2025 Commercial Insurance Operations Survey

We surveyed 30 commercial insurance professionals across carriers, brokers, and wholesalers about their daily operations. The results confirm what many suspected: commercial insurance is still running on tools from the 1990s, and the gap is getting worse.

The survey

In early 2025, we conducted a survey of commercial insurance professionals to understand how they handle the core data operations that drive the industry: exposure data exchange, endorsement processing, and claims reporting. The sample included 40% retail brokers, 30% wholesale brokers and MGAs, and 26.7% carrier professionals (underwriters, account managers, and processors) across property, casualty, and specialty lines.

The survey was conducted anonymously to encourage honest responses about operational challenges that companies may not want to discuss publicly. Respondents ranged from individual producers at small agencies to senior executives at large regional brokerages and national carriers.

The questions focused on basic operational facts: How do you exchange exposure data with counterparties? How much time do you spend on data handling versus client work? How often do data issues affect your ability to complete transactions? What tools do you use for routine tasks that you wish worked differently?

The results paint a picture of an industry that has been left behind by the digital transformation that occurred in most other business sectors over the past two decades.

Key findings

100% of respondents still use email and spreadsheets for exposure data exchange. Not 90%. Not 95%. Every single respondent, across carriers, brokers, and market segments, relies on email and spreadsheet attachments for the basic data exchange that drives commercial insurance transactions.

This is remarkable in 2025. Even heavily regulated industries like healthcare and financial services have largely moved to structured data exchange for routine transactions. Commercial insurance has not.

63.3% spend more than 4 hours per week just on exposure data handling. This includes receiving SOVs from insureds, reformatting them for carrier submission, chasing missing information, and reconciling conflicting versions. For many respondents, particularly those at wholesale brokers, the number was higher: several reported spending 10-15 hours per week on pure data wrangling.

To put this in perspective, 4 hours per week is 10% of a full-time role. For senior professionals earning $150,000-200,000 annually, this represents $15,000-20,000 per year in compensation being spent on manual data entry and file management.

43.3% have lost or delayed a placement due to data quality issues in the past year. These are not minor delays. Respondents described placements that missed renewal deadlines, quotes that went to the wrong markets due to data errors, and endorsements that were delayed by months due to version control problems.

The financial impact of these delays is hard to quantify precisely, but it is substantial. A delayed renewal can mean coverage gaps for the insured and lost revenue for the broker and carrier. A placement that goes to the wrong market can mean sub-optimal pricing and terms.

76.6% see significant or extreme value in a shared exposure data platform. Despite the industry's historical resistance to standardization, the overwhelming majority of respondents expressed interest in infrastructure that would reduce their data handling burden.

This finding suggests that the industry's fragmented approach to data management is a pain point that crosses competitive boundaries. Even competitors are willing to share infrastructure if it reduces operational overhead.

The intensity of this interest is precisely what led us to build Polysea as a neutral infrastructure layer rather than as a competitive tool. The survey confirms that the real demand is for shared infrastructure that reduces the data handling burden for everyone, not for point solutions that might give one party an advantage over others.

Breakdown by role

The data issues affect different roles in different ways, but they affect everyone.

Retail brokers spend most of their data handling time collecting and cleaning information from insureds. A typical quarterly review involves requesting updated exposure data, reconciling it with the prior version, formatting it for submission to multiple carriers, and following up on questions and corrections. One respondent described this as "preparing the same data in twelve different formats for twelve different carrier portals."

Wholesale brokers face the amplified version of the same problem. They receive data from retail brokers that has already been formatted once, reformat it for surplus lines markets, manage submissions to multiple carriers with different requirements, and coordinate responses back through the retail broker to the insured. The wholesale layer adds complexity rather than removing it.

Carrier professionals spend their data handling time on the receiving end: ingesting broker submissions, normalizing them to internal data standards, entering them into policy administration systems, and generating quotes and endorsements in carrier-specific formats. Underwriters consistently reported spending 20-30% of their time on data processing before any actual underwriting analysis begins.

Across all roles, the common theme is that skilled professionals are spending meaningful portions of their time on routine data transformation that does not require their expertise and does not create value for their clients.

The tools gap

The survey included questions about what tools professionals currently use and what they wish existed. The gap between current tools and desired functionality is striking.

Current tools mentioned by respondents:

Microsoft Excel (100% of respondents)
Email (100% of respondents)
Agency management systems (Applied Epic, AMS360, HawkSoft)
Carrier portals (for direct submissions)
PDF editing tools (for ACORD forms)
File sharing services (Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint)
Individual productivity tools (calendaring, task management)

Desired functionality mentioned by respondents:

Real-time exposure data sharing across parties
Automated data normalization and validation
Integration between agency management systems and carrier systems
Structured data exchange (vs. email attachments)
Version control for multi-party documents
Workflow automation for routine endorsements
Centralized document management with party access controls

The gap is not just about individual tools. It is about infrastructure. The tools that exist serve individual organizations. The functionality that respondents want requires coordination infrastructure that serves all parties in the transaction.

Regional and line-of-business variations

The data challenges vary by geography and business type, but not as much as might be expected.

East Coast vs. West Coast vs. Midwest showed minimal variation in data handling approaches or time spent. The industry's operational patterns are consistent across regions.

Property vs. Casualty showed some variation, with property professionals spending slightly more time on data handling due to the complexity of SOV management. But both lines face similar fundamental challenges.

Small vs. Large accounts showed more variation. Large national accounts involve more parties and more complex data coordination, leading to higher time expenditure on data handling. But small commercial accounts have their own challenges, including less standardization and more manual processing.

Specialty lines (cyber, environmental, professional liability) showed higher time expenditure on data handling, partly due to the customized nature of submissions and the lack of standardized forms.

The cost of operational inefficiency

Based on the survey responses, we can estimate the cost of current data handling inefficiency on an industry basis.

The median respondent spends 4-6 hours per week on exposure data handling. Multiplied by salary costs and overhead, this represents approximately $20,000-30,000 per professional per year in pure data handling overhead.

Commercial insurance employs hundreds of thousands of professionals whose roles involve exposure data handling. If even half of them face the median time burden identified in the survey, the industry-wide cost of inefficient data handling is measured in billions of dollars annually.

This does not include the indirect costs: delayed placements, lost business due to poor service experience, errors that lead to coverage disputes, and the opportunity cost of skilled professionals doing data entry instead of risk advisory work.

What respondents said about solutions

The survey included open-ended questions about what would most help respondents' daily work. The responses were remarkably consistent across different companies and roles.

"A single place where all parties can see the current exposure data without having to email versions back and forth."

"Integration between our AMS and carrier systems so we don't have to rekey everything."

"Something that handles the data formatting so we can spend more time on actual client work."

"Real-time updates when something changes so we're not always working off old information."

"Better version control so everyone knows what's current and what's outdated."

The common theme is shared infrastructure. Respondents do not want another tool for their organization to use independently. They want infrastructure that connects their existing tools to other parties' tools and makes the multi-party coordination automatic.

Comparison to other industries

The survey results become more striking when compared to operational surveys in adjacent industries.

Banking: A 2024 operations survey of community banks found that less than 15% of transaction processing time was spent on manual data handling, with the remainder being automated through core banking systems and payment networks.

Healthcare: A 2024 survey of medical practices found that 30% of administrative time was spent on manual data handling, down from over 60% a decade ago due to electronic health record integration and standardized data exchange protocols.

Supply chain: A 2024 survey of logistics professionals found that 20% of operational time was spent on manual coordination, with the remainder being automated through shared visibility platforms and API integrations.

Commercial insurance: Our survey found that 50-70% of operational time is spent on manual data handling and coordination, with minimal automation or standardization.

Commercial insurance is not just behind the curve. It is the only major industry that has gotten worse at operational efficiency while other industries have gotten better.

Industry responses

We shared preliminary findings with several survey respondents to get their reactions. The responses were generally unsurprised but concerned.

"This confirms what we all know but don't like to talk about. We're spending way too much time on administrative work that doesn't help our clients."

"The numbers are probably conservative. When I add up everything I do that's really just data coordination, it's probably more like 60% of my week during renewal season."

"What's frustrating is that each organization has good tools for their internal stuff, but nothing talks to anything else. We're modern internally and operating in the 1990s externally."

"The pandemic made this worse. More remote work means even more email and even less informal coordination. Everything that used to be a quick conversation is now a document exchange."

Several respondents expressed interest in participating in pilot programs for shared infrastructure solutions, which suggests that the appetite for change is meaningful and immediate.

Conclusion

The 2025 survey results confirm that commercial insurance is operating with a level of manual inefficiency that would be considered unacceptable in most other industries. 100% reliance on email and spreadsheets, 4+ hours per week spent on manual data handling, and 43% of professionals experiencing delayed transactions due to data quality issues describe an industry that has been left behind by basic business automation.

The consistency of responses across different companies, geographies, and roles suggests that this is not a problem that can be solved by individual organizations optimizing their internal processes. It is an infrastructure problem that requires industry-level solutions.

The high level of interest in shared platform solutions suggests that the industry recognizes the problem and is ready for infrastructure that addresses it. What has been missing is not awareness or demand, but the neutral infrastructure that can coordinate across competing organizations without favoring any single party.

Building that infrastructure is why this survey was conducted. The results validate the problem, quantify the cost, and confirm the demand for solutions that treat operational efficiency as a shared industry challenge rather than a competitive differentiator.

This survey was conducted by Polysea, which is building neutral infrastructure for the commercial insurance ecosystem, including shared exposure data management, authorization chain tooling, and automated loss run extraction. If the problems described in this article are relevant to your work, we would like to hear from you at hello@polysea.ai.