Top-Tier Specialty Insurer Simplifies Rating Logic for Faster Launches

This top-tier property and casualty insurer serves high-net-worth clients across the U.S. Known for its client-first approach and innovative risk management, the company has built a reputation for excellence in personal lines—from high-value homes to specialty coverages.

As part of a global insurance group, it pairs a member-based business model with enterprise-level standards — giving its teams both operational agility and structure. To maintain that balance, the insurer continues to modernize how products are built, priced, and managed across the organization.

The insurer’s rating logic lived in Excel, driving underwriting decisions through its policy administration system, OneShield.

Over time, the process for updating those models became slow and complex. Each change — from a new rating factor to a minor formula tweak — had to move through a system-level coding cycle. Business teams could make adjustments in Excel, but implementing them in production required IT workflows and manual updates to core systems.

This dependency delayed product updates and added operational overhead. The insurer wanted a faster, more transparent way for business users to manage rating logic — without increasing system risk or diverting technical resources.

The insurer partnered with Coherent for a three-month pilot to test a simple idea: could Coherent Spark turn their Excel rating logic directly into connected, usable APIs, all without manual recoding?

The pilot proved it could. Business users continued building and updating rating logic in Excel. Spark automatically converted those spreadsheets into fully functional APIs that plugged directly into OneShield and other core systems in real time. The process kept existing governance controls intact while removing repetitive IT translation work from system update cycles.

The result was a faster, scalable path for business teams to update rating logic — with IT oversight, not intervention.

The insurer’s pilot showed that modernization doesn’t require a system overhaul. By turning spreadsheet-based rating logic into live, governed APIs, teams kept the transparency and precision they rely on — while finally gaining the speed they needed. The process stayed familiar, but the results were transformative.

For insurers everywhere, that’s a signal of what’s possible. When product, actuarial, and IT teams can move together at business speed, innovation stops being a future goal and becomes part of daily operations. Coherent Spark makes that shift achievable — quickly, securely, and at scale.