Policy systems got modernised. Claims got modernised. Reinsurance got left behind. Here's why.
Reinsurance is insurance for insurers – the layer that absorbs the biggest, rarest, most expensive risks. It's also the most under-digitised corner of the whole industry. Most of it still runs on spreadsheets, email, and PDFs passed between brokers, cedants, and reinsurers.
Three reasons it lags:
1. Every deal is bespoke. A motor policy looks like a million other motor policies, so it's easy to build software around. A reinsurance treaty is negotiated line by line, with its own terms, exclusions, and structures. Hard to standardise means hard to automate.
2. The data is messy and shared. A claim lives inside one insurer's system. A reinsurance contract spans several parties, each holding a different version of the truth. There's no single place the data sits, so there's nothing clean to build on.
3. The volume is low, the stakes are high. Insurers process millions of policies, which makes automation pay off fast. A reinsurer might place a few hundred treaties a year – low volume, but each one carries enormous value. The business case for digitising slow, complex, high-value work has always been harder to make than for fast, repetitive, low-value work.
So the corner of insurance that handles the largest risks is the one still running on the oldest tools. That's the gap. And it's exactly where the next wave of value is hiding.
Do let me know your thoughts on it. Will be happy to discuss.
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