How Insurance Leaders Are Moving from Policy to Platform

CIOs across the insurance sector know what 2025 demands: deliver greater impact with tighter budgets and fewer resources. Underwriting sits right at the centre of this challenge. It affects profitability, customer experience, and risk exposure – but modernising it is rarely straightforward.

This piece explores why underwriting is critical to achieving your board’s top priorities – and how CIOs can modernise processes without overengineering solutions or breaking the bank.

Why Underwriting Is a Board-Level Concern in 2025

Modern underwriting is no longer confined to a back-office function. It’s now central to three of the top four business outcomes identified in Gartner’s 2025 CIO and Technology Executive Survey for insurance:

• Improving operating margins (96%)

• Ensuring compliance and minimising risks (92%)

• Generating revenue (92%)

CIOs are under pressure to digitise underwriting processes to improve speed, control, and insight. But most teams are still juggling a patchwork of tools – policy systems, spreadsheets, and manual handoffs – that struggle to keep up with demands for faster decision-making and real-time risk assessment.

The result? Delays, rework, exposure to audit risk, and friction across customer and broker touchpoints.

From Policy-Centric Systems to Decision-Centric Platforms

Traditional systems were built around policy records – not workflows. They store data but rarely support fast, flexible underwriting decisions.

Forward-looking CIOs are changing that. They’re shifting towards platform thinking, where underwriting becomes an orchestrated, cross-functional service – supported by shared data, modular workflows, and transparency across departments.

One UK insurer we worked with moved from static email threads and Excel trackers to a structured, configurable process built within their existing enterprise service tooling. The new flow spanned underwriting, finance, and legal – with real-time approvals, audit trails, and automated notifications.

The impact? Faster time-to-quote, fewer handoffs, and increased confidence in compliance.

The Missed Opportunity: Treating Underwriting as a Service

Too often, underwriting is seen as a siloed system to improve or replace. But reframing it as a service delivered across the business opens up a different set of tools.

By treating underwriting like a core business service – with defined workflows, SLAs, and service ownership – insurers can spot bottlenecks, automate common tasks, and involve non-technical teams in driving improvement.

It’s the same mindset shift that underpins Enterprise Service Management (ESM). In underwriting, it means risk teams can raise change requests to pricing logic, compliance teams can plug into decision chains, and operations teams can monitor cycle times – all without bespoke tools.

The best part? You don’t need to build it from scratch. Pre-configured templates and proven workflows can be tailored quickly to your organisation’s unique processes and product lines.

Common Pitfalls in Underwriting Modernisation

Many underwriting modernisation efforts fail to deliver because they:

• Focus on the tech instead of the workflow

• Leave underwriting teams out of the design process

• Over-customise, recreating the complexity they were trying to escape

• Miss the link to critical business outcomes like customer experience and margin

Without a structured, outcome-aligned approach, it’s easy to lose momentum – or worse, end up with another system no one wants to use.

What Good Looks Like in 2025

Modern underwriting platforms share a few key traits:

Cross-functional visibility – risk, compliance, legal and ops all see the same process
Actionable data – cycle times, SLAs, reasons for delays
Adaptability – changes to rules or logic flow into production fast
Governance – every decision is logged, traceable, and audit-ready
Business ownership – teams can request changes without an IT backlog

Some insurers are even starting to embed AI-powered agents to support human decisions – surfacing anomalies, highlighting missing data, or suggesting next steps. It’s not about replacing underwriters. It’s about giving them more leverage.

The CIO’s Underwriting Checklist

Before investing in new tools, ask:

• Can your teams suggest process changes without needing development resource?

• Is underwriting embedded into your broader enterprise service model?

• Do you have visibility into the underwriting journey across departments?

• Are you improving both speed and governance?

• Does your current platform help or hinder your compliance posture?

The Takeaway: Small Changes, Big Outcomes

Modernising underwriting doesn’t need to mean a full system overhaul. Often, the biggest gains come from structuring the work better, improving visibility, and connecting the right people to the right decisions – all with governance baked in.

It’s here that CIOs can make the biggest impact – enabling teams to do their best work with fewer barriers, and ensuring technology investments deliver on the outcomes that matter.

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