Confidence to Expand Client Reach
Coalition's cyber insurance market depends on a two-tier broker structure: wholesale brokers hold the licenses to quote certain lines, like cyber risk, while retail brokers rely on those wholesalers to reach clients in markets they can't quote directly. That structure protected compliance, but it also capped how many retail brokers — and their clients — could get a cyber quote moving without a wholesaler's direct involvement.
As Senior Product Designer on the initiative, I led broker interviews and design work to build a collaboration model that let wholesale brokers authorize specific retail brokers to quote directly, while the wholesaler retained approval authority over binding. Wholesale brokers extended their reach to more retail partners, retail brokers gained faster access to a market they couldn't previously enter alone, and Coalition grew its cyber premium base — without weakening the broker-of-record compliance the relationship depends on.
Impact
~1.2k
Wholesale / Retail broker pairings
+50 / +3
50 Quotes / 3 Binds
(first 24 hours)
~$2M
New premium
(first 90 days)
Context
Coalition offers active insurance coverage and cybersecurity tools that help businesses manage and mitigate cyber and executive risk. Its products are distributed through a licensed broker network: wholesale brokers hold market access for lines like cyber risk, and retail brokers depend on those wholesalers to reach clients in markets they can't quote directly.
My Role
Senior Product Designer
I led broker interviews and research, designed the authorization and approval flows, and shaped the information architecture for the wholesaler dashboard. I also created user flows, wireframes, and prototypes to test the new collaboration concept and functionality with brokers, iterating the design based on their feedback before it was finalized.
The Challenge
That structure limited how many retail brokers — and their clients — could get a cyber quote moving without a wholesaler's direct involvement, capping quoting capacity and market reach on both sides of the relationship.
The question: how could Coalition expand quoting capacity and market reach for both wholesale and retail brokers without compromising the compliance obligations that come with broker-of-record status?
Research and Discovery
Interviews with wholesale and retail brokers, conducted with my Product Manager, led to two primary personas and a key insight: wholesale brokers varied widely in how much they trusted a given retail broker to quote cyber risk independently. Some wanted to hand off quoting freely; others wanted tighter oversight, since retail brokers were often less familiar with cyber as a specialized, fast-changing line.
That research revealed the specifications for how the underlying authorization model needed to work: rather than a single fixed permission model, wholesalers needed the ability to calibrate how much autonomy to extend to each retail partner.
To validate the concept, I built user flows, wireframes, and prototypes and tested them with brokers, iterating the authorization and approval flows based on their feedback before the design was finalized.
Key Design Decisions
Calibrate authorization to broker confidence, not a fixed permission model
Broker research showed wholesale brokers had very different comfort levels authorizing retail brokers to quote cyber risk on their own. Rather than force one policy on every relationship, the platform let wholesalers configure retailer access — down to limiting a given retailer to surplus-only or admitted-only quoting — so each wholesaler could extend exactly as much autonomy as their relationship with that retailer warranted.
Gate automation with wholesaler approval to preserve broker-of-record compliance
Retail brokers could request bind approval and complete the e-sign flow themselves, but binding still required the wholesaler's sign-off — approvable in two clicks, or by submitting a signed document bundle to Coalition's operations team when the wholesaler wasn't available to log in. Automating the request kept the process fast; requiring approval kept the wholesaler in control as broker of record.
Surface retailer activity so wholesalers stay in control
The wholesaler dashboard showed all retail broker activity and status in real time, with email notifications as a backup channel. Visibility, not just permission, was what let wholesalers stay confident handing off quoting work.
Product Experience
Wholesaler quoting dashboard
The dashboard gave wholesale brokers a single place to see recently modified clients and retail broker activity across their authorized accounts.
Document upload and review
A dedicated upload flow let retail and wholesale brokers share and review the documents needed to move a quote toward binding.
Outcomes
- Wholesale brokers quickly adopted the new authorization feature, inviting retail brokers to quote on their behalf. Retail brokers used the access to submit quotes and pursue binds in a market they couldn't previously enter alone.
- ~1.2k wholesale/retail broker pairings
- +50 quotes / 3 binds (first 24 hrs)
- ~$2M new premium (first 90 days)
- Pairing and premium figures reflect the first 90 days after launch; quote and bind figures reflect the first 24 hours. Per PM-reported launch activity and internal product reporting.
- The collaboration model also created a new insurance market for retail brokers, expanding their ability to offer cyber insurance quotes to clients who previously had no direct path to this coverage.
- These outcomes reflected broader cross-functional work across Coalition's product, engineering, and broker-facing teams. My contribution centered on the broker research — conducted with my Product Manager — that revealed the specifications for the authorization model, along with the interaction design for the authorization and approval flows and the collaboration UX that supported adoption on both sides of the broker relationship.
Design Organization Contribution
The document-sharing functionality introduced by this project required extending Coalition's design system with new patterns, including an "Upload document(s)" component that could be reused in later product work.
Reflection
“
Looking back, I’d have started broker research earlier. We started sketching solutions before learning how much wholesale brokers‘ confidence in their retail partners varied. That variance turned out to be what shaped the authorization model. Surfacing it sooner would have saved time and rework.
Summary
By giving wholesale brokers a way to extend trust to retail partners without giving up compliance control, Coalition turned a licensing constraint into a growth lever — expanding market access on both sides of the broker relationship.
