Let's start with a quick test.
Question 1: Your actuary identifies that a pricing threshold needs adjustment. How long until the change is live in production?
Question 2: A potential airline partner wants to embed your travel insurance at checkout. Can your systems deliver real-time quotes in milliseconds?
Question 3: When a parametric trigger fires (flight delayed, weather event confirmed), can you pay the claim automatically—without a single human touch?
If your answers involved "weeks," "we'd need to check with IT," or "that's not how our systems work"—you're not alone. But you are falling behind.
The Speed Gap You Can't Ignore
Here's a scenario playing out at insurance companies right now.
An actuary notices flight delay claims are triggering too frequently. The loss ratio is unfavorable. A simple threshold adjustment—from 2 hours to 2.5 hours—would fix it.
At a traditional insurer, this "simple" change requires IT tickets, development sprints, testing cycles, and deployment windows. Timeline: weeks, sometimes months.
At a digital competitor? Minutes.
While you're scheduling meetings about the change request, they've already optimized their product three more times.
This isn't about technology for technology's sake. It's about whether your business teams can respond to market conditions in real-time—or whether every adjustment requires an IT project.
The Embedded Insurance Wake-Up Call
There's a reason embedded insurance is growing at 30%+ annually. When customers can add travel protection with one click at airline checkout, conversion rates soar and acquisition costs plummet.
But here's what nobody talks about: most traditional insurers literally cannot participate in this market.
Embedded distribution demands real-time quoting in milliseconds. It demands autonomous claims processing without human intervention. Legacy core systems—many built on COBOL decades ago—simply cannot deliver this.
So while the embedded market races toward $116+ billion, insurers with inflexible infrastructure are locked out of the fastest-growing distribution channel in the industry.
The Question Every Insurance Executive Should Be Asking
We've spent months researching what separates insurers who thrive in this environment from those falling behind. The patterns are clear—and perhaps surprising.
It's not about replacing your core systems. The insurers making the fastest progress aren't waiting for multi-year transformation programs to complete.
It's not about hiring more developers. In fact, the most agile insurers are reducing IT dependency for business logic changes.
And it's not about becoming an insurtech. Traditional insurers have advantages—underwriting expertise, capital, customer trust—that startups can't easily replicate.
The difference comes down to where decision logic lives and who controls it.
What We Cover in the White Paper
We've compiled our research into a comprehensive guide: "How to Be an Agile Insurer in 2026."
Inside, you'll find:
The three capabilities that define agile insurers — and a framework for assessing where your organization stands today.
The real economics of modernization — including the math on why claims processing costs can drop from $35 to under $0.10, and what that means for product profitability.
A complete case study of parametric flight delay insurance — from architecture to execution, showing exactly how automated decision chains work in practice.
The "agility layer" approach — how to gain flexibility without replacing core systems, with concrete integration patterns and timelines.
Regulatory readiness for AI governance — why externalized decision logic makes EU AI Act and NAIC compliance dramatically simpler.
The insurers who act on this information in 2026 will build competitive advantages that compound over time. Those who wait will find the gap increasingly difficult to close.
How to Be an Agile Insurer in 2026
David Skarka
Enterprise Solution Architect