Where is specialty insurance headed in 10 years? (369)

InsTech - insurance & innovation with Matthew Grant & Robin Merttens

InsTech

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.8 • 50 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What will the specialty insurance market look like a decade from now? Will we still be talking about legacy systems and manual processes, or will the model itself have changed? In this panel discussion from InsTech’s Outpace. Outprice. Outperform event, Robin Merttens leads a conversation with four senior experts on the future of the market and the forces that could reshape it. Featuring: Paul Carroll, Editor-in-Chief, Insurance Thought Leadership Toby Kovacs, Account Director, Google Cloud Andy Yeoman, CEO and Co-founder, Concirrus Tracie Thompson, Global Head of Strategic Clients, Cytora Together, they examine how emerging technologies, shifting client expectations and economic realities are pushing the market to rethink long-held assumptions about distribution, underwriting and talent. In this conversation, the panel explores: Whether brokers, underwriters and annual renewals will still have a role How capital and distribution are bypassing traditional intermediaries Why outsourcing is being redefined in the age of AI The impact of legacy behaviours, not just legacy systems How new models of work and regulation are influencing transformation Whether the protection gap is closing — or widening If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn. Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning. Continuing Professional Development This InsTech Podcast Episode is accredited by the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). By listening, you can claim up to 0.5 hours towards your CPD scheme. By the end of this podcast, you should be able to meet the following Learning Objectives: Describe how AI and automation are reshaping the boundaries of outsourcing in specialty insurance. List the key areas of the insurance value chain likely to undergo transformation in the next 10 years. Measure the potential impact of continuous underwriting and data-driven models on policy efficiency and pricing accuracy. If your organisation is a member of InsTech and you would like to receive a quarterly summary of the CPD hours you have earned, visit the Episode 369 page of the InsTech website or email [email protected] to let us know you have listened to this podcast. To help us measure the impact of the learning, we would be grateful if you would take a minute to complete a quick feedback survey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome or welcome back to the Instech podcast, Zoya here, and this week's episode
0:14.8	comes to you from our outpace, outprice and outperform event at Google's office in New York
0:20.2	earlier this summer.
0:21.7	This was one of the sessions in the latter half of the day and one of the most thought-provoking.
0:26.4	We called it the future of specialty insurance, but really it was a frank conversation
0:30.5	about how much change we can really expect in the next 10 years and how much might stay stubbornly
0:35.8	the same. Robin was joined on stage by Paul Carroll
0:39.0	at Insurance Thought Leadership, Toby Kovacs at Google Cloud, Andy Yeoman at Cinsiris and Tracy Thompson
0:46.2	at Zitora. Between them, they bought perspectives from reinsurers, tech giants, MGAs and the
0:51.8	boardroom, but also a healthy dose of realism and a few great
0:55.1	one-liners. Together they tackled some big questions, including will we still be blaming
1:00.6	legacy tech in 10 years or will we be the legacy tech?
1:04.0	Is this the beginning of the end for business process outsourcing?
1:07.5	Will brokers get closer to capital or were capital bypass brokers entirely? Do we
1:11.5	really still need annual renewals? And what happens when 60% of today's underwriters retire? Will
1:17.7	the robots step in? Are we still a long way away from that future? It was a candid, sharp,
1:23.3	and occasionally controversial conversation and a great window into where specialty underwriting
1:27.5	might be headed. So whether you're an optimist, a skeptic or just trying to stay ahead of the
1:32.4	curve, pull yourself a coffee and enjoy the conversation.
1:38.7	I did my first startup in 2000 and it was a sort of start of the internet as a business tool and I built a digital
1:48.6	trading platform and I asked myself the question how long before say the London insurance market
1:54.6	will trade digitally and I and I thought three five five, ten years,
	...

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