Insurance software solutions: 10 that beat legacy

Insurance software solutions are the platforms that run the core of an insurance business, from quoting and underwriting through to claims, billing and customer management. The gap between modern and legacy systems is now wide enough to decide who wins business.

Your legacy software costs more than the maintenance line in the budget suggests. The real bill is the work lost to competitors who can quote in seconds, settle simple claims in hours and launch products in weeks. This guide sets out the 10 capabilities a modern stack needs, what each delivers and how to judge whether a vendor is selling real modernisation or an old system on someone else's servers.

The capabilities split into two groups. The first five handle core processing: the policy, the money and the risk. The second five add the growth and governance layer: integration, finance, compliance, self-service and security. Each section pairs the function with data from the FCA, Lloyd's, and consultancies including McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, Bain and IBM.

The problemWhy legacy insurance software has become a liability

Most insurers spend the larger share of their technology budget keeping old systems alive rather than improving them. Industry benchmarking from Gartner and Deloitte puts maintenance at 60 to 80 percent of IT spend, which leaves little for the work that wins customers.¹

Deloitte's Tech Trends 2024 found that CIOs spend 10 to 20 percent of their budgets resolving issues tied to outdated systems, and that up to 70 percent of technology leaders see technical debt as a brake on innovation.² Old architectures also trap data in separate stores and resist integration, which makes joined-up service hard to deliver.

Expectations keep rising in the meantime. Bain & Company's loyalty research records insurance Net Promoter Scores improving by 10 to 30 percentage points over the past decade as digital service got better, so the standard for a good experience moves every year.³ A rigid back end makes that standard harder to reach.

Core processingThe foundational five

Five capabilities form the operating core. Genasys brings policy administration, claims and billing into one platform, so a change in one is reflected in the others without integration work.

1. Unified policy administration

A policy administration system manages the full life of a policy: product setup, quoting, issuance, mid-term changes, renewals and cancellation. It is the system of record that holds the definitive truth about who is covered, for what and on what terms.

Speed to market is where it pays back. McKinsey reports that one global property and casualty insurer brought new specialty products to market within three months after moving to a cloud-based policy administration platform.⁴

Configuration is what makes that possible. Gartner expects 70 percent of new applications to use low-code or no-code technology by 2025, up from less than 25 percent in 2020, which is what lets business teams change rates and rules without joining a development queue.⁵

2. Intelligent claims automation

Claims handling runs from first notification through to settlement. McKinsey's underwriting analysis finds that up to 95 percent of suitable policies can pass through straight-through processing with no manual involvement, which removes cost from every simple claim.⁶

The wider prize is large. McKinsey's 2026 analysis estimates generative AI could unlock 50 to 70 billion dollars of insurance revenue, with customer operations among the areas of greatest impact.⁷

Automating routine claims also changes the job. It frees adjusters to spend their time on complex, contested and high-value cases where judgement and negotiation decide the outcome.

3. Predictive underwriting

Underwriting is where risk is priced, and most of an underwriter's day is not spent on it. Accenture's research found the average underwriter spends about 70 percent of their time on non-underwriting work, including 40 percent on administration.⁸

McKinsey reaches a similar conclusion, putting administrative tasks at 30 to 40 percent of an underwriter's time in large commercial lines.⁹ A modern engine that applies rules and enriches data automatically gives that time back.

It also speeds the customer up. McKinsey's 2026 work describes AI cutting quoting times in commercial and specialty lines from two or three days to one or two hours.⁷

4. Customer 360 and CRM

A single customer view pulls policy, interaction and claims history into one place, so service teams can answer quickly and see the right moment to offer cover. Fragmented data makes consistent service across channels close to impossible.

The behaviour has already shifted. Bain & Company found that at digital leaders in motor insurance up to 61 percent of customers start a sales interaction through a digital channel, so the data behind that journey has to be unified.¹⁰

5. Cloud-native, API-first architecture

Cloud delivery is the foundation the other capabilities depend on. McKinsey values the cloud prize for insurance at 70 to 110 billion dollars of EBITDA by 2030, the highest of any sector it studied, and reports that cloud-native design can cut computing costs by 30 percent and deploy workloads up to 20 times faster.⁴

The industry has moved with it. Capgemini recorded the share of banks and insurers that had started their cloud journey rising from 37 percent in 2020 to 91 percent by 2023.¹¹ The test now is whether a platform is genuinely cloud-native or simply an old system rehosted.

Growth and governanceThe strategic five

The second group turns a working core into a competitive one. These capabilities cover how the platform connects, reports, complies, serves and protects.

6. Open APIs and microservices

Open APIs let a platform connect to brokers, data providers and distribution partners, and support models such as embedded insurance. They are how an insurer escapes the closed, proprietary design that made legacy systems so hard to change.

Real API-first design still sets a platform apart. Capgemini found that only 12 percent of financial services firms qualify as cloud innovators, so the claim is worth testing against working documentation rather than a sales sheet.¹¹

7. Financial, actuarial and reporting tools

Insurance finance is demanding. A modern platform consolidates policy and claims data to support reporting under Solvency II and IFRS 17, alongside the returns the FCA and PRA require, and replaces manual reconciliation that introduces error.

The barrier is usually fragmented data. Accenture's research describes underwriting information still siloed in spreadsheets and email attachments, which is the problem an integrated finance and reporting layer is built to remove.⁸

8. Regulatory and governance automation

UK regulation now sets a clear bar for core systems. The FCA's Consumer Duty, in force since 31 July 2023, requires firms to evidence fair value and good outcomes, which depends on data many legacy systems cannot easily produce.¹²

Resilience carries a deadline too. FCA and PRA operational resilience rules required firms to be able to stay within impact tolerances for their important business services by 31 March 2025, after the three-year transition closed.¹³

Lloyd's pursued the same data discipline through its Core Data Record, the ACORD-aligned set of fields captured at the point of bind. Lloyd's wound down the wider Blueprint Two programme in March 2026 in favour of incremental modernisation, but the case for clean, structured data at bind still holds.¹⁴

9. Omnichannel self-service

Brokers and policyholders expect to start on one channel and finish on another without repeating themselves. Portals and apps that draw on the same underlying data make that continuity possible, where siloed systems force a customer to start again.

The demand is well evidenced. Capgemini's Voice of the Customer surveys point to appetite for simple digital self-service on routine tasks, with human support held back for the complex cases that need it.¹⁵

10. Enterprise-grade security

Core systems hold sensitive personal and financial data, so security is a baseline, not a feature. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2024 put the average financial-sector breach at 6.08 million dollars, 22 percent above the cross-industry average and second only to healthcare.¹⁶

The same study found that organisations using AI and automation extensively across prevention spent 2.2 million dollars less per breach, so security design has a measurable return.¹⁶

By the numbersWhat modernisation is worth

The case for modern insurance software solutions rests on numbers from trusted sources rather than promises. These four anchor the argument.

MarketWhy this matters for MGAs and brokers

The UK Managing General Agent channel is growing fast, and it is technology that makes the growth possible. MGAA members underwrote 13.2 billion pounds of premium across 233 members in 2024, rising to more than 18 billion pounds across 249 members in 2025.¹⁷

That expansion runs on configurable platforms. Small teams launch and price products quickly when the software lets them, which is where modern insurance software changes the economics for an MGA or broker without a large IT function.

SelectionHow to evaluate insurance software

Choosing a platform is a decision you live with for a decade. Three areas separate a good fit from an expensive mistake.

Functional depth. Check the software supports your lines of business properly. A system built for personal lines may struggle with the complexity of commercial or specialty risk, so look closely at rating and workflow flexibility.

Technical foundation. Ask whether it is genuinely cloud-based and kept current by the vendor, or an old system hosted elsewhere. API-first design and proven security are not optional for anything you expect to last.

Delivery and skills. Weigh the vendor's track record and the expertise you hold in-house. Thin internal capacity is a common reason projects stall, so judge how much of that gap a vendor's training and configuration tooling closes.

Next stepsWhy now

The cost of standing still compounds. Every slow claim, every product delayed by an inflexible system and every customer lost to a faster rival is revenue the old stack is quietly giving away.

The technology is proven and the regulatory bar keeps rising. The open question for most insurers, MGAs and brokers is how much longer their core systems can dictate strategy rather than enable it.