Flow’s 15-Minute Response Rule: How Speed Becomes a Moat When Everyone Else Takes Two Weeks

Flow’s 15-Minute Response Rule: How Speed Becomes a Moat When Everyone Else Takes Two Weeks

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sivan Iram, CEO and Founder of Flow, explained how his company broke the unwritten rule of commercial insurance wholesaling: you compete on relationships and expertise, not on how fast you respond.

Send a submission to a traditional wholesaler for a $5,000 account and you’ll wait two weeks for a response. Maybe longer. Maybe never. The bigger houses prioritize larger accounts where the commission justifies the effort. Small accounts get ghosted, deprioritized, or handled so slowly that brokers joke about it.

Flow saw that two-week void and turned it into their entire competitive strategy. Response in 15 minutes. First quote in an hour. Binding within a day.

Nine months later, they’re tripling revenue every month.

The Relationship Industry That Forgot About Service

Commercial insurance wholesaling has always been a relationship business. You know the right underwriters. You have carrier appointments. You understand coverage nuances. These relationships take years to build.

But “relationship business” became code for “we don’t need to respond quickly.” The industry optimized for large account relationships while service quality deteriorated everywhere else.

“I saw an intermediary that everybody agreed plays a paramount role in the value chain. But I also saw people complain on the lack of responsiveness, the poor service they were getting, specifically in the segment of small commercial mid market accounts,” Sivan recalls.

Traditional wholesalers can’t afford responsiveness on small accounts. “If you make 20%, you make 10% commission on those deals, you know, and it’s a $10,000 deal. You can’t really spend a lot of time on it if you’re a traditional player.”

So they don’t. And brokers accept it because that’s how the industry works.

The Speed Differential

Flow’s competitive advantage isn’t subtle. It’s dramatic enough that brokers notice it immediately.

“As soon as they send us the first submission immediately they recognize the difference in working with the old traditional, you know, big houses where they send out a request for a $5,000 account and they don’t hear for two weeks versus us, where they get the response in 15 minutes, they get the first quote in an hour. And typically they can bind, you know, within the day,” Sivan explains.

This isn’t just faster—it’s a different category of service entirely. Two weeks versus 15 minutes isn’t an incremental improvement. It’s the difference between treating something as a burden and treating it as a priority.

The speed advantage compounds in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Retail brokers operate under constant time pressure. They have clients waiting for quotes, renewals coming due, and fire drills that need handling yesterday.

“I always say this, you know, retail agents, they have 95% of their book is they just want to place this, I want to renew this book. I just, I don’t want to hear about it, I just want it done. And 5% is on fire. 5% is clients who need it yesterday,” Sivan shares.

Flow solves both problems. The 95% that just needs to get done? It gets done in hours, not weeks. The 5% that’s urgent? It’s actually handled with the urgency it requires.

Building Speed Without Sacrificing Expertise

The obvious question: how do you respond in 15 minutes without cutting corners on the expertise that makes wholesalers valuable in the first place?

Flow’s answer is a hybrid model where AI handles everything that doesn’t require human judgment, while human brokers supervise and provide the expertise clients actually need.

“We take in submissions via email with attachments. And we employ technology to be really efficient with the way that we place. We structure that data with AI agents,” Sivan explains. “The core technology for Flow is a system of AI agents that help our brokers every step of the way. From structuring the submission, recognizing what carriers have that in their appetite. So to do risk appetite matching place business in the right way.”

The AI handles data entry, risk classification, appetite matching, and even the mechanics of placing submissions with carriers—whether through APIs or traditional email. “Sometimes it’s via APIs if the carriers have it. Sometimes it’s going to be with all traditional email,” Sivan notes.

But the human element remains critical. “We do all that with AI agents, but we always have a broker in the loop, we always have human supervision.”

This division of labor is what makes the speed sustainable. The AI eliminates the hours of manual work that made small accounts unprofitable. The human brokers focus on what they’re actually good at: understanding risk, providing guidance, and maintaining the carrier relationships that make placement possible.

Why Speed Compounds

The first time a broker works with Flow, the speed is surprising. The second time, it’s expected. The third time, it becomes the new standard—and traditional wholesalers feel painfully slow.

“In the past nine months, we’ve been tripling our top line every single month. We’ve been tripling our submission volume,” Sivan reports.

This growth comes from brokers trying Flow once and immediately shifting volume because the experience is better. Speed creates a flywheel: more submissions mean more data for AI to learn from, which improves speed, which attracts more submissions.

Traditional wholesalers can’t easily respond. Matching Flow’s speed requires rebuilding their entire operational model and investing heavily in technology—all to compete for business they weren’t making money on in the first place.

The Broader Lesson

Flow’s speed advantage reveals something important: operational excellence can be a moat, even in relationship-driven businesses.

Conventional wisdom says B2B service businesses compete on relationships and expertise—not speed. That’s true until someone delivers both.

Flow didn’t choose between relationships and speed. They used technology to make speed compatible with expertise. The broker still gets guidance. Carrier relationships still matter. But everything happens in hours instead of weeks.

For founders in established industries, the pattern: find the service quality aspect incumbents have let slip because their business model doesn’t incentivize fixing it. Then use technology to fix it without sacrificing what customers value.

Flow fixed response time without sacrificing expertise through their AI-human hybrid model. In your industry, the neglected dimension might differ. But the principle holds: when everyone competes on one dimension, there’s often a neglected dimension where technology creates differentiation.

Traditional wholesalers built on relationships while letting service deteriorate. Flow proved you can have both. And once brokers experience that combination, two-week response times feel like a relic.