Oliver Travieso, Vice President of Commercial Lines
The Commercial Insurance landscape is broad and wide, and agents have been challenged with diversifying their Personal Lines books for two reasons – to provide more balance to their books of business, and to add additional revenue streams to their agency. The Smart Choice Commercial team has done the same to meet and accommodate the increasing demands of different types of agency partners.
Historically, our Commercial division built its portfolio on Small Business and Small Business products to match up with the general population of the nearly 9,000 agents in our network. But increasingly over the last couple years agents have expressed their desire for more, and we knew they were capable of doing more. As a result of that feedback, we recognized we needed to pivot quickly, and we’ve worked diligently to expand so that our agents could continue to stay competitive in their local markets.
Instead of sticking to our traditional form of writing Commercial Insurance in our centralized placement facility called Smart Start, we discovered a large and growing number of agencies with a desire to transact directly with our carrier partners. This initiated an undertaking on our part to assist our agents in gaining direct access to our Standard National carriers like Liberty, Travelers, Hartford, CNA, Nationwide, and more.
Smart Start became an incubation model that would ultimately become a stepping stone to the flagship of our organization - the Agents Program where agents earn direct sub-codes. The Agents Program has become a driving force towards helping our agents earn 100% commission, as well share in profit sharing.
For years, we also received feedback from our agents that they needed and wanted to find a way to compete against the “Direct-to-Consumer” Insuretech markets that seemed to be invading the market and increasingly becoming a threat to business. As a result, rather than view these markets as competition, we decided to partner with several Insuretech firms, as a way to give our agents a competitive edge in their own market space. Our most recent partner, Cover Whale (a dedicated Trucking market), has allowed our agents to compete in the Trucking industry within the 1-5 fleet space. Spanning over 20+ states, we were able to fill a niche we historically struggled to fill. Our agents have been thrilled working with organizations like Cover Whale.
As the industry changes, Smart Choice® will continue to work towards staying relevant and modern in the marketplace with the goal of helping our agents remain competitive in their local markets. We believe the independent agent is the heartbeat of the P&C world regardless of the disruption in the marketplace, and will always strive to be a cutting edge partner.
An Evolving Commercial Marketplace
Businesses in the future will definitively want to be prepared with emergency plans in place for future interruptions. Insurers will want to see that small businesses have better business continuity plans in place – which most will after surviving 2020. Check out the 2021 Issue 3 of Smart Choice Magazine to see how independent agents can help businesses and commercial clients hit the reset button and navigate an evolving insurance marketplace as we move forward.