The challenge
ABA Commercial Insurance is a long-established UK broker. Its sales journey ran across prospecting spreadsheets, a renewal-date tracker, calendars and inboxes. Nobody could see the whole pipeline, handovers lost history, and management reporting meant rebuilding the picture by hand.
The team wanted one shared system shaped around how brokers actually sell: cold prospecting, capturing renewal dates, booking appointments, moving opportunities through a new business pipeline, then looking after live policies and their renewals. Off-the-shelf CRMs were considered. None of them fitted without a workaround at every stage.
The approach
We started with the journey, not the data model. Each stage became a board with its own rules about what has to be true before a record can move on. Attribution, assignment history and the audit trail are append-only, so when an account changes hands the history travels with it and nothing is ever quietly rewritten.
Sign-in uses the firm’s existing Microsoft accounts with multi-factor authentication, and roles come from its security groups, so there are no separate passwords to manage. Appointments sync both ways with Outlook.
What we built
- Boards for prospecting, renewals captured, new business and live renewals, with stage gates and a daily view of what needs doing.
- Work accounts with the full history of contacts, opportunities, policies, tasks and notes.
- Markets and insurer responses, so the team can see who was approached and what came back.
- Reports, saved views, named reports and a management dashboard of targets, activity and attribution.
- Imports with duplicate detection, data-quality tools, retention and erasure workflows, and a search that spans everything.
- Short training videos rendered from the real application, so the guide always matches the screens.
The details
The interface brings complex brokerage workflows into one consistent experience. Clear navigation, practical dashboards and detailed records make it easier for the team to manage opportunities, track activity and find the information they need.
Built for daily use, the CRM balances the depth of functionality required by the business with an interface that remains straightforward to navigate. Everything shown here uses invented companies and people.
The outcome
The system went live in October 2026, with the broker’s existing accounts, leads and policies migrated in over a single weekend. It runs on Azure in the UK, with point-in-time backups, monitoring and alerts, and the same image promoted through test environments before it reaches production.
