Many brokers see technology and automation as the biggest disruptive force of the next decade but industry surveys, including in Australia and the United States, show that only just over half feel prepared, exposing a tech readiness gap that is now visible in every major insurance market. It’s not confined to any one region or distribution model: whether it’s the UK’s relatively mature commercial e-trade ecosystem, fast-flow SME trading in parts of APAC, or more bespoke middle‑market placement in North America, the same tension keeps surfacing.
Brokers are being asked to deliver faster answers, clearer status and more proactive risk guidance, while still operating through a patchwork of tools that rarely join up cleanly with insurer systems.
Roopa Malhotra (main picture), head of customer and digital, APAC at Zurich Insurance, puts the operational problem plainly.
“One of the biggest challenges brokers face is dealing with insurers tech readiness leading to fragmentation,” said Malhotra. “Many still work across disconnected systems or legacy platforms of insurers that don’t communicate, making it difficult to get a complete picture of client history, quoting progress, or claims updates.”
Most brokers are not resisting change but this fragmentation turns every transaction into a mini project — rekeying data, chasing updates, reconciling versions and explaining delays to clients.
That friction matters because client expectations are increasing globally. Whether a broker sits in Singapore, Sydney, London or New York, customers increasingly judge value by responsiveness and clarity across the full policy lifecycle, not just at placement. It also explains why the “tech gap” is often misdiagnosed. The real gap is not ambition versus inertia; it is the difference between technology as a set of point solutions and technology as a connected operating model.
Malhotra also observed that adoption is moving at different speeds even within the same region.
“From my vantage point in Singapore, digital transformation among brokers and intermediaries is progressing rapidly, but not evenly across the region,” she said.
This APAC situation mirrors what many global carriers quietly acknowledge elsewhere: digitisation tends to cluster where scale, infrastructure and standards make integration economically viable, while smaller intermediaries (and specialist lines) remain stuck in manual handoffs.
This unevenness creates a subtle second-order problem: insurers can build digital journeys that look cutting edge in demos but still fail in the broker’s lived workflow.
“A key obstacle to better collaboration is system integration and compatibility on both sides,” said Malhotra. “Many smaller brokers rely on legacy or manual systems, while some insurers, too, may develop digital tools without fully considering integration with the diverse platforms that brokers use.”
The industry can spend heavily and still end up with “swivel-chair integration” — multiple screens, duplicate data entry, mismatched status updates and the familiar black hole between quote, bind, endorsements and claims.
That is why the most meaningful digital initiatives today are increasingly defined less by “launching a platform” and more by compressing the number of steps (and systems) required to transact.
Zurich’s own approach in parts of its SME trading stack illustrates the direction of travel: its Z.stream platform in New Zealand positions itself around full lifecycle functionality—“Quote, bind, endorse and renew functionality 24/7” with tailored question sets and auto-generated documents.
The strategic prize, Malhotra argues, is shared capability rather than parallel capability where insurers and brokers are working more closely together – moving beyond transactional interactions.
“The most effective partnerships are those where both sides can access the same tools, insights, and customer view, rather than working in parallel.” That “same tools and same view” framing is the clearest signal that the old portal era is fading. Brokers don’t want another destination; they want fewer gaps in the process.
What some carriers are trying to do is narrow that gap by reducing the amount of “dead work” that sits between a broker’s workflow and an insurer’s workflow. In practice, that often shows up as a push for broader end-to-end digital trading for simpler risks, alongside attempts to make insurer tools easier to access through the systems brokers already use.
Allianz, for example, pitches QuoteSME as “full cycle,” saying it allows brokers to “quote, buy, amend and renew” online. It also notes brokers can access e-trade products “through imarket” or via “software houses,” which reads as an acknowledgement that forcing intermediaries into yet another standalone portal can create as many problems as it solves.
AIG uses similar language for its SME proposition in the UK, describing AIG eXtra as a “full-cycle e-trade platform” and saying brokers can “quote and bind SME business.” It also points to continuing investment to place products onto Acturis, a practical distribution choice given how embedded Acturis is in day-to-day broking operations.
None of this guarantees a smoother experience, particularly once a risk falls outside these fast-flow rules, or where local data requirements force additional manual checks. Even “full-cycle” can mean different things in different markets — brokers tend to judge it less by the label than by how often a transaction still drops out of the digital track.
Another strand of carrier digitisation leans more on broker portals and their integration capability — building APIs, development environments and onboarding support so partners can connect insurance functions into their own customer journeys. Chubb has leaned into that developer story around Chubb Studio, including a portal designed to “make it easier” for partners to “access and test” its digital products and capabilities. For brokers, the relevance is indirect but real: the easier integration becomes for any distribution partner, the harder it is to justify high-friction processes elsewhere. Still, integration-led models come with their own barriers — technical capacity, governance, version control and the commercial reality that not every broker (or insurer) has the scale to make bespoke connectivity pay.
Then there’s the less glamorous work that brokers often feel most sharply: fixing the core underwriting and policy issuance machinery so “digital” doesn’t stop at a polished interface. AXA XL’s adoption of Guidewire PolicyCenter was presented as a way to reduce manual processes and make it easier for brokers, with the system intended, according to a Guidewire press release, to “rate, quote, bind and issue policies.” That kind of core renewal matters because broker frustration frequently spikes at the edges — mid-term adjustments, documentation, referrals and anything even slightly non-standard. The caveat is that core modernisation programmes are long, expensive and risky and improvements can arrive unevenly by line of business, geography and complexity tier.
Stepping back, the market has not found a single winning formula but is experimenting, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, with different ways of reducing the friction. It's likely the broker–insurer “tech gap” persists not because either side lacks intent, but because connecting workflows across thousands of intermediaries, products and legacy stacks is slow work. The most credible progress can be where digitisation removes steps rather than adding destinations and where both sides can see the same transaction status without chasing it across email threads and disconnected systems.
