Despite years of investment and talk of transformation, the insurance industry’s digital revolution is leaving one key segment behind – and brokers and agents are increasingly frustrated, said one CEO.
Oscar Seikaly (pictured), of Florida-based NSI Insurance Group, said commercial lines, arguably the most complex and manually driven segment of the market, remain mired in outdated processes that slow everyone down.
“Commercial is our least favourite line of business because insurance companies are running at a snail’s pace to change the way they do business,” Seikaly told Insurance Business America. “It’s almost like it doesn’t matter how advanced they become… you still have to call someone who has to get an approval from someone else, who has to check with someone else.”
Seikaly has voiced what many brokers and agents have been feeling: the industry’s largest carriers are moving “at a snail’s pace” in modernizing commercial lines operations.
According to a 2025 J.D. Power study, more than half (57%) of commercial lines agents said their carriers meet even their most basic business needs. About a quarter of agents from both personal and commercial lines said they don’t feel valued by the insurers they represent.
While personal lines insurers have largely embraced automation, digital distribution, and instant quoting, commercial insurance still relies on manual processes that can take days, even weeks, to generate basic quotes.
“Someone comes to us to open a small business or a restaurant, and it can take a week to get a sense of how much premium they’ll be charged,” Seikaly said. “We have to send information to the carrier, who then feeds it into an outdated quoting system, runs separate models, and gets multiple approvals. By the time you get a number, the client is already frustrated.”
That sluggish pace is increasingly untenable in an era where business clients expect the same instant service they get from digital-first consumer platforms. For brokers like NSI, that means constantly apologizing for delays beyond their control.
“It’s not that we don’t want to move faster,” Seikaly said. “Our clients want speed and transparency. But the system isn’t built that way yet.”
NSI Insurance Group has invested heavily in technology to offset those delays and increase efficiency. According to Seikaly, the brokerage operates both traditional and tech-driven business units to cater to different customer expectations.
“A personal lines account manager in our traditional business handles about $400,000 in commission revenue,” he explained. “One employee can handle up to $1.5 million or $2 million easily because automation handles the repetitive tasks.”
He added that many of the systems brokers rely on are “clunky and outdated,” with little incentive for improvement.
But even as brokers innovate, they remain constrained by legacy carrier systems. Many of the management systems that brokers depend on were considered cutting-edge five to seven years ago, Seikaly said, but are now “clunky and outdated.”
The J.D. Power data reflected this sentiment. It found that ease of doing business directly drives loyalty for carriers. Six in 10 agents told J.D. Power that working with insurers is not “very easy.” Commercial agents who feel undervalued were also seven times more likely to reduce business with a carrier year-over-year.
“In commercial lines, ease of doing business is tied for the most impactful factor in overall satisfaction,” said Craig Martin, executive director of insurance intelligence at J.D. Power. “Agents who say a carrier is ‘very easy’ to work with are far more satisfied, more than 300 points higher on our scale.”
Which areas should carriers prioritize to make the most significant change? For Seikaly, it’s connectivity.
“If a carrier knows it’s maxed out in a certain ZIP code, the system should tell us that instantly, not two weeks later after five approvals and 15 emails,” he said. “The modeling should be instant, not something buried in a separate system that underwriters have to check manually.”
Until carriers streamline those processes, Seikaly warned, commercial lines will continue to be the industry’s biggest bottleneck.
“In personal lines, our system can pull data and produce comparisons in seconds. In commercial lines, it still takes manpower and repetition,” the CEO said. “That’s the difference, and that’s what needs to change.”
