to add more underwriters."
For brokers, that race has a practical consequence: the carrier that responds first wins a disproportionate share of the business. How quickly a carrier can return a quote is no longer a back-office efficiency question. It is a placement outcome question.
Carriers using the platform are responding to submissions in hours. Those that have not adopted comparable technology are still taking days or weeks. The consequence is not simply a conversion rate difference.
"If it takes you two weeks to quote a risk, it's not just that your bind ratio is going to be low," de Castro said. "You're going to be binding those risks that nobody else wants to bind."
The market is fragmenting into two categories: carriers that respond quickly and attract a disproportionate share of quality submissions, and later adopters who receive the residual flow after faster competitors have already quoted and bound the better risks. The bind rate gap is one metric. The quality of what gets bound is another, and it compounds over time in ways that a loss ratio will eventually make visible.
For brokers, that fragmentation reshapes how carrier relationships should be structured. A carrier that cannot respond within hours is not simply slower. It is structurally disadvantaged in the submission process, and routing business to it carries a real opportunity cost in conversion terms.
The broker who understood the renewal economics well enough to avoid remarketing small accounts in the first place is now operating in a market where those same economics determine which carrier partners are worth prioritising.
De Castro outlined two priorities for the next 12 months. The first is deepening the Submissions Manager integration so that carriers are more fully embedded in the broker's workflow inside Epic - visible at the point of submission setup, with appetite signals available before a submission is sent rather than only after it is received.
The second is extending the submissionless model from individual risk remarketing to full book-of-business transfers - where a broker moves an entire portfolio from one carrier to another, facilitated through the same automated infrastructure that currently handles single renewals.
Both are expressions of the same direction: the broker who could not afford to remarket a small account two years ago, and who is now remarketing every renewal with a single click, is about to be able to move entire books of business with the same ease. The gap between brokers on the right side of that shift and those still assembling submissions manually will not take long to show up in results.
