Insurance Productivity Rose Just 3% in 30 Years. Here’s What Needs to Change Next.

→ Over the last three decades, most industries lifted productivity by roughly 50%. Insurance managed about 3%. McKinsey senior partner Tanguy Catlin calls insurance "the second worst industry when it comes to productivity gains over the last 30 years." (Digital Insurance)

→ More than half of insurers — 54% — allocate over half of their IT budgets to maintaining existing systems, and nearly half continue to operate core platforms between six and ten years old, with some exceeding 15 years. (Insurance Business America)

→ Two-thirds of executives expect it will take another three to seven years to move core systems to the cloud. Another 14% have no set timeline at all. (Insurance Business America)

→ Developing and testing a single new insurance product on legacy systems takes 6–9 months and costs US$400,000–900,000. (Insurance Journal)

→ 78% of property and casualty insurers have adopted generative AI, but only 4% have scaled it meaningfully across claims operations, according to Bain & Company's 2025 Claims Maturity Assessment. (Risk & Insurance)

→ The carriers that redesigned the claims journey around AI — instead of bolting copilots onto legacy workflows — saw very different results: a 35% productivity boost, shorter settlement cycles, and homeowners' claims processing times cut in half. (Risk & Insurance)

→ Agentic AI — autonomous software agents that interpret legacy systems, generate documentation, validate configurations, and coordinate complex workflows — could improve productivity by 10% to 90% across stages of insurance core system modernization, according to an April 2026 report from McKinsey's Financial Services Practice. The largest gains land in testing, reconciliation, and defect cycle compression (15% to 90%); discovery and reverse engineering of legacy systems come in at 20% to 50%. (Risk & Insurance)

→ Carriers that have completed core system transformations report a 15–25% reduction in operating expenses within three years of go-live, according to McKinsey's Insurance practice — making modernization one of the highest-ROI initiatives in the enterprise technology portfolio. (Advancio)

The pattern is hard to miss. There's a widening gap between insurers who adopted AI successfully and those still stuck in pilot purgatory — and that gap is now the single biggest source of value left on the table in this industry.

We see it on every kickoff call. The 4% of insurers who scaled AI in claims didn't have better technology than the 78% who didn't. They had a clearer read on what to modernize, what to wrap, and what to leave alone. They sequenced the work so each phase paid for the next one. They didn't confuse a copilot demo with a production system.

We know what separates the two groups. And we know how to help you end up on the right side of the statistic.

That work doesn't look the same from every seat. A PE operating partner, a carrier's claims lead, and a broker trying to escape an AMS contract are all staring at the same macro data — and reaching three completely different conclusions about what to do with it. So before the Javits floor opens, here's what Symfa brings to each conversation.

Six thousand people, four hundred speakers, two days. Most of them will be selling you something generic. We won't.

If you're Private Equity with insurance in the portfolio

We operate as an execution partner for the value creation plan, not a delivery shop. Deep insurance expertise across claims, underwriting, pricing, and data. Ability to modernize core, data, and operations in parallel — not in sequence. Lower transformation risk and shorter time-to-impact, because the difference between a 24-month program and a 36-month program is the entire IRR story.

If you're a Carrier

We operate as a strategic team extension with product and delivery ownership — a transformation engine that has lived through multi-team, multi-system environments and knows where the actual landmines are. Claims, underwriting, policy admin, pricing, data. We've seen the version of this story that goes sideways, and we know the early warning signs.

If you're a Broker or Distributor

We come in with an IT landscape audit, replace expensive SaaS with custom, owned platforms, and ship in 3–6 months. Built around your actual workflows, not someone else's roadmap. You own the code. You own the data. You own the timeline.

There's a counter-pressure worth naming. Not every legacy system needs to die. As Carrier Management put it earlier this year, "a 12-year-old policy administration platform that is API-enabled, stable, scalable, and cost-effective" is materially more valuable than a brand-new system that consumes capital for years before it stabilizes. Replacing stable systems simply because they aren't new opens the door to enormous waste. (Carrier Management)

The winners in 2026 aren't replacing everything. They know what to wrap, what to retire, and what's quietly fine. That judgment — built from doing this across PE-backed portfolios, large carriers, and broker platforms — is what we bring to every conversation.

📍 June 3–4, Javits Center. 6,000+ attendees, 400+ speakers, with Anthropic and OpenAI on the main stage.

Vitali (CEO), Rita (Chief Partnership Officer), and Jacob (Business Transformation Director) will be on the floor both days.

• If you're a PE operating partner who'd rather talk value creation than vendor logos — come find us.
• If you're a carrier underwriting or claims lead who wants AI to actually move a metric — come find us.
• If you're a broker who's done bending your business around someone else's software — come find us.

Bring the hard questions. We brought the work.