Consolidation. Compliance. The Cloud.
Across the life and health insurance sector, digital transformation is no longer a project. It’s a baseline expectation. As insurers navigate rising regulatory pressure, legacy constraints, and customer demands, three themes dominate the conversation: consolidation, compliance, and cloud migration.
Together, they’re reshaping how insurers operate, invest, and prepare for what’s next.
Consolidation Is Here
Fewer platforms. Fewer vendors. More pressure to integrate.
Insurers are moving away from fragmented systems and redundant tech stacks. The inefficiencies of managing multiple policy admin systems, manual processes, and siloed data are becoming too costly to ignore.
Globally, insurtech investment surged 90% in Q1 2025 alone, reaching USD 1.31 billion - much of it fuelling platform consolidation and AI-driven optimisation. Closer to home, New Zealand’s health insurers are under mounting pressure to streamline. Legacy platform exits like Bravura Talisman and the acquisition of closed books by Foundation Life are signals that simplification is accelerating.
Locally, the life insurance market now manages over 4.15 million policies, representing more than NZD 3.24 billion in premium value annually. Reducing tech sprawl is key to lifting efficiency and improving product time-to-market.
In practice, this means more than just reducing systems; it requires platforms that can span both legacy and modern policy types. Without that breadth, simplification can create blind spots.
Compliance Is Non-Negotiable
And it’s getting more complex.
Compliance continues to be a major driver of system change. Insurers face ongoing scrutiny and new standards that require policy-level detail, audit readiness, and stronger governance.
Internationally, regulatory technology (RegTech) is a growth sector, helping insurers embed real-time compliance at scale. In New Zealand, the pressure is equally intense – insurers must adapt to evolving reporting requirements while maintaining trust and transparency with advisers, customers, and regulators.
Manual compliance efforts not only increase cost and risk but also stretch internal teams. Platforms that provide audit-ready trails and automated rule enforcement are now essential – not a luxury.
In some cases, compliance automation has proven to be a quiet enabler, reducing operational noise and freeing teams to focus on value creation rather than retroactive fixes.
Cloud is Now the Default
The question is not why - it’s how.
Cloud-first strategies are no longer just about hosting or cost. They’re about agility. The ability to change product logic quickly. To integrate with adviser platforms or digital claims. To respond to regulatory shifts and customer needs without major rewrites.
Global data shows cloud infrastructure is one of the top three technology priorities for insurers in 2025, behind only AI and big data. In New Zealand, public cloud spend reached NZD 5 billion in 2024 and is projected to nearly double to NZD 9.6 billion by 2028, yet most organisations are still early in their maturity journey.
Those with deeper cloud maturity aren’t just running in the cloud; they’re designing around it. That includes rethinking how their platforms integrate, how updates are deployed, and how they manage product agility at scale.
Why This Matters
Policy administration is no longer just an operational concern. It’s where customer experience, compliance, innovation, and cost control intersect.
The insurers that are moving ahead are doing three things:
And behind those shifts are years of lessons about what works, what doesn’t, and what it really takes to move policy admin forward without leaving legacy value behind.