Key Takeaways
Ivans and Cytora now come together under Applied, with one roadmap for carriers and MGAs across the policy lifecycle.
The products, connections, logins and people you rely on today stay the same.
Connected Trading brings agents and carriers closer, so complete risk arrives faster, and quotes return in the agent's workflow.
Ivans was built by carriers to connect the industry around a new technology, and AI makes that mission more important than ever.
A year ago, I stepped into this role after several years leading EZLynx®. The hundreds of conversations I had with agents in that job taught me insurance. They also taught me how much the independent channel depends on carriers and agencies working well together, and that lesson has shaped every conversation I've had with carriers and MGAs since.
This week, Applied™ introduced its new brand and tagline, The Current That Connects Insurance™. If you work with Ivans® or Cytora™, you'll start to see the Applied brand on the products, people and partnerships you already know. I want to share what it means for carriers, why the timing matters and why I believe the best chapter of this work is still ahead of us.
We've been here before
Ivans was founded on an idea that feels remarkably relevant to me right now.
In the early 1980s, personal computers arrived on agency desks, and agency management systems soon followed. For the first time, carriers could send policy data directly to agencies. It was a breakthrough, but every carrier and every management system spoke its own data language. Each connection needed its own translation, which made progress expensive and hard to scale.
In 1983, leading carriers built Insurance Value Added Network Services (IVANS), a layer to connect them all. Ivans’ mission has been the same ever since: bring carriers and agencies closer together. Today, more than 700 carriers and MGAs send over 100 million transactions to more than 30,000 agencies through it annually.
The lesson I take from that history is simple. The PC gave our industry a powerful new tool, and the network is what put that tool to work for everyone.
A new era of risk transfer
Today, AI is the new arrival on every desk. And just like 43 years ago, technology alone will only take us part of the way.
Consider how commercial risk still moves. An agent gathers loss runs, schedules and financials, keys them into forms, and emails the risk to markets based on relationships and memory. On the other side, an underwriting team rekeys the same information, finds what's missing, and sends it back. Our data shows that as many as 40% of submissions are never reviewed at all due to the friction and backlog in underwriting workflows.
Why hasn't this changed in decades? First, commercial risk is bespoke, and every carrier has its own view of the factors that should be used to evaluate risk. Past attempts to standardize forced carriers to choose between efficiency and a least-common-denominator view of risk. Second, commercial submissions are collaborative and iterative by nature, and linear technology was never built for that kind of back-and-forth.
Carriers feel the cost across the entire P&L. Rekeying drives up operating expense. Premium slips away because quote-to-bind ratios fall for carriers that aren't first to quote. The risk that inefficient underwriting organizations do win tends to be risk that has been passed-on by other insurers, weakening the portfolio over time.
The friction and frustration are symmetrical for brokers and carriers. Brokers and carriers each spend too much time re-keying information. Brokers are frustrated with a lack of clarity from carriers; underwriting organizations are bogged down reconciling incomplete submission data. Without a shared understanding of appetite, brokers spend time submitting risk carriers don’t want and fail to submit risk that carriers do want. We feel duty-bound to solve that problem, and it's why we're building toward what we call Connected Trading.
What Connected Trading looks like
Applied is uniquely positioned to close that gap because we work on both sides of the trade. Applied Epic® is the system of record that holds relevant risk information and the system of action where brokers make risk placement decisions. Cytora is the AI that reads that risk against each carrier’s own underwriting criteria, and it powers risk digitization for seven of the world’s top 10 carriers. Ivans connects agencies and carriers across management systems. When those pieces work together, risk moves from agent to underwriter without being rekeyed in the middle. It’s the lesson of 1983 all over again: AI reads the risk, and the network carries it where it needs to go.
That's already happening in the market. With Submissionless™, carrier-ready renewal risks reach preferred markets without the agent ever having to build a submission. With email-to-quote, agents keep sending emails as they always have and receive an underwriting indication within minutes. After the announcement of Submissionless, the three largest admitted commercial carriers in the U.S. and five leading independent agencies signed on as anchor partners within weeks.
This fall, the first production Submissionless quote went from Travelers to a small auto repair shop in Pennsylvania – without anyone filling in a form or rekeying a single field.
When one carrier receives a complete, decision-ready risk and returns a quote right in the agent's workflow, who do you think wins the business? For carriers, that's the path to more submission volume, a lower expense ratio and better risk selection – with underwriters focused on the decisions that need their judgment.
The current that started with Ivans
To me, Applied’s new tagline – The Current That Connects Insurance – captures what Ivans has been doing for 43 years. Every connection carries data, intelligence and action, and each one makes the next more valuable. And now, that current runs through one company built for both sides of the trade: the agency management system where risk data starts and the carrier technology that digitizes, connects and quotes it.
For carriers and MGAs, that means bringing Ivans and Cytora together under Applied, with a single roadmap and a single team behind the connections you rely on. Content for Ivans products is moving to the Applied website, while Ivans.com remains the home for Ivans Download. And to the management system providers and agencies who rely on it, our message is the same as always:
Our commitment to open, neutral connectivity across every management system, including yours, is unchanged. We'll keep earning your trust the same way we always have: by keeping the network open and investing in the connections your users depend on.
My commitments to you
When I took this role, I made two commitments that I intend to keep for as long as I have the privilege of leading this business. The first is ambition: we’ll keep taking on the biggest problems in this industry. The second is partnership with agencies and their management system providers to make the carriers we serve the easiest to do business with.
Ivans began with carriers who decided to build something together, and that's exactly how we're building Connected Trading – alongside the carriers and agencies who share this vision. Many of you have been part of this network for decades. You're one of the reasons we could build what comes next.
Welcome to the new era of risk transfer.
See how Applied brings carriers and agencies closer across the policy lifecycle. Explore Applied’s carrier suite
Author
Michael Streit
Michael Streit leads the Applied carrier business, including Ivans and Cytora. Michael previously served as President of EZLynx, the fastest growing agency management system in the US. Michael began his career as a management consultant at Bain & Company and spent nearly a decade working in Private Equity Operations at Bain Capital and Centerbridge. He received his BA from Notre Dame and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
