Parallel Quoting

Parallel quoting is the practice of submitting a commercial insurance application to multiple carriers at the same time rather than working through them one after another. Where sequential quoting means finishing one carrier portal before starting the next, parallel quoting sends data to Progressive, Hartford, Hiscox, and biBERK concurrently — so the total wait time equals the slowest single carrier response, not the sum of all carrier responses.

Why Parallel Quoting Matters for Independent Agents

Time is the most constrained resource in an independent agency. An agent quoting a small commercial account — a landscaping company needing GL and a BOP — might have six appointed carriers that write that class. In a sequential workflow, the agent logs into each carrier portal, enters the data, waits for a quote, and moves to the next. At 15-20 minutes per carrier, that's 90-120 minutes before the agent has a full picture of the market.

Parallel quoting collapses that timeline. If the same six submissions go out simultaneously and the slowest carrier responds in 30 seconds, the agent has all six quotes in under a minute. The math is simple but the impact is profound: what took two hours now takes two minutes.

This speed advantage compounds across the agency. A CSR handling renewals for 200 accounts can re-market each one across the full carrier panel without the time penalty. An agent responding to a prospect's quote request can deliver options within minutes of the first conversation, before the prospect has time to call a competitor. Speed doesn't just save labor — it wins accounts.

Parallel quoting also reduces a subtle but real problem: abandonment bias. When agents quote sequentially, they often stop after two or three carriers if they've found a "good enough" option, simply because continuing to quote takes too long. This means clients may miss better pricing or coverage from the fourth or fifth carrier. Parallel quoting eliminates this bias because all carriers are already being quoted — there's no incremental effort to include one more.

How Parallel Quoting Works

Parallel quoting requires technology that can manage multiple simultaneous connections to carrier systems. There are two levels of parallelism:

Concurrent API calls — For carriers that offer rating APIs (biBERK, NEXT Insurance, Progressive Commercial for certain products), the quoting platform sends structured data requests to multiple carriers' API endpoints at the same time. Each carrier's rating engine processes the request independently, and responses arrive as they complete — typically within 2-10 seconds per carrier. The platform collects all responses and presents them together.

Concurrent browser sessions — For carriers without API access, parallel quoting requires running multiple automated browser sessions simultaneously. The software opens separate sessions to each carrier portal, fills forms, and navigates the quoting workflow in each one at the same time. This is slower than API-based parallelism (30-90 seconds per carrier versus 2-10 seconds) but still vastly faster than a human working through portals one at a time.

The difference between parallel and sequential quoting becomes dramatic as carrier count increases:

One important consideration: parallel quoting doesn't mean blind quoting. Effective platforms check carrier appetite before submitting, ensuring that parallel submissions only go to carriers likely to return a competitive quote. Submitting to eight carriers in parallel is only valuable if all eight have appetite for the risk — otherwise, you're generating declinations in parallel, which wastes carrier underwriting resources and can affect your submission-to-bind ratio.

Related Terms

• Multi-Carrier Quoting — The broader workflow of obtaining quotes from multiple carriers, which parallel quoting enables at speed
• Browser Automation in Insurance — The technology that makes parallel quoting possible for carriers that lack API access
• Real-Time Quoting — The ability to receive instant premium indications, which parallel quoting delivers by processing carrier requests concurrently