For decades, commercial insurance was built around a fairly predictable buyer.
A manufacturing firm run by a second-generation owner. A regional contractor who’s worked with the same broker for 20 years. A professional services firm where insurance was renewed once a year, mostly based on trust, price, and habit.
That buyer still exists - owners and executives who built businesses over decades, relied heavily on long-standing broker relationships, and accepted slower, document-driven insurance processes as part of doing business. However, they’re no longer the growth engine.
According to a Simply Business analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, nearly three out of every 10 business owners nationwide are under age 40.
Commercial insurance carriers are now dealing with a different kind of policyholder: business owners and decision-makers under 40, running businesses that look different from those of the previous generation.
And that shift is exposing gaps in how commercial insurance is sold, serviced, and supported.
If you look at U.S. small and midsize business data, Millennials are now the fastest-growing segment of business owners. The U.S. Small Business Administration has repeatedly shown that younger owners are over-represented in professional services, technology, logistics, e-commerce, and hybrid service models. In short, businesses that are asset-light, fast-moving, and heavily software-driven.
Today’s under-40 business owners are more oriented towards building firms in professional services, technology, logistics, e-commerce, and hybrid service models—sectors with very different risk and coverage profiles than traditional small businesses.
These businesses operate very differently from traditional, asset-heavy firms. Cash flow is tracked in real time. Payroll, compliance, payments, and customer management live inside SaaS platforms. Founders are used to dashboards, alerts, and instant visibility into operational status.
Insurance, however, still shows up as a slow, opaque process. A quote may take days. An endorsement triggers emails and PDFs. A certificate of insurance requires back-and-forth. Underwriting status is often invisible unless someone chases it.
Older business owners were conditioned to accept this. Younger ones are not.
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There’s a misconception in insurance that younger buyers want to go direct i.e. eliminate intermediaries. The data doesn’t support that, particularly not in commercial lines.
What research does show is that younger B2B decision-makers want to self-educate digitally before engaging and want those engagements to be efficient once they happen. In commercial insurance, younger business owners are not asking for self-service coverage design or advisor-free purchasing. What they expect is digital efficiency around a broker-led process and that translates to faster turnaround, clearer visibility into status, and fewer manual handoffs.
Younger business owners are not comparing the insurance process to what has always worked, they are comparing it to every other B2B platform they already run their business on.
A recent J.D. Power research highlights that only 55% of small commercial clients now say they “definitely will renew” with their current insurer, a significant drop from prior years. Among these, the biggest drop came from Millennial owners, who showed a 12-percentage-point decline in renewal intent from 2024 to 2025.
This isn’t just about pricing: the study found that service quality and communication often drive loyalty as much as price does.
“Clear communication and strong service delivery remain powerful levers for insurers looking to retain customers,” - Stephen Crewdson, managing director of global insurance intelligence at J.D. Power.
In plain terms: younger commercial buyers will trade loyalty for better engagement and clearer interactions.
This shift isn’t limited to policyholders. It’s also reinforced by the next generation of producers.
Research on agent behavior shows that younger commercial producers strongly prefer digital collaboration with carriers. This spans live chat, digital servicing tools, and faster turnaround, with the additional factor, “ease of doing business,” into where they place risks.
When a younger producer chooses between two carriers with similar appetite and pricing, the deciding factor is often operational friction, not commission.
That has direct consequences for carriers that are hard to work with digitally. They may not only lose policyholders but also lose access to the next generation of distribution.
This factor is a distinguishing feature of SimpleINSPIRE. Producers and underwriters operate in the same system, with access governed by role-based profiles. Quotes and transactions generated by underwriters are immediately visible to producers and can be acted on without handoffs. Context-aware communication happens inside the platform rather than through email, reducing delays while preserving underwriting control. In practical terms, this is what “ease of doing business” looks like for a new generation of commercial producers.
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Many insurance companies are listening to their buyers and taking things way beyond just adding new portals. They have begun to restructure critical operational workflows around digital delivery. This is supported by known examples of U.S. commercial carriers as well as the broader ecosystem making operational changes.
Commercial insurance software and systems usually had pricing decisions made offline, and the core system simply stored the result. That model is starting to break down. Newer platforms embed rating and eligibility logic directly into the system, allowing quotes and, in defined cases, binding to occur as part of the transaction itself.
This shift is most visible in small commercial lines, where products like BOP and workers’ compensation are increasingly supported through digital quote-and-bind workflows. In fact, Keynova Group’s Small Commercial Insurance Scorecard 2025 shows that more than half of leading U.S. small commercial carriers now support some form of digital quoting and binding, a capability that simply did not exist in legacy, batch-oriented systems. That leaves the other half waiting to catch up.
Commercial insurance ran on PDFs and email attachments for decades. It worked until scale made the inefficiency impossible to ignore. Today, carriers are shifting to data-first submissions, where risk information flows directly into underwriting and pricing systems instead of being re-keyed from documents. The Hartford’s digital submission and quote APIs reflect this change, enabling faster responses by moving underwriting away from document handling and toward structured data workflows.
In the U.S. market, most Certificates of Insurance are still generated and managed as static documents, even at large national carriers. What has changed is that a subset of carriers, MGAs, and third-party platforms have begun moving COIs into workflow-driven, rules-based systems.
However, adoption is uneven and far from universal, even though COIs are consistently cited as one of the top service pain points for both agents and commercial customers. This is why a COI in SimpleINSPIRE can be generated and emailed instantaneously, both automated by rule as well as on demand. COIs can be generated by both Producers and Underwriters/Customer Service.
Legacy commercial platforms were designed as separate modules for quoting, underwriting, servicing, and claims. That separation creates friction as soon as customers expect continuity.
Leading carriers are extending digital capabilities beyond purchase into servicing and claims, including online claims intake and mobile access to policy information. This is seeing traction across the top small commercial insurers, signaling a move toward platforms that support the policy lifecycle as a connected whole rather than a series of disconnected transactions.
At the architectural level, commercial insurance software is slowly moving away from batch processing toward event-driven operations. Older systems process work on schedules; modern platforms react as events occur. For instance, a submission arrives, a quote updates, a certificate is requested, or a claim is filed. The adoption of event-driven APIs, real-time verification tools, and automated servicing workflows all depend on this capability. Without it, digital improvements remain superficial.
Younger commercial buyers may not realize these shifts in platform design or operating models, but they feel the difference right away in the form of fewer emails, fewer forms, faster responses, and less administrative friction.
Carriers struggle to deliver this experience, not due to lack of effort, but because their software was never built for continuous data flow, real-time servicing, or multi-party workflows. The carriers retaining younger commercial customers are the ones quietly modernizing their platforms to align with how today’s businesses actually function.