News
Specialty rates fall in 2025 and at Jan. 1 renewals: WTW
Rates in the specialty insurance market declined during 2025 and at Jan. 1, 2026, renewals, reaching levels last seen in 2021.
At Jan. 1 renewals, 75% of the 42 material classes showed rate decreases, compared with 30% of classes in 2024, according to a report Wednesday from Willis Towers Watson.
“Based on the Specialty Insurance Marketplace Survey insurance rate index, expected performance … in 2025 has unwound the rate strengthening gains of the last few years back to levels last seen in 2021,” the report said.
The survey is built on data contributed by clients of WTW’s Insurance Consulting and Technology business. WTW publishes SIMS twice yearly, with the next update to be based on first-half 2026 results and the July renewal.
Specialty markets are declining after a multiyear spike in rates. Rates increased approximately 45% cumulatively between 2017 and the market peak in 2023, but around half of that increase eroded over the past two years, the report said.
Global InsurTech Report for Q1 2026 | GallagherRe
[Ed. note: Kudos to GallagherRe, Andrew Johnston for focusing on AI as part of an already comprehensive and meaningful, Global InsurTech Report series]
Over the past few years, our focus on AI has aimed to provide practical insights into its applications and impact across the (re)insurance industry. Now, we look to consider where it can take us in the future.
In this Q1 edition, we focus on the emerging picture of AI liability insurance and how it fits in with an evolving cyber insurance market, as both fields increasingly coalesce around the risks emanating from digital delegation and tech infrastructure.
Taken together, digital and cyber risks have been popular areas for InsurTech innovators for years — since 2012, such companies have raised USD5.77 billion overall, across 263 deals. Viewed in that context, AI liability insurance is merely the new cutting-edge of a digital innovation theme that the market has been pursuing for quite some time.
In addition, the report provides insights into the performance of the InsurTech market for Q1'26. This quarter's activity demonstrates that InsurTech investment remains resilient, signaling renewed confidence in the sector and a clear shift toward AI-driven innovation. VIEW REPORT
Financial Results
SCOR posts €225m Q1'26 profit as strong renewals lift P&C revenue
Global reinsurer SCOR reported net income of €225 million for Q1 2026, with contributions from all business lines, prompting CEO Thierry Léger to reaffirm confidence in the group’s ability to meet its 2026 targets.
Q1 2026, SCOR’s P&C insurance revenue reached €1.812 billion, up 5.4% at constant exchange rates compared with the same period in 2025.
The reinsurer said this growth was primarily driven by its Reinsurance segment, supported by “strong” renewals.
P&C new business CSM totalled €722 million in Q1 2026, an increase of 1.8% at current exchange rates, underpinned by reinsurance volume growth and positive retrocession impacts.
The P&C combined ratio stood at 80.2%, including a natural catastrophe ratio of 4.2%, reflecting a relatively benign quarter for nat cat activity.
State News
No, Florida Lawmakers Did Not Repeal the No-Fault Auto Insurance Law
Did you hear that Florida’s 55-year-old “no-fault” auto insurance statute has been repealed?
Most people in the Florida insurance industry probably know that is not true. But a number of recent websites and postings by Florida plaintiffs’ law firms and even those of a few insurance agencies have suggested otherwise, leading to some confusion and questions about the state’s personal injury protection law.
“Florida No Fault Insurance Repeal 2026,” reads a search-engine headline from the Aronberg & Aronberg law firm website. “Florida Senate Votes to End No-Fault Insurance,” reads another, posted on the Brooks Law Group site. MORE
AI in Insurance
AI is accelerating in insurance – are you ready?
AI investment surge signals shift toward real-time risk management
For decades, the insurance industry moved at its own deliberate pace - a world of actuarial tables, paper applications, and adjusters dispatched to inspect fender-benders in suburban driveways. The joke in technology circles was that insurers would be the last to change. Nobody is laughing now.
Artificial intelligence has not crept into insurance. It has crashed through the door. In the past 18 months alone, a major British insurer cut the time to resolve a complex liability claim by 23 days. A German giant built and deployed a seven-agent AI claims system in under 100 days. An American insurtech automated 55 percent of its claims from start to finish, settling some in seconds. And one of the world's largest carriers - Nationwide - announced it was committing $1.5 billion to technology, with 20 percent explicitly earmarked for AI.
The question the industry asked three years ago - "Can we trust this?" - has been answered. The question now is far more urgent: How fast can we scale it before competitors pull too far ahead?
Agents for financial services \ Anthropic
We're releasing ten new Cowork and Claude Code plugins, integrations with the Microsoft 365 suite, new connectors, and an MCP app for financial services and insurance organizations.
We’re releasing ten ready-to-run agent templates for the most time-consuming work in financial services: building pitchbooks, screening KYC files, and closing the books at month-end. Each one ships as a plugin in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, and as a cookbook for Claude Managed Agents, so a team can put Claude on real financial work in days rather than months.
Claude also now works across Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook (coming soon) through the Claude add-ins for Microsoft 365. Once the add-ins are installed, context carries automatically between applications, so work that starts in a model can end in a deck without re-explaining anything in between.
Finally, we’re continuing to expand our partner ecosystem with new connectors and an MCP app, so the agents draw on the data financial professionals already use. Connectors give Claude governed, real-time access to a provider’s data, and MCP apps go a step further by embedding the provider’s own tools directly inside Claude.
These updates pair best with Claude Opus 4.7, which is state-of-the-art on financial tasks and leads the industry on Vals AI's Finance Agent benchmark, at 64.37%.
Agentic AI Could Deliver Up to 90% Productivity Gains in Insurance Core System Modernization
Agentic AI — autonomous or semiautonomous software agents that can interpret legacy systems, generate documentation, validate configurations and coordinate complex workflows — could improve productivity by 10% to 90% across various stages of insurance core system modernization, according to an April 2026 report from McKinsey’s Financial Services Practice.
The greatest gains come in testing, reconciliation and defect cycle compression, where the report estimates improvements of 15% to 90%, while discovery and reverse engineering of legacy systems could see 20% to 50% productivity improvement.
Why Core Modernization Has Stalled
Insurance core systems often comprise decades’ worth of sparsely documented business rules, batch processes, custom interfaces and data semantics, the report said. Executives have long recognized the need to upgrade these platforms, but structural costs and risks have repeatedly undermined their motivation to act.
Among the most persistent challenges are underdocumented product logic and actuarial settings, semantic gaps that surface late in migration projects and drive rework, and cutover risks that force conservative sequencing, according to McKinsey. These dynamics create costly “double-bubble” periods in which insurers pay to maintain their legacy systems while simultaneously funding the modernization program, the report said.
Predict & Prevent
How modern fleet safety programs can help lower skyrocketing commercial insurance premiums » World Business Outlook
Modern fleet safety programs are transforming commercial insurance with real-time data and proactive risk control.
As commercial transportation faces nuclear verdicts and rising premiums in 2026, insurance providers are closely scrutinizing the effectiveness of fleet safety programs.
Insurers now prioritize data-driven, preventive risk controls as the standard for insurance premium reduction. Fleets with proactive monitoring and intervention demonstrate the strongest case for controlling costs and securing favorable coverage in commercial auto insurance.
The landscape of commercial insurance is rapidly shifting due to high-severity claims and increasing litigation costs, leading to unprecedented premiums for fleet operators. To respond, insurers have redefined risk-readiness by demanding rigorous, verified safety practices that support risk mitigation. Documented participation in fleet safety programs now serves as the primary data source for determining a fleet’s risk profile. In this environment, driver behavior monitoring helps identify high-risk drivers before a collision occurs, and integrating accident data with safety training supports insurance premium reduction that both insurers and fleets value to manage exposure and costs effectively.
Commentary/Opinion
How Small Business Insurance is Evolving: Balancing Speed, Data, and Underwriting Discipline
The small business insurance market has changed dramatically over the past decade. What once required dozens of manual entries and hours of back-and-forth between agents and underwriters has been transformed into a quoting experience designed to mirror consumer-grade software. Yet the push for speed and ease has introduced new questions about data accuracy, agent responsibility, and the underwriting discipline required to serve a segment where premiums may be modest but exposures can be significant.
For carriers writing in this space, the challenge is finding the balance between frictionless submission and the rigor needed to price risk correctly across diverse geographies and exposure profiles.
“Most agencies are looking for the path of least resistance, and carriers are tasked with making the quoting process as easy as possible,” said Scott Young, Vice President of Small Business Underwriting, Philadelphia Insurance Companies (PHLY). “It can feel like a race to ask as few questions as possible to get to that bindable premium.”
InsurTech/M&A/Finance💰/Collaboration
Two truths and a lie about the insurance agency M&A environment
According to Optis Partners, there have been 7,633 M&A agency and broker transactions since 2016.
Given the massive number of M&A transactions in the IA system over the past decade, it has created an abundance of misinformation about the M&A environment for independent agency owners. In an effort to clear up some of the misconceptions, we are going to engage in a game of two truths and a lie.
Truth #1 The Independent Agency (IA) system is undergoing massive consolidation and an unprecedented wealth transfer. Macro-economic forces are causing agency owners to transition ownership every year. These forces include:
- Aging principals: 37% of agency principals are over 61
- Record-high agency valuations: 42% increase in 8 years
- Billions of dollars of investments being infused into the IA system: estimated $85B invested or available for investment
- AI-fueled technological uncertainty
According to Optis Partners, there have been 7,633 M&A agency and broker transactions since 2016. To measure the increase in M&A activity, we looked at 5-year increments; from 2013 to 2017, there were 2,161 transactions, and from 2021 to 2025, there were 4,455. That represents a 106% increase in M&A transactions over those 5-year time frames. While the M&A market has cooled off from its peak in 2021 (33% decrease), we are still in an environment with a bounty of hungry buyers and a decreasing number of sellers.
Insurance startup Corgi hits $1.3B valuation 4 months after its Series A | TechCrunch
Insurance startup Corgi hits $1.3B valuation 4 months after its Series A
Business insurance startup Corgi announced on Wednesday a $160 million Series B, led by TCV, valuing the startup at $1.3 billion, the startup’s co-founder Nico Laqua said on LinkedIn.
This comes just four months after the company announced a $108 million Series A. The company has now raised $268 million in funding to date, Laqua said, and has become Y Combinator’s latest unicorn. Laqua started the company with Emily Yuan in 2024 and was part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch. Corgi, which names Deel and Artisan as customers, offers coverage for general liability, cyber liability, and tech and AI liability. Other investors in the round include Kindred Ventures, Leblon Capital, and First Order Fund.
“We’re excited about the raise and incredibly grateful to our investors for believing in what we’re building. But the job is not done,” Laqua told TechCrunch. “Our mission is bigger: we want to use the fresh capital to expand into more lines of insurance and build a generational company.”
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