Advice, not access, is set to define the next phase of insurance innovation, according to Bryan Davis (pictured), president of VIU by HUB, who argues that technology now makes meaningful guidance viable in parts of the market where it had previously been uneconomic.
For years, the industry has poured energy into fixing the mechanics of buying coverage while skirting the harder task of delivering informed judgment at scale. Davis is blunt about why that gap persisted, pointing out that “in the personal lines, small transactional lines, insurance space, the economics haven’t been there for a broker to really focus on advising clients,” he said, and that basic constraint has left many brokers leaning on call centers and outbound campaigns that customers ignored, creating a service model that felt out of step with how people made decisions in the rest of their financial lives.
He argues that the baseline has already shifted toward seamless fulfilment, where brokers are expected to deliver journeys that “look more Amazon-like, look more like e-commerce,” he said, and where clunky processes are no longer tolerated by consumers and small business owners who assume speed, transparency, and choice. At VIU, that expectation has driven investment in tools that create “an effortless experience that’s not constrained by traditional insurance,” he said, while the team tries to avoid the trap of turning brokers into digital order takers and walking away from the advisory value that is supposed to set them apart from direct channels and aggregators.
In Davis’s telling, the real contest now plays out on the advising side of the value chain, where digital channels finally allow firms to interact with customers in ways that were “not invasive and are cost-efficient,” he said. That shift makes it more realistic to offer tailored guidance to personal lines and small commercial clients who had previously seen little more than transactional touchpoints and renewal notices, yet it also demands far more discipline about where firms choose to differentiate.
Leadership teams, he suggests, can no longer spread scarce technology resources across every part of the stack without consequence. Instead, they need to be precise about where they try to stand out and where they simply need to keep pace, because the old habit of building everything from scratch in a fast-moving market has become a reliable way to end up with slow delivery and indistinguishable products that fail to move key metrics.
Davis frames that choice through a business‑architecture lens that separates capabilities where a firm wants to be distinctive from those that just need to be competitive, saying “where we want to be differentiated, we try to own that development ourselves and create our secret sauce,” he said. Areas considered table stakes or merely leading, he added, could sit on top of partners that bring scale and speed without diluting the core proposition, and that thinking underpins what he described as a “build-buy-ally type approach,” he said, designed to keep the platform open to outside innovation while staying hard‑nosed about which components earn internal engineering effort.
Even in strategically critical domains, he argues that partnership could be the difference between ideas that stay on paper and products that actually reach customers. “I like to say, we’re a brokerage, we’re not Google,” he said, and in practice that means combining VIU’s insurance expertise with external strengths in data and engineering so that, as he put it, “that combination could create something that is unique and disruptive,” he said, and allowed the firm to move at a pace that better matches markets which are not waiting for incumbents to catch up.
If architecture and tooling shape the pace of change, Davis is clear that they still sit behind leadership and culture in deciding whether transformation sticks. He argues that organizations need leaders who know “how to set environment, processes, and controls,” he said, and who can work more like digitally native firms that operate on frameworks such as OKRs rather than legacy command structures that drag decisions across multiple committees.
He stresses that effective leaders in this period have to act as bridges across generations and disciplines, warning that “you can’t just go hire a Gen Z-er who doesn’t understand this other generation,” he said, because the real work lay in building environments where engineers, underwriters, salespeople, and marketers challenge one another while staying anchored to revenue and client outcomes. For senior teams wrestling with transformation agendas, he believes the most uncomfortable issue is no longer which platform to install or which vendor to back but, as he put it, “what type of leadership do I need to have effective transformation?” he said, since without that answer even sophisticated tools end up in the hands of teams that could “come up with some cool things, but it doesn’t sell anything,” he said, and leave organization's no closer to the advice‑driven model that technology is supposed to unlock for clients in the first place.
