Yet BriteCore’s 2025 Annual P&C Core Systems Report reveals that speed to market remains one of the industry’s biggest pain points. While 75% of insurers say the ability to introduce new products, lines, or regions is highly important, only 42% are satisfied with their current systems — a 33-point capability gap, one of the widest in the report.

Why Speed to Market Is So Challenging

Legacy systems often require months of planning, coding, testing, and migration just to bring a single new product to market. Insurers cited three key barriers:

Hard-coded products and dependencies

Traditional legacy systems force insurers to rely on vendor IT teams or specialized developers to make configuration changes.

Limited agility in rating and underwriting rules

Many older policy admin systems cannot quickly support new pricing structures, underwriting criteria, or regulatory variations across states.

Fragmented workflows

Disconnected policy, billing, and claims systems slow testing and make product deployment error-prone.

While insurers know agility is essential, their core systems are often their biggest obstacle.

The Impact of Delayed Product Launches

When product rollout slows, insurers feel the effects across nearly every part of the business. Opportunities in new markets can slip away simply because a carrier wasn’t able to introduce a product quickly enough to compete. Competitors who move faster gain an edge by releasing new products or coverage options while slower-moving insurers struggle to keep pace.

Delays in pricing adjustments also chip away at profitability, especially in volatile markets where rates need to evolve quickly. Operational costs creep upward as teams resort to manual workarounds, and frustration builds among underwriting, product, and distribution teams who feel constrained by systems rather than empowered by them. 

In an industry where nimble competitors and MGAs can launch products in weeks, older systems risk holding carriers back in ways that materially affect both growth and performance.

Why Modern Platforms Change the Equation

Modern, cloud-native core systems fundamentally shift this dynamic by removing the technical barriers that slow product development. Instead of relying on coding or vendor intervention, a configuration-first platform allows insurers to build and modify products using intuitive no-code or low-code tools. Rating becomes far more agile, with flexible engines that can quickly support complex structures, tiers, and regional variations. A unified policy, billing, and claims environment reduces the number of handoffs across systems, making testing and deployment significantly more reliable.

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Dedicated sandbox environments give teams the ability to validate new products at speed, and API-driven data enrichment ensures that valuation, inspection, and risk intelligence partners can be incorporated seamlessly into underwriting and claims processes. Together, these capabilities help insurers turn product launches from months-long efforts into streamlined, repeatable workflows.

The Path to True Agility

Importantly, achieving this level of agility doesn’t require a massive transformation all at once. Many insurers begin with incremental modernization—adopting a configurable core platform that immediately accelerates product development while still integrating with existing systems. This approach gives teams the ability to launch new products faster, enter new regions with fewer roadblocks, and adapt to regulatory changes without the typical system delays.

It also empowers carriers to deliver new features that agents and policyholders expect, all while responding more effectively to emerging risks. Speed to market is no longer just a competitive advantage; it has become an operational necessity. The insurers that modernize early will be the ones best positioned to adapt, grow, and lead in a rapidly changing landscape.

For more insights from the 2025 Annual P&C Core Systems Report, read here.