How UNICO Group and borrowedtyme are re-imagining the broker AMS with the “power of one.”

When Eric Himmelberg joined UNICO Group as director of information technology in early 2022, he encountered a familiar headache: data scattered across too many places.

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“Our service teams were using two different agency management systems,” he recalled during a panel at BTV’s BrokerTech Connect: Chicago conference in August. “Benefits were in one system, property and casualty in another, and our producers were in Salesforce CRM. Producers were entering information in duplicate and triplicate just to move a deal forward.”

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Himmelberg immediately imagined a better way. “I couldn’t help but think it would be great if we could all just work as one team on one system.”

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Finding the platform

Himmelberg spent months exploring the AMS market until a Salesforce Financial Services Cloud presentation caught his attention. “It looked like the platform where we could all come together and collaborate,” he said. But customizing a powerful CRM into a broker AMS would require heavy configuration.

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Enter the borrowedtyme Team, led by Kevin Rall.

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From agency challenge to industry solution

Rall’s own path mirrored the problem. After years of Salesforce implementations for major carriers at Accenture and Deloitte, he joined an Ohio agency in 2020 that had made multiple acquisitions—and quickly found himself juggling three AMS platforms and two accounting systems. “We looked at everything in the market and said, nah,” he told the audience. “Salesforce FSC was the right way to go.”

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The team first moved accounting onto Salesforce using Accounting Seed, then built out personal and commercial lines, employee benefits, and end-to-end workflows: prospecting, carrier proposals, binding policies, invoicing, commissions, and claims. Dashboards, certificate self-service, and renewal management followed—all on one platform.

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As word spread, other agencies wanted in. “Someone said, ‘Can we see it?’ We showed them. They said, ‘Can we do that?’ We said, ‘Sure,’” Rall laughed. That interest sparked borrowedtyme, a company dedicated to helping brokers turn Salesforce FSC into a full AMS.

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Partnerships over vendor relationships

UNICO became one of borrowedtyme’s earliest and most active partners. “They’ve been a real partner, and we are grateful for their leadership and culture,” Rall said. “Partners care about each other’s success. Vendors only care about their own success.”

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For Himmelberg, that distinction mattered as much as the technology. “Technology alone isn’t enough,” he emphasized. “Leadership and culture drive change. You need commitment from the top and buy-in across the organization.”

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Culture and collaboration

That commitment reshaped UNICO’s culture along with its tech stack. Today, every employee—from summer interns to the CEO—has a Salesforce + borrowedtyme license. “It’s not just where we store data,” Himmelberg said. “It’s where we collaborate.”

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Borrowedtyme even built a “high-performance team” module at UNICO’s request. Instead of creating meeting agendas by hand, service and sales teams now navigate live account data together, flagging tasks and setting due dates in real time. A dynamic “renewal manager” replaces the old highlighter-and-paper method, dramatically cutting prep time and ensuring a single, reliable record of activity.

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Ready for AI

With clean, centralized data, UNICO is positioned to layer on artificial intelligence using borrowedtyme in three pilot areas:

• Processing unstructured data such as commission statements and carrier proposals.
• Proposal enhancement and document comparison to highlight differences and draft client-ready presentations.
• Self-service policy intelligence, allowing clients to ask natural-language questions like “What’s my deductible for X?” and receive instant answers.

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“Adoption is everything,” Rall said. “We can build great technology, but if we can’t operationalize it, it’s not worth much. AI will reward the brokers who can adopt and scale it fastest.”

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Because Salesforce keeps innovating, UNICO can integrate these capabilities without a massive rebuild. “Having all our data organized and centralized makes AI a plug-and-play advantage instead of a multi-year project,” Himmelberg added.

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Lessons for the industry

Both leaders offered advice for brokerages considering a similar transformation:

• Start with the why. “Always ask why you’re doing the process you’re doing,” Rall said.
• Culture beats code. “You can buy as much technology as you want, but if you don’t have the leadership and culture to say, ‘That’s the mountain we’re going to take,’ it won’t work,” he emphasized.
• Choose partners, not vendors. True partners “care about each other’s success.”

For Himmelberg, the payoff is clear: “Having everyone aligned on a single platform with clean, robust data is powerful.”

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What began as a plan to eliminate duplicate data entry has become a model for the future of brokerage technology—one platform, one team, one source of truth. Or, as Rall summed it up, “The whole conversation about CRM versus AMS probably needs to go away. We should talk about what platforms we’re running on and what capabilities we’re delivering.”

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Himmelberg simplifies it further: “Literally every person in our agency goes to the same place to get work done. That’s the power of one.”

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