Firms struggle to integrate with insurtech partners – Charles Taylor’s Jeremy Stevens

One of the biggest barriers to finding insurtech partners in the insurance industry is the disconnect between specialised and traditional operations and insurtech innovations. 

This is according to Jeremy Stevens, business line director for EMEA at Charles Taylor, who told Insurance Times that the search for the right insurtech partner is becoming as much a cultural and integrational challenge as a technological one.

This follows the publication of the Charles Taylor report From Legacy to Leadership: The Digital Journey of UK Insurer in September 2025, that revealed one in four (24%) of organisations struggle to identify suitable insurtech partners.

While there are insurtechs with sufficient understanding of the retail and finance sectors, Stevens explained that “there are less insurtechs that are from the insurance sector and that have insurance pedigree.”

He stressed that finding a partnership within a specific sector, for example fine artworks, further complicates the challenge as firms need to look for an insurtech with experience within that “particular niche sector” to deploy it.

He said: “You can [partner with] one of the huge American corporations and invariably if you wanted a data management system you could find one.

“But you then have to take that data management system and integrate it, deploy it and run it with an organisation that has ageing systems.”

The integration challenge

Based on a survey of 103 key decision makers in large insurance companies across the UK, Ireland and Channel Islands, the digital modernisation report also revealed that 46% have been experiencing three or more challenges in upgrading their legacy technology.

As a result, it highlighted that this integration barrier ”underlines the necessity for assistance in supporting insurers navigate the insurtech market”.

Speaking on the repercussions of this challenge to upgrade on finding an insurtech partner, Stevens explained that a traditional insurer would look at the innovation from insurtechs and “won’t quite know what to do” in terms of integration and deployment.

“It’s bridging that gap between the world of brilliant technology and the traditional insurance sector [as] there’s a lot of manual processes in some of the larger institutions here [that] haven’t changed for many years,” he continued.

“Especially in underwriting and claims, it’s very people-based. There’s a lot of trust on people knowing each other, so if [an insurtech] goes in and says this underwriting workbench platform is going to solve all of your inefficiencies [they’ve] then got to get that [into existing workflows].”