Running Faster or Moving Forward? Why Insurance Innovation Often Misses the Point

When progress feels measurable, but not directional

September 2022. I was sitting at my desk writing a column for a Dutch insurance trade magazine -- something I had been doing regularly for a while. And I remember the exact moment the thought crystallised, the one that would not leave me alone afterwards.

I had spent nearly twenty years in this industry by then. Running an MGA, building portfolios, sitting in more meetings about "innovation" and "digitalisation" than I care to count. And the thing I kept coming back to was this: we were getting better at everything except the thing that actually mattered.

We had faster systems. Better workflows. Cleaner processes. And yet, when I looked at the fundamental question -- are we actually growing, or are we just running the same race more efficiently? -- the answer was uncomfortable.

The limits of working harder within the same model

Here is what I had seen, over and over, for years. A firm invests in new technology. Processes speed up. Reports look better. Everyone feels productive. And then, twelve months later, the portfolio has barely moved. The same clients, the same products, the same revenue -- just delivered with slightly less friction.

It is like polishing a car that is parked in the garage. Beautiful work. But you are not going anywhere.

A world that shifts, even when we do not

What made it worse was that the world outside was not standing still. Clients expected more. Competitors were trying different things -- some ridiculous, some genuinely clever. New entrants kept arriving with fresh assumptions and no legacy to protect.

I watched all of this from the inside, and I recognised something in myself that I did not love: I had become very good at operating within a system that I was increasingly unsure about. Comfortable. Competent. And possibly heading in the wrong direction.

From processing information to making decisions

The column I wrote that September was about a specific observation: our industry had become excellent at processing information but surprisingly poor at using it to make decisions. We had data everywhere -- in policy systems, in CRM tools, in spreadsheets that only one person understood. But the gap between having information and acting on it was enormous.

Not because people were lazy or incompetent. They were neither. But because the tools were built for administration, not for decision-making. They told you what happened. They almost never told you what to do next.

Why this mattered to me

I kept asking myself a question that felt almost too simple: where does growth actually come from? Not in theory -- in practice. In a real brokerage, with real clients, on a Tuesday afternoon. What makes the difference between a portfolio that grows and one that just gets renewed?

The answer, I came to believe, was not more efficiency. It was better decisions. Knowing which client to call. Knowing when their situation has changed. Knowing where the real opportunities are, rather than spreading effort evenly across a portfolio and hoping for the best.

And that thought -- that we were optimising the wrong layer entirely -- was the one that would not leave me alone.

How Onesurance started

I did not set out to start a technology company. I am an insurance person, not a developer. But the more I sat with this problem, the more I realised that nobody was building what I thought was needed. Not another dashboard. Not another CRM plugin. Something that actually sits in the decision layer -- between the data you already have and the action you should take next.

Onesurance came out of that frustration. Out of nearly twenty years of watching smart people work hard inside a system that was not designed to help them grow. Out of a column written on a quiet afternoon in September, when I finally admitted to myself that I could either keep writing about the problem or try to do something about it.

I chose the latter. Whether that was brave or foolish probably depends on the day you ask me.

Final thought

I still think about that original question. Not because I have a perfect answer -- I do not -- but because I think it is the right question. Are we running faster, or are we actually moving forward?

For me, the answer meant leaving behind something familiar and building something new. For others, it might mean something different entirely. But the question is worth asking. Especially on a quiet afternoon, when nobody is watching.