The insurance technology vendor market is no longer the place where insurance technology innovation happens. There, I've said it.
For the first time in my career, my direction of travel has been wavering. The support for innovation that I had come to expect from vendors simply is not there any more.
That is not a complaint. It is just a reality for both me, and them. It ended because two things happened at the same time.
The money changed hands
The meaningful vendors are now overwhelmingly held by private equity. Sapiens to Advent. Duck Creek to Vista. Majesco to Thoma Bravo. Same story, pretty much across the board. Each transaction concluded with a fund whose return profile demands harvest, not invention. Margin expansion, predictable cash flow, and an exit window that closes well before the next generation of the platform needs to ship.
This is not a London Market quirk. It is not a slight on the market's vendors. The same pattern plays out in Bermuda, North America, continental Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Across other SaaS vendors outside of those markets too. It is the disruptor's disruption. The same ownership model produces the same product behaviour, regardless of geography or line of business.
AI became a cost play, not an innovation play
The market assumption is that AI is accelerating vendor innovation. The reverse is happening.
Inside a PE-owned vendor, AI is a margin lever. It shows up as implementation cost takeout, support automation, and productised copilots priced as upsell. Not real innovation. Not innovations that are truly going to support carriers in a softening market.
Where is the use of AI for good? Where is the AI that genuinely helps carriers reason about risk, that accumulates institutional intelligence, that compounds across the underwriting cycle? It is not there. It is merely good for margin.
Do not believe me? Ask your vendor. You will get one of two answers: first, “our roadmap is determined by what you want.” Second, “we are innovating in AI,” and then either they cannot express exactly how, or they articulate low-level, low-value operational enhancements.
For me personally, this is exasperating. As someone who has spent years dragging vendors forward, this is a slow and painful death. Worse still, it does not blooming help the market, and that frustrates me, irks me at my core. I want to help people, companies, markets.
No one is coming to help the market. They are there to help their PE owners.
Who is coming to help? Certainly not the established vendors.
So who will?
I will.
What comes next
The consequence is another decade of carrier dependence on platforms that have stopped evolving. That is happening at precisely the moment the softening cycle makes platform decisions most consequential.
The vendors will not save them. The vendors are not built to.
I have spent twenty-five years transforming vendor platforms for innovation to now stifle & die.
So now I am building a practice dedicated to helping you innovate, on the carrier side of the table, in-house. Specialising in the Insurance markets. Transformative, Innovative, Tangible, Ready.
Using AI appropriately and not as a plaster for margin.
Announcement tomorrow. Follow along with my mission.