Old Logic, New Moves? Why Insurance Is Being Rewritten More Quietly Than We Think

A stable industry, quietly shifting

I spent close to two decades running an MGA, and for most of that time the basic machinery of insurance barely changed. The products evolved, the regulations multiplied, the IT systems got marginally less ugly -- but the underlying logic? Pretty much the same as it was when I started.

What catches my attention now is not that things are changing. Insurance people have been talking about change at every conference I can remember. What is different is that the changes are happening underneath the conversation, in places most of us are not looking.

When the rules are rewritten, not optimised

There is a particular breed of company that is not trying to make the existing process faster. They are asking a more uncomfortable question: does this process need to exist at all?

Consider parametric insurance. No adjuster, no claim form, no back-and-forth. A predefined event happens, a payout is triggered. Done. Or image recognition for damage assessment -- a client uploads a photo, and the system estimates the damage in minutes rather than weeks. These are not improvements to the old workflow. They skip it entirely.

I find this genuinely fascinating, and I say that as someone who built a career on the old workflow.

A broader pattern starts to emerge

Once you start noticing it, you see the pattern everywhere. Some technology removes a step. Some rearranges the sequence. And occasionally -- the really interesting cases -- something removes the need for the sequence altogether.

Meanwhile, our industry keeps hosting panels about "digital transformation" that could have been given, word for word, in 2017. There is a wonderful irony in an industry that talks constantly about innovation while mostly innovating the speed at which it does the same thing.

The role of the intermediary is not disappearing

I should be clear: I do not think brokers and intermediaries are going away. Most of these innovations target specific parts of the chain -- underwriting, claims, risk assessment. They do not replace the person who sits across the table from a client and actually understands their situation.

But they do change what that person needs to be good at. Less form-filling, more sense-making. Less process execution, more connecting the dots for a specific client in a specific context. Honestly, that sounds like a better job to me.

Timing becomes part of the value

Here is something I did not fully appreciate until I crossed to the technology side: in a world where information moves faster, knowing when to act matters as much as knowing what to do. Recognising that a risk profile has shifted before the renewal conversation. Spotting that a client's situation has changed before they call you about it.

We have seen this play out with brokers we work with now. The advisers who get a timely signal and act on it do not just retain more clients -- they have better conversations. More relevant ones. The kind I always wanted to have when I was running my own book, but could never quite time right because I was flying blind across too many clients.

Final thought

Three years ago I was writing about this industry from the inside, as someone who had spent two decades there. Now I am writing about it from a slightly different angle -- as someone who left to build something, and keeps being surprised by what he finds when he looks back. I am not going to pretend I know exactly where all of this lands. But the question that matters is not whether things will change. It is whether we will notice the changes that count, or spend our energy debating the ones that do not.