How Distinguished, a Leading MGA, Built a Modern, Seamless Agent Portal Across Ten Products & Four Groups

About Distinguished 

Headquartered in New York City, Distinguished is a leading national insurance Program Manager dedicated to driving growth and opportunities for their brokers, carriers, and employees through highly competitive specialty insurance products delivered in an easy and accessible manner. 

Specializing in areas such as Real Estate, Community Associations, Fine Art & Collectibles, Hotels, and Restaurants, Distinguished provides Property and Liability Products via a vast network of agents and brokers nationwide.

Long committed to leveraging technology to drive value for its customers, Distinguished built a portal that enables brokers to submit, quote, and bind online. Distinguished completed a broad, multi-year transformation initiative to modernize its technology infrastructure and the Unqork platform was used to build the broker portal. 

Challenges & Opportunities 

In an ever-evolving market, it is essential to make it easy for agents to get the prices, quotes, and policies in a timely way. Delivering modern agent experiences has been a core goal of Distinguished’s digital transformation efforts. 

Over the years, Distinguished has expanded by welcoming new teams and programs, this growth presented several exciting opportunities to unify and modernize our technology landscape:

• System Integration: A chance to enhance agility in a dynamic market by harmonizing their legacy platforms.
• Strategic Investment: An opportunity to shift resources from maintaining legacy systems toward innovation that drives efficiency for both our clients and internal teams.
• Elevated Agent/Broker Experience: A meaningful opportunity to reimagine and elevate the agent/broker journey through a modern, intuitive portal.

“As we evaluated our technology landscape, it became clear that consolidating and modernizing our systems would unlock greater focus, innovation, and long-term value,” shares Mani Meiyappan, SVP & CIO, Distinguished.  

Distinguished Selects Unqork

After an exhaustive search, Distinguished decided to build its new agent portal on Unqork for several reasons, including:

• Rapid development and seamless integrations: Unqork simplifies and accelerates development, including seamless integrations across disparate systems. 
• Modern UX capabilities: Distinguished could create a compelling UX without touching the underlying systems. 
• Reduced technical debt: Applications built on Unqork’s platform can be updated and maintained through a configuration-based approach, enabling greater agility as business needs change. 
• A springboard for innovation: The extreme scalability and flexibility of Unqork’s data-driven architecture opened up new opportunities for innovations across functions, from agent portal to underwriting desktop.

“By bringing in Unqork, we could decouple the portal from the policy system and have a thin layer on top that allowed us to build modern UX capabilities,” says Meiyappan. “And we could support the kind of continual enhancements without large initiatives that touch the policy system every single time.” 

Business and Technology Benefits 

Distinguished’s new agent portal is already winning praise from users. “We’ve gotten very positive feedback over the three months that the solution has been up and running. Agents love the fact that it’s simple, clear, and intuitive,” says Meiyappan.

The company is also driving meaningful operational efficiencies for both customers and internal teams. “Brokers appreciate being able to determine eligibility upfront, saving valuable time and enabling faster decisions and our underwriters are seeing benefits too—they’re focused on the right opportunities from the start, which streamlines their workflow and improves overall productivity.” explains Meiyappan. 

And thanks to more third-party integrations, data is all prepopulated for the underwriters to review, so they don’t have to go to third-party sources themselves to collect the data, according to Meiyappan. 

He and his team are also pleased to have a system that makes it easy to create and tweak workflows without writing or managing code or touching underlying systems. 

Key Benefits:

• Enhanced agent experience
• Faster times to rate, quote, and bind
• Support for complex workflows, from data capture to policy issuance
• Real-time insights and reporting capabilities.
• Robust support for future marketing, UX, and underwriting innovations

What’s Next? How Distinguished Plans to Drive Innovation with Unqork

To remain ahead of the curve relative to competitors in the MGA space, Distinguished is already considering new ways to take advantage of the power of the Unqork platform. 

For example, his team is exploring adding chatbots and expanding the functionalities of agent dashboards, including the ability to get reports and statements and gain quick insights across their book of business with Distinguished. 

They are also considering leveraging Unqork to transform internal processes, including a one-stop shop for their underwriting teams.

“Unqork really positions us to grow into the next phase.”

— Mani Meiyappan, SVP & CIO, Distinguished

Watch Distinguished’s SVP & CIO Mani Meiyappan and Unqork’s Noel Hoxha, Executive Director for P&C Insurance, demo Distinguished’s modern agent portal and discuss the business and technology opportunities it unlocks.