Distribution Hub and MarketIQ: Sending the Packet to Carriers Without the Email Chain

Ask anyone who has run a PEO's carrier relationships what the submission process looks like and you will get the same description. The underwriter assembles a folder: the ACORD 130, the loss runs for however many years the carrier wants, the current mod worksheet, a narrative about the account, maybe a supplemental questionnaire the carrier insists on. The folder goes out as an email with six attachments. The carrier's underwriter replies asking for a seventh. Three days later there is a question about a claim on page nine of the loss runs. Someone forwards the thread to a colleague, who replies-all to the wrong version. By the time a quote comes back, the submission exists in four inboxes in five slightly different states, and nobody can say with confidence which version the carrier priced.

We lived this in our own PEO for years, and it is one of the first things we set out to fix when we built HALO IQ's carrier distribution. The answer has two halves: Distribution Hub on the operator side, and MarketIQ on the carrier side.

The packet is a thing, not a pile

The first idea is that a carrier submission should be a single object with a definite state, not a collection of attachments that happen to be in the same email.

Distribution Hub is the internal operator tool that builds that object. By the time an account reaches the point where a PEO or MGA wants to take it to market, most of the inputs already exist in HALO IQ. InboxIQ parsed the loss runs and the ACORD 130 when the broker sent them. ModIQ aggregated the losses by policy year and produced a mod projection and, where requested, the WCIRB or NCCI worksheet. The wizard holds the company basics, the class codes, and the payroll by class and location. The narrative about the account, if Executive Summary AI or an underwriter has drafted one, is sitting in the deal.

Distribution Hub pulls those pieces together into a packet. The operator sees what is included, what is missing, and what the carrier being targeted typically requires. A carrier that wants five years of loss runs when the packet only has three gets flagged before the submission goes out, not after. The operator can add documents, write or edit the account narrative, and choose which carrier markets to send to.

The packet is then versioned. If the operator adds a fourth year of loss runs after the first send, the packet becomes version two, and every carrier who received version one can be shown that an update exists. There is no "which attachment did I send them" problem because the packet is the record.

The carrier gets a link, not an inbox

MarketIQ is the other half: the surface the carrier's underwriter actually uses.

When the operator sends a packet from Distribution Hub, the carrier contact receives a magic link. Opening the link lands them in MarketIQ, a carrier-facing portal where the packet is laid out as a submission: the account summary, the ACORD 130, the loss runs by year with ModIQ's aggregation visible, the mod worksheet, the narrative, and any supplemental documents. The carrier does not need an account on HALO IQ, a password, or an onboarding call. The link authenticates them to that packet and nothing else.

From MarketIQ the carrier underwriter can review, download what they need, ask a question, request an additional document, decline, or indicate they are quoting. Each of those actions is an event the operator sees in Distribution Hub. The question goes into a thread attached to the packet rather than into an email that might or might not be forwarded. The document request shows up as a missing item the operator can satisfy by uploading to the packet, which creates the next version and notifies the carrier.

The status of every market the packet went to is visible on one screen: sent, opened, under review, additional information requested, declined, quoting, quoted. That status board replaces the mental model the underwriter used to keep in their head, and the sticky notes they used when their head got full.

Strict separation between the two surfaces

This is the part we want to be explicit about, because it is where a design like this can go wrong.

A carrier opening a packet in MarketIQ sees the packet. They do not see the operator's pipeline, the other carriers the packet was sent to, the PEO's pricing, the ModIQ loss pick with its upward loads, the ConnectIQ deal notes, or anything else inside the operator's tenant. The magic link scopes them to a single packet, and the carrier surface is a separate application boundary from the operator surface. The carrier cannot navigate from the packet to anywhere else, because there is nowhere else for that link to go.

In the other direction, the operator sees the carrier's actions on the packet and the thread the carrier writes in, and nothing about the carrier's internal process. That separation is deliberate. Carriers will not use a portal that leaks their competitive position to the operator, and operators will not send packets through a system that exposes their book to the markets. Both sides needed to be confident that the surface they were on was theirs, and we built MarketIQ and Distribution Hub as two surfaces, not one surface with two views.

Multiple markets receiving the same packet each get their own link, their own thread, and their own status. Carrier A does not know carrier B received it. Carrier B's document request does not change what carrier A sees unless the operator chooses to issue a new version to everyone.

Why the mod worksheet and the aggregation travel with the packet

One detail that matters more than it appears: the loss runs in a MarketIQ packet are not just the PDFs the broker originally sent. They are the PDFs plus ModIQ's structured aggregation by policy year, by carrier, with valuation dates, paid versus incurred, and open reserves called out.

A carrier underwriter looking at raw loss runs from three carriers across five years has to rebuild that aggregation themselves, and the rebuild is where disagreements start. If the operator's mod projection says one thing and the carrier's hand-built aggregation says another, a week goes by while they reconcile. Sending the structured aggregation alongside the source documents gives the carrier the operator's math to check against rather than to recreate. They can still disagree, but they disagree about something specific.

The same applies to the mod worksheet. For California accounts, a WCIRB worksheet obtained through ModIQ's request flow travels in the packet, so the carrier is working from the bureau's figures rather than from the operator's projection alone.

What changes for the operator

The daily experience in a PEO or MGA that uses Distribution Hub is mostly about what stops happening. Nobody searches an inbox for the version of the loss runs they sent to a particular carrier. Nobody wonders whether a market opened the submission or whether it is sitting unread. Nobody forwards a thread and hopes the context survives. The underwriter opens Distribution Hub, sees every packet in flight, sees which markets are moving and which are stalled, and spends their attention on the stalled ones.

When quotes come back, they attach to the packet and flow into the deal in ConnectIQ, where the pricing comparison can happen against the manual rates CarrierIQ already holds for those markets. The operator can see at a glance whether a quote is in line with the carrier's filed LCM or whether something in the account drove a different outcome.

A hypothetical submission

Take a hypothetical 140-employee food distribution company with warehouse, driver, and clerical classes, coming to a PEO through a broker. The broker emails the loss runs and ACORD 130; InboxIQ parses them and creates the deal. The PEO's underwriter runs ModIQ, gets a projection and the WCIRB worksheet, and opens Distribution Hub. The packet assembles with the ACORD, five years of aggregated runs, the worksheet, and a narrative the underwriter edits from the AI draft. Three markets are selected. Each receives a link. One opens it the same afternoon and asks for a driver list with hire dates; the underwriter uploads it, version two goes out, and that market moves to quoting. A second declines with a note about the driver exposure. The third opens it two days later and quotes without questions. The whole exchange is visible on one screen, and the broker, in their own workspace, can see that the account is at market and which stage it is in without calling anyone.

That is a hypothetical, but it is the flow we built for, because it is the flow we needed ourselves.

The point

Carrier submission is one of the last places in PEO and MGA operations where the medium is still email and the record is still an inbox. Distribution Hub and MarketIQ replace that with a packet that has a state, a link that scopes the carrier to exactly what they need, and a status board that tells the operator where every market stands. The email chain was never the problem, exactly. It was that the email chain was the only record. Now there is a better one.