Flow Flood: Transforming the Flood Agent Experience

Flow Insurance is a flood insurance program administrator built by agents for agents. Flow wanted to streamline flood insurance placement. With INSTANDA, Flow created a digital flood marketplace that allows agents to compare quotes from up to six insurers, bind applications, service policies, and offer direct bill renewals.

Abbe Sultan, Co-Founder of Flow Insurance, said, “Our goal is to empower agents to easily find and choose the best coverage for their customers and provide the best branding for our partners. With INSTANDA, we’ve been able to offer both in one easy-to-use platform. Not only does it realize our vision today, it also permits future plans and growth.”

Making new business fast and easy for agents

Traditionally, finding and buying coverage has been an obstacle for agents. Contracts were hidden behind a curtain, with agents forced to quote NFIP and private carriers individually, chase applications to ensure bind, and log into multiple systems to ensure renewals processed.

Flow wanted to accomplish something new by including multiple flood syndicates on one platform. Since partnering with INSTANDA, they achieved this with a scalable platform, providing a full-service solution, from quote, to bind, to issue, to service, to renewal. The marketplace enables Agents to quote and issue flood policies within minutes. Agents no longer need to quote with multiple carriers across multiple platforms or go through long quote flows only to find out their flood application was declined; it’s all available in Flow’s agent portal, alongside NFIP rates for comparison. The platform requires no training, and agent onboarding times have been reduced from up to ten days to a matter of minutes, enabling Flow to triple their agent force in 4 months. Adding a carrier now takes weeks rather than months. The platform has also reduced the time taken to adjust moratoriums from three business days to seven minutes, increasing product availability and allowing insurers to avoid taking on too much risk.

Speed to market as a priority

Time was a key priority for Flow Flood as they launched their MGA and product across multiple states. Flow’s team worked in tandem with INSTANDA in a co-build implementation, enabling the team to release the marketplace in five months.

Michael Pallas said, “INSTANDA allowed us to be versatile. Because we were involved with the development process, we were able to leverage our insurance experience and tailor the build to our specific requirements. INSTANDA are insurance people too, so it was easy to communicate what we needed, work together, and achieve our goals.”

Digital enables rapid state expansion amid complex regulation

Flood insurance comes with unique challenges for insurers launching nationwide. Every state is unique when it comes to filing surplus lines filings and taxes. Flood also has differences when comparing NFIP to the private sector, requiring insurers to understand and adapt to a laundry list of form wording, taxes, and rates. As a result, private insurers often struggle to roll flood products out to additional states. With INSTANDA, Flow initially launched their product in 18 states and added an additional 24 states within their first year of launch.

Michael Pallas, said, “Our motto has always been ‘flood is for all’, so we wanted to make quoting flood insurance as easy and straightforward as possible for retail agents, with the end goal of getting more homes insured against flooding. INSTANDA’s easily-configurable, no-code architecture is helping us make that happen. No-code means that compliance can be easily customized across regions.”

Ecosystems enable flood insurance success

Insurers cannot exist in a vacuum. Flow Flood built a true marketplace, bringing together a range of different partners and integrating with multiple data sources to ensure a seamless agent experience and risk exposure management.

With INSTANDA’s comprehensive APIs, Flow seamlessly integrates with property information data to prefill applications and with syndicates for real-time quoting and binding.

Michael Pallas said, “Any company’s success is reliant on the relationships around it. Take out one piece of the puzzle and they wouldn’t exist. Without INSTANDA, without our Lloyds broker, without our partners, there would be no Flow. Our message to the insurance marketplace is to go after your dreams. The tech is there now, so if you think something can be done better, go do it.”