Future Predictions Steer Insurers Toward Business Growth Models

In 1936, U.S. Olympian Jessie Owens brought home four gold medals in track and field. Before the opening of the games, a young German inventor and shoe manufacturer, Adi Dassler, convinced Jessie to wear athletic shoes that he and his brother Rudolf had designed specifically for high-performance events. Little did the brothers understand how they were reinventing sports business models from the “outside” through partnerships.

It’s 2026. Adidas (founded by Adi Dassler) is now responsible not just for supplying gear to sports teams but for helping them increase revenue. For the Winter Games in Milan/Cortina, Adidas supplied apparel for Team Great Britain, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Ethiopia, Ireland, Bahrain, Cuba and Turkey in deals estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The International Olympic Committee also received over $350M in athletic-wear merchandising income from all brands.

In soccer, teams like Real Madrid, Manchester United and Inter Miami wear Adidas shoes, uniforms and other apparel — and realize 40% or more of team income from “merch.” Teams that once asked, “Where do we get our equipment?” now ask, “Which partner will help us grow?”

In insurance, we often speak in terms of ROI. Which technology and business model changes pay off? But how can we prioritize our ROP — return on partnerships? Talent partners, vendor partners, financial partners and certainly insurance partners, such as brokers and MGAs, can make insurance business models work — and even recreate them in surprising ways.

In Majesco’s recent webinar, 2026 Trends Vital to Compete and Accelerate Growth in a New Era of Modern Insurance, we had a round-table discussion including some of today’s most sought-after industry experts. We covered Part 1 of this conversation in a recent blog, Moving the Needle: Sparking Non-Incremental Change in Insurance Technology Solutions. In Part 2, we’ll look closely at how technology and business models are affected by the state of the insurance business today — with pointers on how insurers can react wisely and prepare effectively.

Our conversation included:

Myself, Denise Garth, Chief Strategy Officer, Majesco
Rob McIsaac, President and CEO at RPM Ventures NC, LLC
Lisa Wardlaw, President and Founder, 360 Digital Immersion
Jim DeMarco, Insurance Advisory Lead and WWFSI Insurance Strategy Lead, Microsoft

Denise Garth
Our first topic is Insurtech Zombies — a view of the status of Insurtech companies.  We are 10+ years into Insurtech and we’ve seen it evolve. But the pace of change and economic dynamics has accelerated that change. It’s no longer like 3-5 years ago, lots of money flowing in and growth at any cost. There has to be some element of profitability. There have to be good, strong business metrics.

Do you think the Insurtech model is broken? Does it require a better economic awareness and a better understanding of Insurtech value for insurers regarding what Insurtechs provide?

Rob McIsaac
The world is changing around some of this. The Insurtech and Fintech emergence more than a decade ago was a very exciting time in terms of the ability to try and move quickly, break things, learn new things, and bring capabilities to market.

In today’s world, interest rates and economic headwinds are different. There is a lot of uncertainty in business right now.

We’ve learned that when you look at venture capital or private equity investments in startups, you know there is an effort to get them up and running and moving forward. But there’s always an exit at the end of that, where the company will wind up in someone else’s portfolio. What impact does this have on insurers?

Insurers certainly need to understand technology road maps, but as a carrier or as a potential buyer of things, insures need to understand the ownership road map, because as we look at the number of participants in any particular carrier ecosystem, there can be significant challenges that come from a surprise transfer of ownership or surprise failure of an entity or when a competitor buys something you considered to be important what you were doing.

Innovation is still crucial, but I think it’s going to be different going forward.

It may well be that we see M&A consolidation in the insurance technology realm, because there is a stability that’s implied by some of the more mature companies that carriers may want to deal with — managing the risk of relationships. Insurers will need to do more than they’ve done historically around understanding how contracts are developed and what happens with change in control language when it is built into those contracts.

Denise Garth
And to go even further with that, there are multiple layers to ownership risk. In some cases, the companies bought by VC and private equity firms didn’t necessarily have the level of profitability needed to invest back into the business. This holds true, not just for startup Insurtechs, but established Insurtechs. Inability to invest in the technologies of the business can be problematic given the pace of change.

For insurers who might be looking to partner with tech companies for support or to even run part of their business, what kind of operational or strategic risk do you think they are facing?

Jim DeMarco
One of the risks has to do with the way the technology itself has evolved. The barrier to entry for Insurtech or for any sort of fintech has declined dramatically. We now have the ability to say “because we have some technology around agents, or because we’ve created interoperability with MCP, and we’ve made service-oriented architecture actually a real thing, now I can plug in something small and have it go big.” Those capabilities have changed the economic model. It is a disadvantage to the earlier Insurtechs, because they built before this infrastructure was available.

A good example of this is in the RE business. Some companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building fantastic placement models in the RE business. In the last six months, other companies have spent less than $4-$5 million replicating that exact same capability with much smaller teams in a much more agile way, utilizing today’s interoperability.

We’re now seeing people able to plug in, provide very crisp value, with very small “agents that do x” that fit into a process or reinvent the process. But who will be aggregating those small pieces to create more of a framework approach? This could cause a change in how capital markets approach Insurtechs.

Denise Garth
So, should insurers re-evaluate how they go about the selection process? Perhaps it’s not about how pretty the screens are or the feature functions.There may be some more fundamental issues that have to come into play.

Lisa Wardlow
Let’s think about it from a CFO procurement perspective.

First, consider the engine that has been rewarding Insurtechs. It is predominantly VC backed. In a VC backed model, these tech companies had been told to “Go full-stack.”

Let’s imagine that a geospatial Insurtech has included in their solution every function from A to B, all the way up to the UI. They have geocoding in there. It’s complete. Now, let’s say that as a carrier, I need bits and bots of 10 of these incremental-type solutions to get to my needed end solution. I still have to be the Lego master and assemble the little bricks and blocks. The problem is that every single one of these 10 solutions that I need has geocoding in it. They all have some form of data “denormalization.” They all have a UI. From a CFO perspective, I’m carrying a duplicative load.

I need to strip out all of their UI layers, because most of this is going in a pipe (and, after all, how many user interfaces can we have people into when we’re running a carrier?) So to get to what I need, I have to strip off the top, then clear the redundancy out of the middle and bottom layers.

It is counterintuitive to what these insure techs have the agility to do and the VC backing to do. They hypothetically want to sell this little widget for hundreds of thousands of dollars to thousands of carriers in order to make their massive valuation. The economic model of the Insurtech doesn’t match the economic value to the insurer.

To make this work, Insurtechs and insurers either need a wholesale model, where insurers can buy the part, not the whole and do a heck of a lot of work synthesizing and doing what I just articulated,  or, (I’ll leverage this because we’re on a Majesco webinar) they will need a company like a Majesco to integrate those widgets for them.

Denise Garth
We’ve discussed the operating model, the technology foundation, some of the risks and metrics. How do we put together the picture of what the business of insurance truly is today? Is it asset management? Is it about the products? Is it about the customer? Is it about the agents or the distributors? Is it about risk management? Is it distribution-focused? Which of those are going to really define the growth?

Lisa Wardlow
If we step out of the tactical things that we do in insurance, I really think it’s no longer about policies, premiums or risk transfer. I believe it is “decision execution under uncertainty at scale.” This means that we no longer sell products; we operate judgment.

Jim DeMarco
I’d say if you want to see where the direction of the business insurance is always good to watch what the brokers are doing. The brokers are shifting focus in a number of different ways. We’re seeing more and more emphasis put on risk planning and risk prevention, the kinds of things we tried in the 90s, but were unsuccessful with it.

As insurers, we’re once again seeing this idea of risk mitigation. We’re seeing it in everything from cyber to catastrophe risk. And from there, if we start looking at this sort of prudent use of risk planning — that shift in the business will actually fundamentally change how insurers look at the value prop as well.

In most insurance lines, we are going to see an interaction between planning and planning tools (A lot of that coming from AI) together with good strong advisory services to rethink about the prevention and the mitigation of risk and prudent judgment.

Rob McIsaac
Carriers and brokers need to look into the future. Life in the 2020s is very different than in previous decades. When I think about how family formations take place, how people will approach transit, how people will invest money — the past will not be a good predictor of the future.

If we understand how some of these demographic shifts and changes will play out, we’ll grasp insurance trends in a way we can respond with relevance.

Example: The average age of an insurance agent today is something on the order of 62. That’s not old, but consider that human beings tend to buy things from other human beings that are ±10 years of their own age. It can explain why (in some parts of insurance) the average customer base has been aging rather dramatically. How do we deal with this and other trends?

In upcoming decades, we will see a significant intergenerational wealth transfer take place. If insurers want to be a part of that, they need to understand how these changes are impacting consumers now and in the near future.

Denise Garth
I would like each of you to share your one bold prediction for 2026 and why that is.

Lisa Wardlaw
My 2026 prediction is insurance won’t be disrupted by new risk, it will be disrupted by how systems decide.

The biggest failures won’t come from underwriting. They’ll come from opaque automation and AI acting faster than governance can keep up.

The carriers that win won’t be the ones with the most pilots. They’ll be the ones who redesign their operating models so that risk is actually embedded in the execution layers. Decisions are reversible, and humans stay in the loop when outcomes are irreversible. By the end of 2026, the question won’t be, can AI help us? It will be, do we actually control how our systems act?

We have a lot of carriers ask, “How can I leverage technology to reduce my cost?, and the old adage still applies, “You cannot shrink to grow.”

The carriers who are saying, “I want to leverage AI just to lower my cost,” are going to miss the mark. They will see their share erode — not just their share relative to competitors, but their share across the value chain.

Demographics absolutely matter in this. Folks who are cutting off their young in order to serve their old will find themselves spending way more money five years from now than they did to get talent into the house. They will find themselves lacking understanding in the institutional knowledge as folks who are leaving their organization leave with no one to pick it up. My prediction for 2026 is that companies who come to us asking, “How do we eliminate jobs with AI,” or “How do we make ourselves more operationally efficient,” will be coming to others in 2027 asking how they grow their businesses again.

Rob McIsaac
AI is a very important technology, just as I thought the Internet was before that and the browser and the personal computer. But one of the realities that’s going to dawn in 2026 is that those who rush into AI without a really good understanding of governance and some of the foundational elements that are required to make it work will find themselves in the midst of cleanup efforts at some point.

Thinking about the incredible value that can be created from some of the new and emerging technologies is an appropriate thing to do. But setting the foundation and the governance — structuring things in such a way that you’re really able to capture value will be important.

Denise Garth
My bold prediction is…I think by the end of 2026, we are going to see the start of a number of companies that may not really be the names that you would expect, but that are actually doing some of the things that we talked about here on this panel — looking at the operating model and defining what they are as an organization, then starting to put that technology foundation in place to really drive growth.

These companies will be rethinking the business and the industry as a whole. By the end of 2026 I think we’ll see lights of opportunity and lights of hope that we haven’t seen before.

Thanks once again to our panelists for this forward-thinking and insightful conversation! Stay on top of insurance tech trends with Majesco webinars, including our upcoming look at The Frontier Insurer.