How Market Access for Insurance Agencies Protects Growth When Carriers Exit

Market access for insurance agents is critical. Yet we are in a phase of high carrier withdrawals as appetite tightens and carriers leave high-risk markets, leaving agencies scrambling to find coverage for their customers. In turn, this frustrates clients and damages their trust. Agencies that rely too heavily on a small set of carriers are most vulnerable to this hard market, but every agency can be affected.

With flexibility in market and carrier access, however, bolt Solutions knows that insurance placement challenges can be mitigated, ensuring agencies can adapt and retain accounts – even in a volatile market. And in shifting markets, that flexibility can be a profound competitive advantage.

Market Access for Insurance Agencies: The Challenges

Hard market cycles and geographic pullbacks are part of the insurance landscape. In 2025 alone, we’ve seen a spate of rising climate-linked catastrophic weather events that have driven many major carriers to limit exposure to these markets, or even withdraw coverage completely. 

The knock-on impact to these insurance carrier exits is slower (or even non-existent) placement for clients needing protection and coverage. This not only slows your growth, but also impacts how your customers trust you. While there are some signs that the familiar, and prolonged, hard cycle is passing, experts predict we will move into a period of margin pressure and slower premium growth through 2026. The agencies that thrive will be the ones that can embrace both technology and alternative revenue streams to help them solve their insurance placement challenges. 

On the other hand, over-reliance on a limited set of carriers with shrinking market appetite is a recipe for disaster, compounded by a lack of visibility into alternative markets or available Excess and Surplus, or E&S, options that could offer relief.

bolt Solution’s own market research backs this, highlighting that hard markets and carrier exits remain a top challenge for our customers. Coverage gaps and difficulty placing risk appear consistently on the Top 5 list of agency pain points. This aligns with general data that suggests that there is a “growing disconnect between the coverage carriers can provide and the protection customers and communities require, jeopardizing the very purpose of insurance.”

This gets amplified by workday frictions: the need to repeat data entry not only over multiple systems, but multiple carrier portals, continual switching between these portals just to find coverage for your customer, and tedious manual searches that eat up producer time and your agency revenue. Luckily, however, there is a better path forward. 

Solving Insurer Library and Surplus Lines Access for Independent Agencies

With the right hard market insurance strategies in place, insurance carrier exits don’t have to create insurance placement challenges for you or the customers trusting you. And the solutions are remarkably simple.

Diversify Carrier Access Intentionally

Agencies with a broad carrier mix across personal lines, commercial lines, and excess and surplus lines build the resilience needed to still serve their customers, even in the face of insurance placement challenges. It’s time to shift from choosing carriers based on commission or ease of doing business, and focus on carrier appetite volatility, the breadth of products, and their geographic footprint.

Building market access for insurance agencies means understanding which carriers are stable in your core markets and where products without fallback options could be holding you back. Map your book against your carrier panel to identify concentration risk. If a single carrier holds too much of your product lines, you’re one appetite change away from shrinking revenues. A diversified carrier base, across products, lines, and areas, is one of your most solid hard market insurance strategies. 

Build an Adaptable Placement Workflow

Next, look to carrier appetite tools to help you save time and wasted quote cycles. Traditional placement workflows see producers logging into multiple portals to manually check appetite, then submitting to one carrier at a time. Modern agencies need better platforms that centralize access and reduce dependency on individual carriers, as well as lighten the manual load on agents and producers. 

Carrier appetite tools that can automate this appetite intelligence cut down on wasted submission time. Meanwhile, real-time appetite data makes sure you’re only submitting to markets actively writing the risk profile of the customer, eliminating carrier portal ping-pong and accelerating bindable quotes. 

Give Your Agency More Paths to Coverage

Surplus line access is essential for risks that don’t fit standard carrier appetites. Wholesale appointments insurance makes certain that, even when direct appointments are missing, you can still place business and keep your customers happy. 

Agencies should maintain options across multiple channels, including direct carrier appointments, wholesale partnerships, and even D2C digital storefronts for specific products. How agencies compete when carriers withdraw from states depends on having the right backup plans – ones that don’t need weeks of scrambling to secure new appointments.  

Strengthen Renewal Readiness

It’s easier to retain a client than to onboard a new one. Proactive agencies should be tracking their renewals ahead of time, identifying accounts that will be at-risk if a carrier changes appetite. Data can help you understand where appetite is tightening, and which accounts may need remarketing to secure a renewal. Luckily, proactive repricing tools can help you better protect accounts before appetite changes impact the policy. 

For example, when you know a carrier is pulling out of a line or geography, you can remarket renewals in advance, giving you time to find competitive alternatives, without rushing the client or risking non-renewal. Proactive servicing protects your book, and you can’t afford to be without it. 

bolt Solutions Helps Empower Agencies to Compete in the Face of Insurance Carrier Exits

bolt Solutions supports you in finding the right market insurance strategies to stay competitive, regardless of the broader carrier landscape, offering you:

Insurer Library and Market Access

How to add more insurance carriers to an agency is one of the biggest challenges for independent agency owners. bolt Solutions offers immediate, one-click access to over 100 carriers, with more than 6,000 products in the insurer library. Automated carrier appetite tools and intelligence come built-in, ensuring only carriers actively writing the risk are approached.

Our one-pass multi-carrier quote flow works across personal and commercial lines as well as E&S, eliminating the need to switch systems or re-enter data. When direct appointments lapse, one-click wholesale appointments insurance routing fills the gap. And it’s all backed by the dedicated market team, helping agencies obtain the carriers they need. 

Workflow Advantages

Consolidating placement into a single workflow, instead of multiple logging into separate carrier portals, gives producers a unified work environment. Tight credentials management ensures agents are always set up correctly, while real-time RC1 quoting (with API-driven accuracy) and quote declination analysis better empower you to understand where market tightening is happening, and what can be done about it. This turns basic carrier appetite tools into real strategic intelligence you can use for growth. 

E&S and Wholesale Strength

bolt Solutions’ platform also includes built-in wholesale appointments insurance, with delegated authority routing and surplus lines access for expansion. Multi-tenant oversight offers support for larger or multi-office agencies trying to build consistent placement workflows across locations. When standard markets decline, bolt Solutions offers you a path forward, whether through wholesale partners or E&S markets, giving you more strategies to protect agency growth in hard markets with greater flexibility and speed. 

Getting Started With Insurance Strategies for a Changing Market

If you’re looking to build resilience against insurance carrier exits, start with these steps:

• Review your dependency on your top three carriers and assess your concentration risk
• Map which products lack fallback options and identify gaps in your carrier panel
• Add E&S capabilities to your workflow to avoid coverage gaps when standard markets decline
• Track renewal cycles early to anticipate appetite changes and remarket proactively
• Consolidate your quoting and placement workflow to eliminate portal switching and manual processes
• Use data to understand appetite patterns and declinations so you can adjust strategy before problems arise
• Adopt tools that expand access without increasing headcount or administrative burden

Carrier exits don’t have to derail your growth. Agencies that can diversify their market, strengthen their placement workflows, and leverage flexible platforms can protect their revenue, retain happier clients proactively, and above all, turn hard markets into their competitive advantage. If you’re ready to get started, request a demo and see how expanded market access and a broader insurer library can safeguard your growth, no matter how volatile the market around you.