Photo: Smolaw11/Adobe Stock

Legacy technologies in insurance is stifling innovation as industry leaders admit to running core platforms that are nearly two decades old, according to a survey by West Monroe.

Fifty-four percent of insurers spend more than half their IT budgets just to keep systems running, the data showed, with 52% delaying or canceling two to three major tech projects last year because of budget constraints.

“Many insurers are still running core operations on COBOL—a language older than most of their customers,” West Monroe partner Peter McMurtrie told PropertyCasualty360.com.

“This dependency exposes a major contradiction. Organizations may have modern-customer facing experiences, yet their back-end processes remain anchored to aging infrastructure that limits scalability, agility and speed,” he said. “Modernization efforts cost money, and typically larger companies are better able to fund those large capital investments relative to smaller companies. But there are also a number of smaller, either regional or specialty carriers, that are industry leaders in this space as well. So it's not a broad categorization.”

Key takeaways from the West Monroe survey…

  • AI progress is stuck on the human side. When asked about the biggest barriers to AI adoption, insurers pointed to people—not technology with 24% citing resistance to change or cultural pushback.
  • GenAI pilots are growing, but scale is still out of reach. Nearly 60% of insurers have moved beyond initial pilots, yet most deployments remain small and siloed. Claims is leading the charge with 30% actively piloting GenAI tools—showing slightly more momentum than underwriting. Underwriting is close behind, with 27% still in proof-of-concept and 17% just beginning exploration.
  • Data Bottlenecks Are Slowing Critical Decisions. Forty-one percent lack real-time data access. Forty-eight percent report it takes 16 to 30 days to complete a rate indication assessment. Nearly half (46%) say it takes nine to 16 weeks to launch even a minor product update.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of insurers predict another three to seven years to move their core systems to the cloud, with 14% saying they have no timeline at all. At the same time, just 20% have defined a tech modernization strategy but made little progress, while 12% are still in early planning and 2% haven’t started.

“If you aren’t staying current, you're getting further and further behind, and it costs more to make the next leap,” McMurtrie said. “But it's really about whether you've been investing consistently in modernization and whether you have the profitability to continue doing so.”

NOT FOR REPRINT

© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.