In personal lines, renewal challenges tend to center on scale. But in commercial lines, the issue isn’t just how many policies you manage—it’s how complex and fragmented the entire renewal process has become.
Ask any commercial account manager what renewals feel like, and you’ll likely hear a version of this:
“We’re spending more time gathering data than actually advising our clients.”
Here’s why.
The Commercial Renewal Problem: Fragmentation and Friction
In commercial insurance, renewals are anything but straightforward. Even long-standing accounts with few changes require extensive effort just to get to the quoting stage. Why?
Because there’s no centralized place to pull everything together—and every carrier has different expectations.
Here are the biggest operational headaches:
1. You’re Piecing Together Information From Everywhere
Unlike personal lines, where integrations and raters simplify quoting, commercial renewals demand manual collection of data across multiple systems and touchpoints.
- Property details from the AMS
- Exposure data from client emails
- Updated COIs from compliance systems
- Loss runs from third-party portals
- Vehicle schedules from spreadsheets
- Financials from the client directly
All this data has to be compiled before you can even start the conversation with your underwriter. And heaven forbid a question is answered incompletely—it could mean days of back-and-forth to clarify a single item.
2. No Universal Rating System = No Instant Visibility
In personal lines, raters like EZLynx, PL Rating, and others give producers and service teams visibility into pricing across carriers.
In commercial? Those tools barely exist.
Each carrier has its own appetite, its own form stack, and its own digital submission process (if one even exists). That means your team is often:
- Logging into multiple portals
- Manually re-keying data
- Calling or emailing MGAs for quotes
- Chasing down underwriters for timelines
The result? A time-intensive, highly manual workflow with no guarantee of success.
3. Carrier and Underwriter Communication Is Bottlenecked
Even when you finally get a submission together, it often sits in a queue—waiting for the right underwriter to review and ask follow-up questions.
This isn’t just frustrating—it’s risky. Delays in underwriting can jeopardize timely renewals, frustrate clients, and increase the likelihood of churn or coverage gaps.
Worse yet, each underwriter may require a different format or additional clarifying documents. This forces your service team to become professional translators—adjusting the submission format for each carrier, often multiple times.
4. It’s Hard to Standardize or Scale
When commercial renewals are this bespoke, there’s no standardized workflow.
That means each account manager develops their own system—leading to:
- Inconsistent client experiences
- Difficulty training new hires
- No way to measure team performance against a benchmark
- High error risk from manual entry
Agencies with growth goals are especially vulnerable: it’s nearly impossible to scale a book when every renewal is a one-off project.
So, What Can Be Done?
The root problem with commercial renewals is that they rely on tribal knowledge and manual labor. There’s no central source of truth, and no platform tying all the moving parts together.
But there’s a better path.
A Smarter Future: Automating What You Can, Surfacing What Matters
You won’t eliminate every manual task—but you can transform how your team approaches commercial renewals:
🔹 Centralize renewal timelines and risk profiles across your book
🔹 Use AI-driven task automation to remind account managers what’s due and what’s missing
🔹 Predict risk and prioritize accounts that need early outreach or carrier realignment
🔹 Build templates and pre-submission workflows to standardize carrier submissions
🔹 Track communication loops with MGAs and underwriters in one place
Solutions like ReFocus AI are already helping commercial teams get proactive about renewal management—prioritizing which clients need attention and automating the workflow steps that bog down operations.
Closing Thoughts
Commercial lines renewals don’t need to be a black hole of time and energy. The right technology can’t replace human expertise—but it can streamline the workflow, surface insights faster, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
At the end of the day, commercial clients expect two things:
- To be advised well, and
- To feel confident in their coverage
By reducing friction in the renewal process, your team can spend more time delivering both—and less time chasing down PDFs and portals.
Want to see how ReFocus AI is simplifying commercial renewals?
Let’s talk.
