Speed to Launch
The build-and-QA cycle that ran one to two months now takes MISSION one week, so the step most likely to delay a launch no longer does.
CASE STUDY
MISSION made rating its fastest launch step with Coherent
At a glance
MISSION built a new model for program incubation: entrepreneurial underwriters launch their own specialist businesses, backed by MISSION's capital, capacity, and technology, and run across several policy admin platforms. Rating sits at the center of that model, and it was the slowest part of every launch. Pricing logic built in Excel had to be hand-coded into each system and re-tested, often taking one to two months per program, and rebuilt separately for every platform a product ran on.
With Coherent, that logic became a single service the business owns. Program teams keep pricing in Excel; Coherent exposes it as a governed API every platform calls. Standing up rating for a new program now takes one week, and each product now prices the same on every platform it runs on.
Key results
Rating build cut from over a month to one week
One service pricing consistently across every policy admin platform
Program teams change their own rates and logic, with no core-system rework
A full, comparable history of every rating change, in place of scattered email trails
The Challenge
Rating was the longest step in every launch, and the one most likely to slip
MISSION launched in 2021 and has since launched over 30 programs spanning more than 70 product lines across admitted and non-admitted markets. Each program runs semi-autonomously with its own requirements, and the same or similar products may run across policy platforms. Rating is central to all of it — and because MISSION builds programs from scratch, pricing logic is written fresh for each one and revised constantly as rates, coverages, and algorithms take shape.
That logic lived in Excel workbooks the program teams built and trusted. Converting them into something a policy admin system could run was the hard part: each workbook went to developers, came back with questions, got reimplemented, and moved into QA, with another round of back-and-forth every time an issue surfaced. Rating alone took one to two months of a three-month launch target, and it was the step most likely to put that timeline at risk. Worse, the effort didn't happen once — a product running on multiple platforms meant the same logic rebuilt system by system, doubling the work and risking one product priced one way on one system and differently on another.
"We used to spend one to two months of every launch just building rating. Now we don't even really think about it. Our teams update the Excel, upload a new version to Coherent, and nothing in the core system has to change."
— Michael Waller, VP Technology Business Operations, MISSION
Our Solution
Pricing logic the business builds, deployed once, running everywhere
MISSION evaluated the problem on two axes, speed to market and maintenance, and both pointed the same way: stop deconstructing the workbook. Every platform MISSION runs is API-enabled, so integration was straightforward. The friction sat in the translation work between model development and each system, and Coherent removed it by making the workbook itself the live service. The team names the fields, uploads the model, and Coherent generates the governed API its platforms call. The logic program owners build stays intact. Today, Coherent is the rating function for effectively every new program MISSION launches.
That changed what a rating update costs. When a program adjusts a rate, the owner simply makes the change in Excel and a new version goes live. And if a policy prices unexpectedly, the answer is no longer a needle-in-a-haystack hunt through a core system — the team opens the workbook and sees exactly how it rated.
At MISSION's scale, the same service carries a second advantage: every platform calls it at once. A product built by one team prices identically wherever it runs, with no reimplementation and no drift between systems. That single point of control takes rating off the list of things that limit growth. New programs and new systems no longer wait on pricing being rebuilt, and the longest step in a launch became one of the shortest.
Our Impact
One Source of Truth
A single service feeds every platform, so a product can't rate one way on one system and differently on another. Consistency holds by design, and it's auditable.
Business Ownership
Program teams update their own rates and algorithms in Excel without touching the core system. A change no longer means handing work to developers and QA.
Real Control
Now that updates are fast and self-served, teams adjust rates and logic they used to leave alone because changing them in the system wasn't worth it.
Full Traceability
Every version is captured and diffable, surfacing even the changes no one flagged and replacing an email trail that made history near impossible to reconstruct.
Capacity Unlocked
With rating no longer the bottleneck, MISSION's team moved its focus to forms — one of the heaviest parts of launching a program — plus workflows and UX.
"I'm a big proponent of Coherent. It just makes sense given how MISSION is structured — multiple systems, multiple products, multiple programs. Having one centralized service for rating, controlled in one space, has been great for us."
— Michael Waller, VP Technology Business Operations, MISSION
What's Next
One rating layer, built to scale with MISSION
The approach is already moving beyond the US business into MISSION's UK operation, as it stands up new systems there. And the team is building on the service itself: MISSION now uses the API documentation Coherent generates to auto-populate requirements for its core systems, speeding up the setup around each new program, not just the rating. As MISSION keeps adding programs and platforms, the rating layer scales with it instead of being rebuilt each time.
Stop letting rating
set the speed limit on growth
Coherent turns the models your teams already build in Excel into one service every platform calls. Your programs own their pricing, and launches stop waiting on rebuilds.