In a nutshell
- 2026 is the year the industry shifts from pilots and promises to production, measurable outcomes and real operating leverage.
- AI, embedded insurance and orchestration move from experiments to engines that drive cost efficiency, new revenue and faster scale.
- Capital discipline reshapes the market with consolidation, tougher partnerships and a clearer path for the strongest players.
- Operational resilience becomes a differentiator – not just a regulatory box to tick, but a driver of trust, performance and customer experience.
Quentin Colmant is the CEO of Qover, which he co-founded alongside Jean-Charles Velge in 2016. Prior to launching the company, he had a successful career in the insurance industry, holding a series of top management positions at Allianz Benelux in both general and life insurance.
Quentin has an MBA and two Master's degrees: a Master's in Engineering Science & Applied Mathematics and a Master's in Finance.
The insurtech industry has spent the past few years experimenting: with AI, embedded insurance technology, new distribution models and operating setups.
If 2025 was about proving what works, 2026 will see that pay off.
Across the market, I see a clear shift underway. From pilots to production, from promises to measurable outcomes, and from innovation to real operating leverage.
The winners won’t be the ones with the best pitch decks. They’ll be the ones showing hard results.
With that in mind, here are my six insurtech predictions for 2026.
1. From copilot to autopilot: agentic AI becomes real operating leverage
Agentic AI didn’t make as much progress as I predicted for insurtech in 2025. But I’m back for another round. I’m saying it now: this is the year we move from experimentation to full operational impact.
In 2026, we’ll see real transformation in the operations of insurance, seeing real benefits of full automation, and hence significant operational cost decrease.
Here’s what we’re already seeing from using AI at Qover →
The architecture is changing. Instead of one monolithic assistant, insurers are deploying multi-agent systems – aka specialised agents for claims intake, fraud checks, customer communications, payments and recovery, all orchestrated through clear workflows.
Claims will be the first true autopilot domain. Agents will handle the full journey: intake, validation, triage and next-best action, with straight-through settlement for simple claims becoming the norm. Humans stay in the loop, but mostly for complex judgement, negotiations, high-severity cases or fraud.
The same shift will happen in customer care. The classic chatbot is fading away. In its place, resolution engines emerge. Agents that don’t just answer questions, but actually do things like policy endorsements, cancellations, mid-term changes and proof of insurance. All with guardrails, and human supervision when needed.
Customer communications will also scale up fast. AI drafts most routine claim and policy messages, while people focus on exceptions. When done well, this will improve clarity and empathy at scale, along with better service-level agreements.
Underwriting follows close behind. Submission autopilot becomes real, with agents ingesting broker and partner documents, enriching them with external data, flagging gaps and teeing up decisions. Underwriters focus on edge cases and portfolio intent, not data wrangling.
With all that said, I think we’ll see many ‘agentic’ projects fail. If the gains aren’t measurable, or the cost of making AI effective outweighs the problem size, they won’t survive.
In 2026, outcomes matter: days removed, leakage reduced, complaints down. Everything else is just noise.
2. Embedded insurance becomes a profit centre for banks and fintechs
For years, embedded insurance in banking was positioned as a loyalty perk, a nice extra, a packaged benefit.
Now, in 2026, banks and fintechs will start treating insurance as a real business line, with P&L ownership and growth targets. Protection becomes a product vertical with clear revenue targets – a strategic growth engine rather than just a retention tool.
This will have a variety of consequences down the line:
- Two-speed models crystallise. On one side, embedded, non-additional-cost (NAC) cover drives loyalty and reduces churn. On the other, transactional insurance drives margin and personalisation. The strongest banks will mix insurance models to improve margins and hyper-personalisation.
- Revenue models mature too. Commission-only economics give way to profit share, performance-based structures and portfolio-level deals. This leads to platforms being increasingly measured on loss ratio, service quality and complaints, not just volume.
- Insurance UX will become part of the core brand promise. Claims and servicing are no longer ‘someone else’s problem’. Platforms will have to invest in it because poor insurance experiences now hit churn and trust directly.
- Full lifecycle integration becomes table stakes, with winning programs connecting the entire flow: pricing, sale, servicing and claims – not just a checkout widget at the end of a journey.
- We’ll also see a clear shift in bargaining power. Insurers increasingly play the role of capacity and product factories, while platforms own distribution, data and the customer relationship.
- Finally, portfolio expansion wins. Platforms move beyond a single hero product into ladders – travel, device, purchase protection, mobility, SME and lifestyle – turning insurance into a cross-sell engine.
In the end, it’s about making sure that the value from bundled insurance flows back to bank customers through fair coverage, transparent design and benefits that are designed for your specific users.
3. Orchestration becomes the insurance operating system
This one might not come as a surprise. I’ve been singing the praises of embedded insurance orchestration for a while now, and 2026 is the year it stops being a technical choice and becomes a strategic one.
API-first, cloud-native, microservice-based architectures with AI embedded by design are no longer optional. They’re the only way to keep pace with partner distribution and market change.
Instead of shipping giant releases, insurers and insurtechs assemble reusable building blocks. That means the same customer journeys can be embedded across apps, channels and countries – while adhering to local insurance challenges – without rewriting everything.
Orchestration will also become the commercial product. We now see that brand partners don’t want ‘an insurer integration’. They want one contract and one API layer that can route to multiple capacity options.
With this type of modular orchestration platform, insurance product configuration evolves into a true product factory. Flexible coverage components and pricing rules allow rapid iteration and partner-specific tailoring without heavy code changes.
I predict that integration will become strategy, where governance, versioning and data contracts determine speed, reliability and partner trust.
This doesn’t mean that core legacy systems are ripped out. Rather, they’re wrapped in orchestration layers, where components can be progressively swapped out, reducing transformation risk.
See how insurance configuration works via an orchestration platform →
4. Capital discipline forces consolidation & reopens IPO path for top insurtechs
The funding environment keeps tightening. In 2026, ‘survive versus scale’ becomes binary.
Capital rewards clear paths to growth and profitability, while everyone else faces down-rounds, restructurings or sale processes.
Unit economics dominate the conversation: CAC payback, loss ratio control and measurable automation ROI will matter far more than innovation.
The impact is felt earliest at the top of the funnel, as CB Insights notes. With fewer funded experiments, fewer ‘nice-to-have’ propositions survive beyond seed stage. This will see a smaller number of categories attracting most of the attention.
At the other end of the spectrum, scale winners move to consolidate the value chain. Brokers, MGAs, platforms and carriers will use acquisitions to accelerate digital modernisation.
In that consolidation wave, technology platforms become the most attractive targets. Buyers want reusable infrastructure – API distribution, pricing and underwriting tech, claims automation – not single-product digital insurers.
As a result, I think strategic partnerships will also become tougher and more long-term by design. Capacity partners and distributors demand performance-based economics, auditability and operational resilience, leaving little tolerance for fragile vendors.
At the same time, the IPO window will quietly reopen for the very best insurtechs. A small number of leading insurtechs will start preparing public filings. Not many will make it there – but enough to signal that the next phase of maturity has begun.
5. DORA in practice: operational resilience becomes a differentiator
Even though DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) applied from the beginning of 2025, 2026 is when many companies will feel the ongoing supervisory cadence.
As a result, operational resilience will shift from a compliance exercise to a commercial differentiator. We’ve seen partners increasingly ask for proof before signing – controls, testing regimes and incident playbooks – especially in embedded and B2B2C models.
This will extend to board agendas as supervision becomes tangible through regular audits, governance, KPIs and remediation cycles. Major ICT incident reporting will also become a muscle – not just the ability to file reports, but to classify incidents consistently, escalate them quickly, run meaningful post-mortems and feed lessons learned back into change management.
That same mindset reshapes how testing is approached. Instead of annual audits and last-minute checks, resilience testing becomes continuous. Scenario testing and recovery drills become part of the operating rhythm rather than a year-end scramble.
As expectations rise internally, they also extend outward. Third-party risk turns into a contract negotiation battleground. Audit rights, subcontractor visibility, resilience-linked SLAs and credible exit plans become standard clauses.
Cloud concentration, meanwhile, is no longer theoretical but a regulatory and commercial reality. High-profile outages, like the two major Cloudflare crashes in 2025, remind everyone of the systemic risk of relying on a small set of providers. As a result, multi-region design and clear failover strategies become part of standard due diligence.
Ultimately, resilience shows up where it matters most: the customer experience. Faster recovery times and clearer incident communication reduce churn and complaints, turning operational strength into something customers can actually feel. In 2026, resilience isn’t just about compliance – it’s about trust.
How to tell if your insurtech partner is up-to-speed with data security measures →
Conclusion: what’s ahead for insurtech in 2026
2026 won’t be about bold claims, but about execution and tangible outcomes.
The players that win will be the ones turning technology into real operating leverage, embedded insurance into a genuine growth engine and operational resilience into a competitive advantage.
The era of experimentation is giving way to one of delivery and discipline, and I’m looking forward to seeing who steps up.
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