Pulse Check – State of the European Insurance Industry 2024
Digital maturity and operational resilience will continue to be top priorities for European insurers in the coming years.
Rise above market pressures to position yourself for the new future.
Insurance companies are facing many headwinds -– low investment portfolio returns, stagnating premium growth, rising costs, operational inefficiencies, insurtech-driven startups, and a hybrid, globally distributed, workforce.
ISG’s insurance practice specializes in business-technology strategies, partner-ecosystem advisory, cost optimization, modernization, IT, digital and cloud transformations.
We work with Life and Annuity (L&A), Property and Casualty (P&C), and Reinsurance companies. Our advisors cover quote to claim. We have advised in new business, underwriting and claims management, as well as policy administration that includes
provider and platform selections. We have supported insurers with operating model review and redesign, outsourcing and offshoring, and infrastructure consolidation.
ISG is a leader in providing partner-ecosystem advisory and benchmarking services to guide our clients to successfully bid, negotiate or renegotiate contracts. With the emergence of digital technologies, we created our robust sourcing methodology to help you achieve appropriate vendor/provider relationships to address newer business and IT models, such as Agile, DevOps and AI. Plus, our tools can help you manage your ongoing third-party relationships and risks.
ISG maintains up-to-date information about emerging technologies from diverse sources, including directly from top business process, technology, TPA (third-party administrator), insurtech and platform suppliers. This enables us to provide deep, unbiased insights about supplier partnerships for automations, transformations, and traditional, outcome-based or futuristic partner models.
We are prepared to invest toward the success of our clients. With ISG, you can identify the root causes of cost, productivity and service quality issues, and design a roadmap to achieve excellence and sustainable results.
ISG's recent study on the insurance industry shows insurers are focusing on profitability over growth.
AI investment is accelerating, but results remain uneven. Only one in four initiatives is meeting revenue impact expectations, at an average spend of $1.3M per use case. Enterprises are no longer asking whether AI works. They are being asked to prove that it pays.
We help you identify where AI agents deliver the most value, restructure workflows around them and build the accountability models that keep autonomous execution auditable. The enterprises that win won't be the ones that reacted. They'll be the ones that designed for it first.
We give enterprises transparent, benchmarkable pricing models that tag each resource unit with the autonomy level used to deliver it. As AI capability advances, your pricing keeps pace. Both buyers and providers can quantify what that progress is worth.
We bring analysis of more than $2.6 billion in tracked AI spend to every sourcing decision. Procurement, technology and finance leaders get the independent intelligence to rationalize vendor portfolios and hold providers accountable to measurable outcomes.
We embed controls at the point of data creation, define accountability for autonomous actions and build adaptive frameworks that keep pace with AI without impeding it. Enterprises that get this right don't just manage risk. They build the trust that lets them scale faster.
We ground strategy in research across 2,400 enterprise use cases, aligning investment to where impact is proven and designing the data, talent and governance foundations that move AI from pilots into the workflows that drive commercial results.
We benchmark your AI readiness against peers across 75 countries, identify the dimensions holding you back and give you a personalized roadmap to close the gap.
AI investment is shifting decisively toward revenue-generating functions. CRM automation, sales enablement and forecasting have replaced chatbots and IT productivity tools as the leading use case priorities, reflecting enterprise recognition that productivity gains alone do not satisfy board-level scrutiny. At the same time, use cases in production have doubled since 2024, and the portfolio is diversifying rapidly, with over 300 distinct function and industry-specific use cases now in active deployment.
ISG research across 2,400 enterprise use cases shows that the strongest AI returns are currently concentrated in compliance, risk management and quality control, not in the growth and cost outcomes most enterprises originally set out to achieve
The gap between where enterprises are investing and where AI is actually delivering is the defining commercial tension of 2025. Organizations that close it by targeting functions with structured, revenue-attributable data and clear ROI measures will establish performance benchmarks that compress the window for competitors still cycling through pilots. The standard is being set now.
ISG is a leader in proprietary research, advisory consulting and executive event services focused on market trends and disruptive technologies.
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Learn MoreThe global insurance industry is at a pivotal juncture, driven by economic volatility, evolving policyholder expectations, regulatory changes and potential AI innovations. Insurers are navigating a landscape that demands agility, personalization and operational excellence. The increasing number of digital-native consumers, climate-related risks and cybersecurity threats are reshaping traditional business models, compelling insurers to rethink their enterprise designs and core strategies.
Digital engineering has become the core capability that helps incumbent insurance enterprises modernize legacy systems, accelerate innovation and deliver seamless policyholder experiences across multiple channels. As these enterprises face growing competition from insurtech, neo insurers and digital insurers, shifting policyholder expectations and increasing regulatory complexities, digital engineering services offer the technical architecture, development expertise and operational frameworks needed to transform outdated monolithic systems into flexible, cloud-native, API-driven ecosystems. This change goes beyond technology; it involves fundamental shifts in how insurance organizations design, develop, deploy and maintain digital tools that are increasingly essential for staying competitive.
The insurance industry is facing its most significant technological transformation since the onset of digitization. GenAI and Agentic AI fundamentally reimagine the way insurance carriers, brokers and managing general agents (MGAs) operate, engage with customers, assess risk and deliver value. These technologies have matured from experimentation stage into production-ready platforms, reshaping the insurance competitive landscape.
Amid economic volatility, ongoing inflation, talent shortage, technological changes and rising competition, incumbent insurance enterprises encounter unprecedented challenges that demand both cost optimization and capability growth. In this environment, providers offer models such as build-operatetransfer (BOT), build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT), build-operate-transform and transfer (BOTT), capability center as a service (CaaS) or global capability centers (GCCs) as distinctive solutions. These models represent structured approaches, delivering both short-term and operational gains alongside long-term strategic benefits, effectively addressing the complex, and sometimes conflicting, needs of insurers.
Struggling to create a seamless shift between voice and non-voice channels? Seeking omnichannel support to improve customer service? Learn about the capabilities of top customer experience and digital operations providers globally.