Happy New Year! As we look back on 2023 and our 20^th anniversary, we realize that our achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the support of all our agency partners. We appreciate every agency that chooses EZLynx® as their Indispensable Partner to help their businesses effectively sell, service and grow.

While our objectives shift as the industry faces new advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) and challenges like a hard market, we strive to work together to build solutions that can act as an agency’s most productive employee, supporting the success and growth of our customers. We are steadfast in accelerating progress toward solving the problems – and seizing the opportunities – our industry faces, and we believe our next chapter in this journey will be even more exciting than our last.

Highlighting 2023

EZLynx made fantastic progress in 2023 on several fronts. We returned to our traditional focus of delivering cutting-edge solutions to the industry, demonstrating that we are a valuable part of Applied System’s go-forward strategy. EZLynx Rating Engine™ won Gold in the 15^th annual 2023 Golden Bridge Awards for business information solutions.

In addition to industry recognition, we made huge strides with exciting innovations, including:

• Integrating Tarmika™, the industry’s leading commercial lines rater, with EZLynx to provide agents access to 35+ commercial markets via Ivans® to automate the appetite and quoting process.

• Automating the reconciliation of payments taken through Applied Pay® to save time for accounting staff.

• Enhancing EZLynx Client Center™ with the ability to link customers to carrier payment portals for their direct bill policies to simplify the payments experience.

• Adding a template management area for commercial proposals to expedite and customize commercial sales.

• Advancing automation throughout the platform so agencies have more time to focus on the most valuable tasks and achieve maximum potential.

• And so much more!

With all the exciting enhancements, it is easy to miss a tool or new feature that can bring value to your agency. I would encourage you to take a few minutes to review our Product Hub, where you’ll find high-level overviews and short videos of the latest functionality in EZLynx. Check back often – we update it quarterly with every new release.

Championing Progress: 2024 in Focus

At EZLynx, we are technology-obsessed. We focus on developing technology to solve problems affecting independent insurance agencies to help them sell, service, and achieve rapid growth. We have exciting things planned for 2024!

Advancing Sales and Marketing Automation

We made many advancements in this area over 2023, and we’re not done yet! We are incredibly excited about the official launch of our modernized EZLynx Sales Center™ application coming soon. We’ve gotten great feedback from our agency partners, who are helping us ensure we deliver a simpler way to manage your sales pipeline. We plan to build on our Agency Insights® recommendation engine to surface additional cross-sell recommendations and ways to expand your sales funnel. To simplify time-saving measures in your agency, we’re adding suggested automation to accelerate getting started with this powerful tool. We are also making our email campaign tool more user-friendly while maintaining its flexibility and capabilities.

Delivering on More Data

You may have noticed a change in our reporting early this year. Every EZLynx Reporting & Analytics™ user has early access to our new reporting platform. You can access our beta version by going to the beta section in the reporting menu. As we work to fully shift to this new platform over the year, we will release regular enhancements, updates, and additional reports. This is the first step in our data journey as part of our Know, Recommend, and Assist framework. Our initial goal is to give agencies a clear way to know what is happening in their businesses. The new reporting comes with additional perks, such as near real-time refresh of agency data!

Tapping into Artificial Intelligence

We believe artificial intelligence (AI) can assist and accelerate the efforts of your staff. We are leveraging the analytical power of technology to support the problem-solving, intuition, and customer expertise of insurance agents. We believe AI has tremendous potential for improving productivity across the industry, but we can’t build it alone. We started by introducing an early access program to get feedback on AI content generation, giving agencies the power of a content team within EZLynx. Soon, we will create a waitlist for agencies who would like an exclusive preview of more of the new technology and the opportunity to partner with us and help us define and develop new tools to improve how you work within EZLynx.

Make sure you’re subscribed to NewsLynx® – this is where we will provide more info on how you can join in this exciting new program!

Simplifying Commercial Lines

Diversifying into commercial business is one of the primary areas where we’ve seen growth in our customer base over the past few years. We made huge strides in creating more efficiency in this area. Our integration of a commercial lines rater, Tarmika, is part of the core EZLynx Submission Center™ workflows agencies already use. Data you have already collected in the management system flows into Tarmika for new business and renewals. Once completed, quotes automatically flow back into EZLynx for tracking on the submission dashboard. Even with these technology investments, many EZLynx commercial workflows are complex. If you need a place to start, we invite you to join Office Hours to help you learn how to use EZLynx to maximize your benefits. As our customers continue to invest in commercial lines, we embark on a multi-year journey to shorten and accelerate these workflows to continue creating incredible power and value.

Continuing to Push Personal Lines to New Limits

Twenty years ago, EZLynx set out with a mission to help build the success of the independent agent channel. We helped fight the assault from direct writers and captives to compete for new business. EZLynx rapidly delivered agency and customer-facing tools to drive productivity, attract customers, and win new business. We still strive to increase speed-to-quote and accuracy for real-time rating. We are working closely with several carriers to close existing gaps in the quote and bind workflow to streamline the end-to-end process for agents and hope to share more about that this year.

Our Journey Continues

We look forward to making our next decade the most beneficial for all our agency partners. We continue our commitment to leveraging the latest technology to solve customer problems, free up agents’ time, and increase agency productivity and overall profitability. We wish you all growth and success for your agencies this next year!