How Rikor leveled up their insurance brokerage platform with fractional technical leadership, project management, and onshore developer expertise.
Rikor, an insurtech platform serving franchisors and franchisees, partnered with Fraction to accelerate insurance carrier API integrations. Fraction’s triple-threat model — fractional CTO, PMO, and onshore developer — delivered faster velocity, better partner communication, and expanded real-time quoting across more carriers.
When Rikor needed to expand its insurance carrier network with complex API integrations, their offshore development team — effective at core platform work — hit a wall. Time zone differences and communication gaps made direct technical collaboration with carrier partners slow and error-prone. Fraction’s fractional engineering model changed that.
Insurance compliance platform — software that helps franchisors verify, track, and enforce insurance policy requirements across their entire franchisee network, ensuring every location maintains the coverage levels required by the franchisor agreement.
Rikor is an advanced insurance technology company providing an insurance compliance platform to franchisors and franchisees. As the platform matured, Rikor set its sights on more ambitious projects: expanding its network of insurance providers and enabling real-time quoting across a broader range of carriers and policy types.
To pursue that expansion, Rikor needed technical resources capable of directly engaging with insurance carriers’ API teams — a requirement that exposed the limits of their existing offshore development setup. The company recognized it needed onshore developer talent, but in a highly competitive tech-talent market, a traditional full-time hire carried substantial cost and risk.
”Fraction’s advantage breaks down into 3 core pillars: a fractional CTO, a fractional PMO, and a verified developer.”
— Jonathan Frazier, COO of Rikor
Rikor’s offshore team had successfully built the core capabilities of the platform — policy management, compliance tracking, and franchisor reporting. But insurance API integrations are a different kind of work. They require developers to interact directly with insurance carriers’ technical representatives: asking precise questions, navigating ambiguous documentation, and adapting quickly when APIs behave unexpectedly.
Time zone differences and communication barriers made this kind of fast, iterative technical dialogue difficult. Delays compounded. Questions got lost. And the faster Rikor tried to move, the more friction the offshore model introduced. For a company trying to scale its carrier network, this was a meaningful constraint on growth.
The problem was not the offshore team’s skill — it was fit. The work Rikor needed to do next required a developer who could read a room, ask the right questions in real time, and operate in the same time zone as the partners they were integrating with. That pointed toward an onshore solution. But a full-time US-based senior engineer hire was expensive and slow, and the competitive talent market made it even harder to execute quickly. Rikor needed an alternative.
Fraction’s offering gave Rikor three things at once: technical leadership from a fractional CTO, project coordination from a dedicated PMO, and execution capacity from a vetted US-based senior developer.
The process started with Fraction’s CEO Praveen Ghanta — a developer-turned-founder with multiple exits — conducting the technical interview himself. This gave Rikor confidence that the developer placed on their project had been properly evaluated against the specific technical challenges of insurance API integration, not just screened against a generic job description.
Fraction places US-based senior developers with fractional CTO and PMO support — typically within one week of engagement.
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The Fraction developer arrived already understanding how to operate in a high-velocity consulting context — jumping in quickly, grasping Rikor’s platform from both a technical and business perspective, and immediately engaging with insurance carrier technical contacts. As Jonathan Frazier noted, an onshore developer is “more likely to read a room, know how to ask, and know who to ask and for what and when.” That capability made the difference in complex, partner-facing technical work.
Fraction’s PMO joined alongside the developer, taking on project planning and organizational work that had previously been a source of friction. By managing developer priorities and maintaining clear communication between the business and development teams, the PMO role reduced confusion and kept the team focused on the highest-impact work. This is a pattern Fraction has applied across multiple engagements with growth-stage software companies, where misaligned priorities and poor stakeholder communication are often the primary drag on delivery speed.
The results were direct and measurable. With Fraction’s triple-threat model in place, Rikor expanded its relationships with insurance providers and rolled out real-time quoting across a wider range of carriers and policy types — capabilities that directly improved the platform’s value to franchisors and franchisees.
Fraction helped Rikor achieve five distinct outcomes:
Deliver on schedule, with predictable expansion of software capabilities
Expand insurance provider access to grow real-time quote value for customers
Engineer novel technologies beyond the scope of what internal leadership had originally scoped
Reduce miscommunication between business stakeholders and the dev team through PMO oversight
Drive long-term revenue growth by directly improving the platform’s ability to close and retain new business
The expanded quoting capability had a direct impact on Rikor’s revenue. More carriers and policy types mean more coverage for franchisors and more value for franchisees — which translates into faster sales cycles and stronger retention. Rikor continued the engagement with Fraction with the goal of scaling its customer base into 2024 and beyond.
This pattern — where fractional technical talent unlocks capabilities a company couldn’t efficiently build internally — appears consistently across Fraction’s case studies. Similar dynamics played out in the modernization of a legacy investment analytics platform, where the constraint was architectural complexity rather than partner communication.
The Rikor engagement illustrates a specific and common situation: a company with strong offshore development resources that runs into a class of work where US-based, onshore collaboration is genuinely necessary. Insurance, financial services, and healthcare technology are sectors where partner-facing technical work often falls into this category — regulatory context, communication precision, and time zone alignment all matter in ways that are hard to compensate for with offshore teams alone.
Fraction’s model is designed for exactly this gap. Rather than hiring a full-time US engineer — a process that can take months and carries significant overhead — companies like Rikor can engage a pre-vetted developer, start in days, and scale up or down based on actual project needs. The addition of fractional CTO and PMO capacity means that smaller teams get organizational infrastructure they typically couldn’t justify building internally.
For growth-stage companies in regulated industries, that combination is often the difference between shipping a partner integration on time and watching it slip quarter after quarter. Fraction has applied this model across insurtech, fintech, and healthcare technology, including at events like ViVE 2023, where the intersection of technology and regulated industries is a central theme.
Fractional engineering means engaging senior, US-based technical talent on a part-time or project basis rather than hiring full-time employees. For Rikor, this model provided access to an experienced developer, a fractional CTO for technical leadership, and a PMO for project oversight — all without the cost and risk of full-time headcount. The result was faster delivery on insurance API integrations and improved communication with insurance carrier technical teams.
Rikor’s offshore team was effective at building core capabilities like policy management and compliance workflows, but the time zone differences and communication barriers made it difficult to collaborate directly with insurance carriers’ technical representatives. Onshore developers are better positioned to read the room, ask the right questions at the right time, and move faster in partnership-driven integrations — which is exactly what expanding Rikor’s carrier network required.
Fraction’s triple-threat model combines three roles: a fractional CTO providing technical leadership and architectural guidance, a PMO handling project planning, priorities, and cross-team communication, and a vetted senior developer who can execute on complex engineering tasks. All three roles work together to give growth-stage companies enterprise-level delivery capacity without building out a large internal team.
By bringing in Fraction’s onshore developer alongside fractional CTO and PMO support, Rikor was able to execute on technically complex integrations with insurance carriers’ APIs. This allowed Rikor to roll out real-time quoting across a wider range of carriers and policy types — directly improving the platform’s value to franchisors and franchisees and expanding Rikor’s ability to close new business.
Fraction can typically place a vetted, US-based developer within one week of an initial engagement. The process includes a technical interview with Fraction’s CEO — himself a developer-turned-founder — to ensure the selected talent matches the client’s specific technical and business requirements. This is significantly faster than a traditional full-time engineering hire, which can take months.
Fraction is best suited for growth-stage companies that need to accelerate delivery without the overhead of a large internal engineering team. Insurtech, fintech, and healthcare technology companies with complex API integration requirements are particularly good fits, as are companies that rely on direct technical collaboration with enterprise partners where communication clarity and US time zone alignment are critical.
Praveen Ghanta is a five-time founder and serial entrepreneur. He is the founder of DevHawk.ai, an AI-powered engineering management platform, and Fraction.work, which connects fast-growing companies with top fractional tech and growth marketing talent. Previously, he founded HiddenLevers, a risk analytics platform for wealth management that he bootstrapped from inception to acquisition by Orion Advisor Solutions in 2021, serving thousands of advisors and $600B in assets. He earlier founded SmartWorkGroups, acquired by Intralinks in 2000.
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