Sponsored content: Matt Wellman, senior director of enterprise accounts and insurer relationships at Applied Systems Europe, discusses how technology team demands can slow down growth
Ask most UK personal lines insurers where their growth strategy starts and the answer usually involves more brands, more distribution partners and more routes to market. Ask what’s getting in the way and the conversation turns to the cost and complexity of system integrations.
It’s a problem hiding in plain sight. Direct integrations have long been the standard model for connecting insurers with new distribution partners, but as demands on technology teams grow and market conditions tighten, that model is increasingly hard to sustain.
Where the pressure builds
The barriers aren’t always visible from outside. Cost and time are the obvious ones – building a bespoke connection with each partner requires development resources, testing cycles and ongoing maintenance that few teams can absorb.
A subtler pressure comes from IT prioritisation. When every integration competes for the same pool of resources, some lose out not for lack of commercial merit, but because the queue is too long.
For some insurers, it isn’t the initial build that’s the problem – it’s what comes after.
Maintaining live integrations, managing partner-side changes and handling testing when something breaks quietly consumes the capacity that could bring new relationships online.
Every new integration adds to the pool of systems needing monitoring and re-testing, so the opportunity cost of the next one keeps rising as resources stay tied up sustaining the last. Growth stalls and restarting gets progressively more expensive.
A commercial problem
The consequences extend well beyond IT. Resourcing constraints directly affect how quickly insurers can respond when a new brand or distribution opportunity arises. In a market where onboarding speed increasingly influences partner decisions, a slow integration process is a commercial liability.
Brands choosing which insurers to work with aren’t just comparing products and pricing – ease and speed of integration are factors in their own right.
If one insurer needs months of technical negotiation while another can go live in weeks, the choice may effectively be made before the commercial conversation begins. Every month spent building a bespoke integration is a month a competitor could use to win that same relationship, giving upfront delay a direct commercial cost.
An alternative
These challenges are driving growing interest in hub-based connectivity platforms. By connecting once to a shared ecosystem, insurers can distribute rates and products across a broad network of brokers and brands without managing individual point-to-point integrations.
Real-time rate distribution replaces the lag of monthly releases, helping insurers move faster and respond to pricing changes with greater agility.
The operational benefits are just as significant. Automated quote, bind and renewal workflows cut manual processing, freeing up resources otherwise tied up in maintenance.
Standardised data formats and built-in compliance tools bring consistency and auditability. A single connection can open access to a marketplace spanning dozens of insurers, MGAs and products, turning a lengthy, resource-intensive process into a scalable distribution strategy.
The upfront connection is a one-time investment. Because maintenance is centralised, the marginal cost of adding the next broker or brand is close to zero. Instead of opportunity cost climbing with every relationship, it flattens, freeing capacity for the next growth opportunity rather than defending the last one.
For insurers feeling the weight of the integration backlog, the question is no longer whether a connected platform model is worth exploring, it’s how many opportunities are being left on the table by not moving sooner.
