When Bold Penguin first got its start four years ago, we understood that there was just too much friction in efficiently selling small commercial insurance. The volume and variety of carrier products, combined with the labor-intensive quoting and underwriting process, made small commercial an extremely challenging area of the industry in which to write.

Our first product at Bold Penguin was the exchange, which allows agents to purchase pre-matched in-appetite risks to grow their book of business. To date, we’ve helped over 1.5MM small business owners through the commercial insurance exchange by very efficiently triaging, classifying, and routing their unique risk profile to an agent who is able to provide them quotes for insurance. This process has reduced the time-to-quote from weeks to minutes. 

Our next product was the Terminal, which powers the digital storefronts of carriers such as Nationwide and Progressive. Leveraging our Terminal Javascript SDK functionality, the Terminal enables carriers and agencies to provide multiple quotes to a small business owner in minutes versus hours or days. We wanted to build technology that created a faster and more accurate quoting experience and we’re proud to have achieved this with the Terminal.

These platforms were built API-first. That is to say, they were built with extensibility and reusability in mind. While we could continue to build new products, we know that we could only build an ecosystem if we allowed other organizations to build on top of the platform we’d created. The burden of integrating new carrier products is not trivial; each integration comes with its own nuances and challenges. Bold Penguin has integrated over 24 digitally-enabled carrier products into the platform to date, and is on-pace to double that in the next 18 months.

It’s not surprising that many top carriers and brokers have chosen to partner with Bold Penguin. Every agency has its own personality and needs to customize the user experience to deliver a very-branded experience, while still providing the power of commercial connectivity that the Bold Penguin platform provides.

The developer portal is a showcase of all of the unique integration points that Bold Penguin offers its customers to deliver a customized, world-class experience. Our customers have used these integration points to deliver customized workflows, bootstrap the quoting process, and provide in-depth advanced analytics about their quoting activity. The value of building a platform is that any partner can leverage these things in novel ways.

We’ve officially launched the first version of our developer portal which documents some of the ways that organizations can build on top of the Bold Penguin platform. In the future, we will roll out additional features such as sample applications, instructional blog posts & videos, and self-service API credential management.

Take a look at: developers.boldpenguin.com.

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