Speed to Market
Updates that once meant a months-long engineering handoff now go live the day the underwriting team makes them.
CASE STUDY
Assist Insurances puts underwriters in control of production pricing
At a glance
Assist Insurances is an MGA in the Irish motor market. When a broker submits a risk through the market's centralized quoting platform, Assist has seconds to run its rating model and return a price. That model lives in Excel and belongs to the underwriting team, but owning the logic didn't mean controlling it. A rate change an underwriter could specify in hours meant a development handoff measured in months.
With Coherent, the rater itself became the production system. An underwriter uploads a new version with an effective date and it goes live. Every prior version stays addressable, so quotes remain reproducible exactly as issued, which Irish regulation requires. Within months of launching real-time broker quoting, Assist scaled across a growing brokerage network without pricing ever waiting on engineering.
Key results
Instant rate and rule changes, deployed by underwriters
~40 hours of integration instead of thousands building a rating engine
51,000+ broker quotes rated in the first four months of real-time quoting
Every issued quote reproducible against the exact rater version that priced it
The Challenge
Rate changes moved at the speed of the dev queue
Assist Insurances is a lean MGA selling private motor and fleet insurance through Irish brokerages, where every quote follows the same path. The submission arrives from the market quoting platform, Assist enriches it with data on the driver, the vehicle, and the risk profile of the area, and the rating model returns eligibility and premium in seconds.
While the logic in that rating model is the underwriting team's product, changing it in production was not in their hands. And the distance between that team and production set the company's pace. Updates meant manual work or a handoff to engineering, where a change an underwriter could specify in hours sat in a delivery queue measured in months.
That process could not survive what was coming: a new broker-facing system for real-time quoting, launching in February 2026, that would push quote volume past 51,000 within four months. Regulation only raised the stakes further. Assist must reproduce an identical quote for the same inputs for 30 days after issue, even as it tunes pricing for the live market.
Any rating architecture had to preserve every version of the model a quote had ever resolved against, while never slowing the next change down.
"We could build our own rating engine and carry the maintenance and translation risks forever. Or we could take the same Excel file that already defines our formulas and put it into Coherent. In about 40 hours of development, we got a better system than thousands of hours of building our own ever would."
— Andrii Drozdov, Software Engineering Manager, Assist Insurances
Our Solution
Underwriters hold the keys to production rating
The integration itself was the small part. Over roughly 40 hours, Assist's development team mapped the Excel rater's inputs and outputs. The same rater the underwriting team had always maintained became the system answering broker quotes in production. Now, when an underwriter needs to change a rate or add a rule, they simply upload a new version, set an effective date, and it's live. No ticket or release cycle between the pricing decision and the system that executes it.
Coherent keeps every version of that rater addressable, which turned a compliance obligation into a byproduct of the architecture. Assist can tune pricing for a single county without disturbing quotes already in force. Each quote resolves against the version that produced it, exactly as the reproduction rule requires.
The same API history drives validation. When a result looks wrong, the team exports the call and replays it to see precisely what went in and what came out. Before a change ships, historical calls run against the candidate rater at scale to compare pricing across versions.
When Assist began building its second product line, the integration pattern was already set and the underwriting workflow carried over unchanged.
Our Impact
Engineering Leverage
Roughly 40 hours of integration replaced thousands of hours of building and maintaining a rating engine. The hours saved went into Assist's own broker portal and back office instead.
Production Scale
Broker-driven volume passed 435,000 production calls a month within months of launch. Volume no longer determines headcount.
Regulatory Confidence
Versioned raters resolve historical quotes exactly as issued while live pricing keeps moving, meeting the 30-day reproduction obligation by architecture rather than by process.
"Coherent gives a non-engineer the ability to be an engineer. Our underwriters update rules, rates, and calculations instantly, and if we find a bug, we fix it then and there. The teams who work in Excel every day control production logic themselves and deliver business results faster."
— Jennifer Roche, Technical Underwriter, Assist Insurances
What's Next
The pattern Assist built with Coherent is now part of its expansion plan. Fleet insurance is following private motor onto the platform, with home and commercial vehicle cover mapped behind it. Each new line starts with the integration already built and a workflow the underwriting team already runs. As more brokerages come online and quote volume climbs, launching the next product is mostly a question of how fast Assist wants to move.
Pricing agility is how MGAs compete
With Coherent, rates move the day the market does, every quote stays reproducible, and engineering builds the company instead of the rating engine.