Technology has rewritten the playbook for commercial insurance - and the shake-up is far from over. Modular infrastructure, agile pricing tools, and AI-driven underwriting are no longer future bets but current necessities. But for Farah Ismail (pictured), head of commercial lines at WTW, the next two years will test how well insurers can break from legacy models without compromising compliance or customer trust.
“Technology is drastically changing the insurance marketplace,” Ismail said. “It’s really affecting how insurers go to market and how they’re actually just setting up their ecosystem, setting up their architecture.”
The shift isn’t just about introducing new tech, she warned. It’s about how seamlessly it’s integrated into workflows and, more importantly, how effectively teams actually use it. “It’s not just about making sure that you have the technology, but it’s that your users are actually able to use it in an effective way,” she explained.
The trend toward modular system design is gaining traction as insurers try to stay responsive in a volatile risk environment. A flexible setup allows firms to adopt new technologies without overhauling their entire operation. But that flexibility must be backed by strategic intent.
“You have to make sure that you’re actually addressing the right pieces,” Ismail said. That means aligning architecture with business use cases - not tech for tech’s sake. And while agility is key, regulation can’t be sidelined. “The compliance part is incredibly important... so that you're able to make changes to your systems... without completely disrupting your regulations and your compliance,” she said.
Her prescription? A phased approach. “Start [with] core systems and make sure that you have that modular response... without disrupting all of your compliance requirements,” Ismail said.
As insurers overhaul their operations, not every part of the business is moving at the same speed. According to Ismail, underwriting and pricing remain at the top of the transformation agenda - claims, however, still trail behind.
“Whenever I’ve spoken to carriers, the prioritization that I’ve heard is very much underwriting, pricing and then claims,” she said. That’s not due to a lack of importance - it's because claims transformation is harder to quantify in business terms. “It just doesn’t seem to get as much emphasis, at least in the beginning stages, because it’s so hard to quantify and to make that business case,” she explained.
But the payoff, she argued, could be significantly higher. “Claims can get double-digit loss ratio improvements... underwriting models are probably 3-5%,” Ismail said. “It’s really getting folks to spend the time and effort on the claim side so that they can use the analytics more efficiently and actually dig in to all those benefits.”
The challenge is not just technical - it’s cultural. Without a shift in mindset, even the most advanced platforms won’t deliver. “You have to be able to change the mindset so that folks are actually using it effectively,” she said.
Looking beyond operational efficiency, Ismail sees one of the biggest opportunities for AI in custom product development - especially in commercial lines. “In the personal line space, there’s a lot of modular designs... but in the commercial line space, it tends to be very specific product driven,” she explained.
That specificity has made it harder for commercial insurers to keep pace with evolving customer needs. AI can help fill that gap - literally. “AI can be used to identify where those gaps are, and to develop new products to fill some of those gaps,” she said.
Still, she cautioned that AI alone is not a silver bullet. It needs to be deployed within a broader infrastructure that understands market conditions and can bring new products to market at scale. “It can’t be done alone,” Ismail said. “You really do need it with all of the surrounding infrastructure, knowing the market and understanding how folks are going to use it effectively.”
