The real competition is at the customer interface

For a long time we thought of competition in insurance as two companies offering the same customer a better price. Today the picture has changed. The real competition is no longer between insurers; it’s shaped by who holds the point of contact with the customer, the interface. What matters is no longer who manufactures the policy, but where the customer makes the decision.

InsurTech startups haven’t torn the industry down so far; mostly they’ve played a complementary role. But for big tech, carmakers and platforms the story is different. With their data and scale, these players can make insurance part of their own ecosystems. This is where the real issue begins.

Owning the risk isn’t enough to own the value

If an insurer loses the point of contact with the customer, it may keep carrying the risk yet fail to hold the value. We call this disintermediation, the sidelining of the intermediary. You carry the risk, you put up the capital, but someone else manages the customer relationship and the data. Who wins in that equation over the long run? Usually not the one carrying the risk, but the one holding the interface.

That’s why I don’t see the future of insurance only as a risk-carrying business. I see it as a business that manages data, designs the customer experience and manages to stay at the center of the ecosystem. Otherwise you do the hardest job and stand in the most fragile spot.

This risk isn’t abstract. By Deloitte’s projection, if 20 percent of US personal motor insurance is sold embedded by 2030, around 50 billion dollars of premium could shift from traditional channels to digital platforms. Examples like Tesla Insurance and Ford Insure place insurance directly inside the car sale; the customer meets insurance at the point of purchase, the moment the need is highest. This isn’t a change of sales channel, it’s a relocation of the distribution structure itself.

The platform economy repositions insurance

For years insurance was positioned as a product bought when needed. The digital platform economy is changing that at the root. The Geneva Association’s work shows insurance is no longer a standalone product but an ecosystem component embedded inside platforms. Insurance stops being a separate sales process and becomes a natural part of the user experience.

The same work defines three roles insurers can play in the platform economy:

• Orchestrator: the player that builds its own platform and runs the ecosystem.
• Partner: the player that integrates into existing platforms.
• Co-developer: the player that builds the platform together with a technology or brand partner.

The critical insight: you don’t always have to own the platform to create value. In the Geneva Association’s survey of 21 large re/insurers, more than 80 percent had built partnerships with technology or platform companies, and more than 60 percent had begun developing their own digital platform. So the industry sees the platform economy not as an experiment but as a strategic necessity. It neither wants to lose control nor stay away from the advantage of reach and data.

The new interface: AI assistants

The newest front of the interface war is AI assistants. ChatGPT opened a finance feature where users connect their bank accounts, get a credit-card recommendation and complete the application from the chat screen. OpenAI positioned this explicitly as action, not information. So a chat interface turns into a channel where financial products are bought. The next stop of this shift that began in banking is most likely insurance.

This has several possible outcomes: the assistant could partner with comparison sites, deal directly with insurers, or even build its own comparison engine and remove the intermediary layer entirely. The scenarios differ, but one truth underlies all of them: the distribution channel is changing. Because for most insurance customers what’s decisive was never emotional engagement, it was convenience. And these new assistants may be the most convenient interface ever built.

In each scenario the loser is different. If comparison sites partner with such an assistant, they gain traffic in the short term, but as the customer stays on that screen their own cross-sell and ad models weaken. If insurers deal directly, they find a powerful distribution partner but pay for it in brand value; because a large share of today’s sales comes from the customer’s tendency to choose a familiar brand. The most disruptive possibility is the assistant building its own comparison engine: then the intermediary layer is removed entirely.

Sometimes the winner is the infrastructure, not the interface

While focusing on the interface, it’s easy to miss something: the real power is sometimes not in the front end, but in the invisible engine behind it. In banking, Cross River Bank is a good example. Founded as an ordinary community bank, instead of marketing its own products it chose to be the legal and operational infrastructure behind technology companies. It became an engine that lets millions of transactions happen in compliance with regulation.

A similar shift is happening in insurance. Insurance-as-a-service, providing the license, capacity and infrastructure that let tech startups sell insurance, is shifting the industry’s center of power. The winners of the future may not only be the brands trying to reach the end user; they may also be those who build the infrastructure that lets insurance flow smoothly inside thousands of platforms. If you control the infrastructure, you largely decide which way innovation goes.

Whoever has the data has the power

What truly makes an interface powerful is, in fact, data. The next-generation checkout experience Bolt and Palantir built together shows this well: fed by a shopping network covering more than 80 million consumers, the system offers each user a real-time, personalized payment flow. Static screens that look the same to everyone give way to screens that learn. When insurance enters this flow, what sets the offer won’t be only the actuarial table; it’ll also be the customer’s behavioral data. Whoever has the data largely holds control of the customer relationship.

New power, new risks

This transformation brings new risk as much as opportunity. Platform dependence, channel conflicts, data governance and regulatory uncertainty are increasingly critical headings. Becoming too dependent on one platform can turn today’s distribution partner into tomorrow’s biggest risk. So this isn’t only a technology investment; it’s a structural matter to be handled together with business model, governance and regulation.

What should the insurer do?

So what should the insurer do here? In my view there are three paths, and all three beat staying passive. First, own a narrow but strong interface: become the customer’s first stop in a specific segment. Second, control the infrastructure: be the trusted engine others build products on. Third, partner from a position of strength: leave distribution to the platform while keeping pricing, data and the claims experience. Whichever you choose, two things are non-negotiable: customer data and the moment of claim. Whoever hands these to someone else is left at the table with risk alone.

Where the insurer of the future will stand

My stance is clear: in this age, merely carrying the risk and leaving the interface and infrastructure to others means doing the hardest job and standing in the most exposed spot. The winner will control either the customer interface or the infrastructure beneath it; preferably being genuinely strong in one of the two. The future of insurance will belong not to the insurer that carries the risk, but to the one that manages the data, designs the experience and manages to stay at the center of the ecosystem.