Everything Works. But Does It Still Work? Rethinking Efficiency in Insurance
This article is based on a column originally published in a Dutch professional insurance magazine that has been in circulation for over 89 years.
When efficiency starts to feel complete
I have a soft spot for efficient businesses. I really do. There is something deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled brokerage hum along -- the CRM is clean, the workflows are tight, compliance is handled, renewals go out on time. Beautiful.
The problem is that you can have all of that and still be heading nowhere in particular. I have seen firms that could process a policy change in four minutes flat but had not acquired a meaningful new client in eighteen months. Efficient? Absolutely. Growing? Not so much.
A different question in the boardroom
Something is shifting in the conversations I have with leadership teams. It used to be that management meetings revolved around process improvement -- how do we do what we already do, but faster and cheaper? Perfectly reasonable question. But increasingly, I hear a different one: are we doing the right things in the first place?
Grant Thornton published a study in late 2025 that put this rather well. Their finding was not that technology projects fail because the technology is bad. They fail because the organisation around them -- leadership clarity, decision-making culture, willingness to actually change -- is not ready. The tool works fine. The people are the bottleneck. Which is both humbling and unsurprising if you have ever tried to introduce a new system to a team of experienced advisers.
From tools to decision-making
Our industry has a remarkable talent for buying technology and then using it to do exactly what we were already doing, just with a nicer interface. We take a tool designed to transform how we work and reduce it to a slightly fancier spreadsheet.
The real value, I have come to think, is not in automating existing tasks. It is in making better decisions about which tasks to prioritise. Which clients to call today. Which part of the portfolio needs attention right now, not in three months when the review cycle comes around. That is a fundamentally different use of technology, and it requires a fundamentally different mindset.
Why leadership becomes the differentiator
The firms that get this right do not start with a software purchase. They start with a conversation at the top about what kind of business they want to be. Do we want to be a well-run administrative operation, or do we want to be a growth business that happens to be good at administration? Those are very different ambitions, and they lead to very different decisions about where to invest time and money.
I am not saying efficiency does not matter -- of course it does. But it is table stakes, not a strategy.
When adoption becomes the real challenge
Here is something nobody tells you in the sales pitch: the hardest part of any technology initiative is not the implementation. It is the Thursday morning three months later, when an adviser has to decide whether to check the new dashboard or just do things the way they have always done them. Most of the time, habit wins.
The organisations that succeed are the ones where leadership stays involved past go-live. Where using data to inform decisions becomes part of how the business operates, not a side project that lives in a browser tab nobody opens.
Final thought
I realise that sounds a bit dramatic. But I have watched enough well-run firms get overtaken by competitors who were frankly less organised but more willing to ask uncomfortable questions about the future. At some point, "everything works" stops being a comfort and starts being a warning sign.