The trial period is over. Insurance innovation across Asia-Pacific has broken out of the pilot phase and gone straight into the operating core of the industry. Analysts diverge sharply on the market’s exact size. Fortune Business Insights puts it at US$6.56 billion for 2026 and Mordor Intelligence at US$239.19 billion for 2025, a gap driven by differing market definitions rather than any real disagreement about direction. What nobody disputes is the pace, sustained double-digit annual growth, whether that’s Research and Markets’ 37.7% or Fortune Business Insights’ 33.9%. 

That growth isn’t spread evenly. Life insurance premiums across Asia-Pacific are forecast to grow 5.3% annually through 2035, according to Arthur Calipo, Deloitte’s Asia-Pacific insurance leader, and the region already accounts for roughly 36% of global life insurance premiums. Yet penetration remains low, just 2.6% in emerging Asian markets and 5.4% in mature ones, leaving significant headroom that the wider market-size estimates above don’t capture. 

That momentum sits behind Insurance Business’s sixth annual 5-Star Insurance Innovators report, which recognises the insurance innovations, products and leaders across Asia, Australia and New Zealand that introduced new technology or distribution strategies during 2025, following last year’s edition. 

Last year was about proving the idea worked. This year is about proving it scales, fast. According to Kylie Bryant, a partner in Deloitte New Zealand’s operations, industry and domain solutions, last year was largely defined by experimentation, while 2026 has forced insurers to scale proven solutions into measurable outcomes at speed, redesigning operating models and embedding AI across core functions rather than running isolated digital trials on the side. 

“The biggest challenge is not a lack of innovative ideas; it’s the ability to execute at scale,” she says. 

That shift towards scale brings its own friction. “Many insurers continue to grapple with legacy technology, fragmented data, complex operating models and increasing regulatory expectations,” Bryant says, arguing these issues make it difficult to fully realise the value of AI, automation and digital experiences. 

For brokers, she adds, integration is the sticking point. A seamless customer experience sounds simple until it depends on secure data sharing, strong governance and multiple parties actually working together instead of past each other. 

That gap is already closing for some. “In Asia-Pacific, leading insurers have already implemented a range of Gen AI-powered applications such as customer service bots, underwriting assistants and claims triage systems,” says Joanna Wong, Deloitte China insurance leader. Most insurance leaders, she adds, are now focused on practical AI use cases with a clear return on investment and manageable risk, rather than experimentation for its own sake. 

The pace of that shift is measurable. Gartner’s prediction on task-specific AI agents puts 40% of enterprise applications on track to carry these agents – AI systems capable of completing complex, end-to-end tasks with minimal human supervision rather than simply answering questions – by the end of 2026, up from fewer than 5% in 2025. 

Regionally, AI and generative AI spending across Asia-Pacific is forecast to grow from US$73 billion in 2024 to US$370 billion by 2029, according to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, with financial services increasingly scaling AI beyond its traditional home in fraud detection and risk pricing. 

That shift is showing up in where the money goes, too. Gallagher Re's Global InsurTech Report for Q2 2026 found AI-focused companies captured 99.1% of all global insurtech funding that quarter, the highest share on record. Simone Dossetor, chief executive officer of Insurtech Australia, has watched the shift happen in real time. “When I talked to people when we were in Asia in June [2025], they were very much still in the trialling phase,” she says. “And then when I spoke to them this year, they were like, ‘No, we know we need to invest, and we know we need to do it.’”

What that spending buys is starting to show up in hard numbers closer to home. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Insurance Outlook points to Zurich Australia, which partnered with the University of Technology Sydney to build an AI tool that cuts life insurance application processing time for customers with mental health disclosures from 22 days to less than a day. 

Regulators are watching just as closely in Australia, one of this report’s three core markets. As IB reported, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) wrote to every bank, insurer and superannuation trustee it regulates on 30 April 2026 with a blunt warning: governance, risk management and operational resilience practices are not keeping pace with the scale, speed and complexity of AI adoption. One finding stood out: some institutions are betting on a single AI or cloud provider with no contingency plan if it fails. 

Bryant sees the next phase of adoption heading in a similar direction, beyond productivity tools and copilots into more autonomous, agentic workflows across underwriting, claims, servicing, fraud detection and risk assessment. But rapid deployment alone isn’t the goal. “Success will depend on more than technology,” she says. “Strong data quality, governance, explainability, cyber security and human oversight will be critical. The insurers that succeed will be those that scale AI responsibly while maintaining trust.”
 

Layering four years of nomination data reveals a pattern that isn’t a steady climb or decline; it’s a dip and a partial recovery. Among winners who disclosed their technology spend, the share investing 31% or more of their annual budget peaked at 75% in IB’s fourth annual 5-Star Insurance Innovators report for 2024 and 63.6% in the 5-Star Insurance Innovators report 2023, before falling sharply to just 30% last year, which was the year most winners clustered in the moderate 11–30% band instead. 

This year’s cohort shows a swing back the other way; half of respondents now sit at 31% or more, including one entrant, TautSec, investing 81–100%. 

Dossetor has watched that swing happen from the inside. “Some of the incumbent, large multinationals were very cautious about deploying AI, how they were using it, and very cautious about insurtech,” she says. “The conversation has really moved on, and the investments moved on.” 

Company size continues the trend the 2025 report first identified: scale is no barrier to recognition. More than a third of this year’s winners employ over 500 people, but more than a third also employ 25 people or fewer, spanning the same range from specialist insurtechs to global brokerages that last year’s report described. 

AAMC is an Australian accident and repair management company working almost entirely with the motor insurance sector, coordinating everything from first notification of loss through to vehicle assessment, repair and return. The business was recognised in this year’s 5-Star Insurance Innovators for CX Perspectives, an AI-powered interface built with the Amazon Connect provider iCXeed that lets non-specialist managers question their own contact centre data directly, understanding not just what is happening across their queues but why. 

AAMC’s shift towards AI started with a decision about people, not technology. During the pandemic, the business moved to a fully remote model and found it worked. “It gave us access to really great quality talent in regional spaces that most of the insurers weren’t willing to employ because it was remote,” chief information officer Mark Gwynne says. “It worked for us, so we decided to double down and stick with the remote strategy.” 

That meant retiring an old, on-premises phone system in favour of something built for a distributed team. “We decided to move to a cloud-based platform, and Amazon Connect was the system we chose – very dynamic and very modern at the time. It paid per minute, so you only pay for the time you use, as opposed to conventional phone systems, which pay for the number of concurrent calls you can take, a really great system from an operational perspective.” 

As call volumes grew in the years after, roughly 42,000 interactions a month across 100 human agents, working through approximately 15,000 claims over the same period, AAMC’s dashboards and reports could show what was happening but not why. 

The opportunity to move beyond conventional reporting came through a conversation with AAMC’s technology supplier. “He said, ‘Mark, I’ve got an opportunity. You guys are always looking to innovate and keen to explore different solutions. I’ve got an AI solution for you,’” Gwynne says. 

“I loved it; I thought it was a great idea. We put some skin in the game, and they put some skin in the game, too, because they wanted to productise it,” he says. Asked what AAMC would have had to do differently without it, Gwynne is direct. “I think we would have had to employ at least a call centre expert of some kind, potentially from the insurance industry, and a data analyst. That’s at least two high-grade full-time employees to give this level of intelligence, which is a 20% increase to my team size alone,” he says. 

The result, CX Perspectives, is now in the hands of a small group of leaders, including the managers who oversee AAMC’s call centres. “Even outside their core specialty, they can ask the tool for meaningful stats from last week, and it presents the information with the terminology explained clearly,” Gwynne says. It’s the ambition behind the tool in a single line: “A data analyst and call centre expert in your pocket.” 

The tool remains in a limited beta while AAMC works through what responsible rollout looks like. “It can hallucinate, and people invariably trust it. We don’t want to put our employees in a position where AI is being used to judge their performance unfairly and incorrectly,” Gwynne says. “So, the job of the managers right now is to verify the numbers and help train their teams how to use it responsibly.” 

“CX Perspectives is like having a data analyst and call centre expert in your pocket” Mark GwynneAAMC

Gwynne is candid about what this means for a business built on staying lean, rather than hiring specialist teams to sit apart from day-to-day operations. “We run a lean operation, without a separate team of call centre specialists. We want that expertise directly available to the managers making decisions every day, so insights translate into practical improvements in customer service,” he says. 

Instead, AAMC’s bet is that the same managers who already handle customer service day-to-day can absorb that expertise directly, rather than waiting on a separate team to hand it down. “What we’re hoping is that the managers who do the job day to day, who are focused on customer service, get the benefit of dedicated data analysts and call centre experts to improve the daily work they’re doing. I think it kind of brings it together.” 

Q: Can you put AAMC’s contact centre volume into perspective? 

A: It’s 100 agents, 15,000 new claims or assessment requests every month, and then 42,000 interactions on those claims. So quite high: 2.5 interactions per claim. 

Q: Before AI ever entered the picture, what changes did AAMC make to its contact centre operations? 

A: Two years after we moved to Amazon Connect, COVID hit, and volumes ramped up, so we realised we needed to overhaul our IVR and phone system. We got a supplier in to help us review our practices; we categorised calls differently, we flowed them differently, and we started bringing in post-call surveys and other standard measures. 

Q: How did the idea for an AI layer actually come about? 

A: The supplier we use approached me and said, I’ve got an AI solution for you. He envisaged this AI interface like ChatGPT, where it has access to your phone data, your transcripts, call categories, and everything, but it also has the intelligence of an AI that knows best-practice phone contact centre operations and that knows business analysis. I loved it; I thought it was a great idea. 

Q: Where do you see this taking AAMC’s managers over time? 

A: The vision for us is that it transitions a lot of our business from not being call centre experts into being able to learn and absorb call centre metrics and best practices and then start challenging them by digging into the data themselves, coming up with solutions that can help improve average handling time or reduce time to answer or post-call interactions.

TautSec is a Sydney-based cyber risk and insurance platform, founded in 2023, built around a simple idea: cyber protection should be easier to access, easier to understand and more practical for businesses to act on. The business sits at the intersection of insurance, technology and cyber security and was recognised in this year’s 5-Star Insurance Innovators for CyberPilot, its cyber risk platform, and its approach to bringing cyber risk assessment and cyber insurance together rather than treating them as two separate purchases. 

Cyber insurance and cyber risk management have traditionally been sold as separate products, often requiring multiple providers, lengthy assessments and significant cost. For many Australian businesses, that separation leaves them unsure of their own cyber risk, with no clear, affordable path to actually improve it, a gap that hits smaller organisations hardest, since they typically lack the resources or in-house expertise larger companies can draw on. 

TautSec built CyberPilot, a platform combining cyber risk insights, compliance frameworks, and cyber insurance access, powered by NIST OSCAL, real-time threat intelligence, insurance claims data and adaptive risk modelling. A significant share of TautSec’s 2025 technology spend went directly into this capability, building an affordable cyber risk management solution designed specifically for organisations working within supply chains. 

One case shows the platform in practice, and the irony wasn’t lost on the team – the customer was itself in the insurance space. “An external attack surface scan identified issues that were preventing the business from securing cyber insurance,” Frank Teunissen, co-founder and chief technology officer at TautSec, says. “We worked with their technology team to remediate those issues and, once resolved, we were able to secure cover for them.” 

The platform kept scanning after that point, rather than stopping once the policy was in place. “We continue to scan their external attack surface, giving the business ongoing visibility of potential vulnerabilities so issues can be identified and addressed as they arise, rather than waiting for the next insurance renewal or security assessment,” he adds. 

That same practical instinct shaped TautSec’s formal submission to the Australian Government’s Cyber Security Strategy Horizon 2 consultation. “Cyber governance and insurance need to work together,” Teunissen says. “One should not replace the other; they are complementary parts of a broader risk management approach.” 
 

“Good governance and security controls help businesses understand and reduce their cyber risk, while insurance provides financial protection when an incident occurs” Frank TeunissenTautSec

Teunissen sees the same misunderstanding again and again, and it cuts two ways. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that cyber security is inherently complicated and that it requires expensive consultants and complex frameworks to get it right,” he says. “There is also a misconception that having cyber insurance means a business has its cyber risk covered and therefore doesn’t need to invest in managing that risk.” 

Simple steps, such as multi-factor authentication and regular staff training, can meaningfully shift a business’ resilience. “Cyber insurance has an important role to play, but it is not a substitute for good cyber risk management,” he says. “Businesses need to understand where their vulnerabilities are and take practical steps to reduce their risk. Insurance then provides financial protection if something does go wrong. That’s the approach we take at TautSec. We want to make cyber risk easier to understand and give businesses practical, prioritised recommendations they can act on, with cyber insurance providing an additional layer of financial protection."

Q: Your submission to the government’s Cyber Security Strategy consultation drew on direct engagement with the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Which recommendation from that submission do you feel most strongly about, and why? 

A: We see an opportunity to establish clearer minimum cybersecurity requirements across supply chains, particularly for SMEs, with a practical framework they can realistically meet. For businesses that are part of a larger supply chain, cyber risk doesn’t sit with one organisation; a vulnerability in a smaller supplier can create significant exposure for the organisations they work with. 

This would give smaller businesses a clearer understanding of what is expected of them and a practical pathway to improve their cyber resilience. If businesses can better understand, measure and manage their cyber risk, they are in a stronger position to access appropriate insurance and manage the financial consequences of an incident. 

Ultimately, our goal is to make cyber risk more practical and accessible for businesses while creating stronger resilience across the broader supply chain. 

Q: You mentioned that a significant share of your 2025 budget went into technology. What did that investment go towards, and what results have you seen from it so far? 

A: This has included the development of our automated scanning capability, including linking this to relevant cybersecurity frameworks, and the design of the algorithm used to produce our Protection Index. 

The index is critical to providing organisations with a meaningful understanding of their cyber risk maturity, enabling them to track their progress and have a single view of the issues that require remediation, rather than being confronted with a multitude of individual issues. The ability to link this information to the insurance risk engine will be key to the ongoing development of our technology platform. 

Across this year’s 5-Star Insurance Innovators, the same theme surfaces again and again: AI is no longer a pilot sitting off to one side of the business; it’s becoming part of how the business runs. What that looks like in practice, though, differs enormously depending on who’s doing it and what problem they set out to solve. 

The six winners below capture that range. A Sydney cyber risk platform reinvesting the vast majority of its budget into a single, unified product sits alongside a century-old New Zealand insurer running an AI contact centre built with Deloitte and AWS. 

A 10-person insurtech and a 500-plus-employee claims administrator are tackling entirely different problems, yet arriving at the same underlying answer: embed the intelligence where the work happens, rather than bolting it on afterwards. 

The next 12–24 months won’t slow down. Bryant expects the shift towards agentic AI to keep accelerating: systems that coordinate activities and make decisions within defined controls, not just assist a human one step at a time, pushing deeper into underwriting, claims, servicing, fraud detection and risk assessment. 

In Australia, governance won’t be an afterthought this time. APRA has signalled its April 2026 letter is the opening move of an active supervisory program, not a one-off warning, with further thematic reviews and AI supplier engagement to follow over the same period. 

Bryant also points to a genuinely underused opportunity sitting just behind AI in the conversation: open insurance and consent-based data sharing, which she frames as foundational infrastructure rather than a compliance box to tick. 

A recent Deloitte and InsurTech New Zealand paper on Open Insurance makes a similar case, arguing that insurers that engage early have a real chance to shape the model locally, rather than risk it being defined by offshore aggregators later. 

Several of this year’s winners are already building towards that horizon over the same 12- to 24-month window. FreightInsure, which launched its embedded freight cover in New Zealand in 2025, has the UK in its sights next. PropertyExpert is planning further regional expansion into 2026. Cova AI has already extended beyond Australia into New Zealand and the UK. The pattern across all three, technology proven at home, then exported, looks set to define this cohort’s next chapter as much as the innovations themselves did this year. 

Dossetor points to a third thread worth watching over the same window: insurers moving from covering risk to actively helping prevent it. “There are kind of quite a lot of propositions around health risks and tools to assess concussion or injuries that sort of area,” she says. “I think the insurers are realising that it’s in their interest, rather than just the customer’s problem. How can they incentivise that and make insurance more than just a risk tool?” 

Not every consequence of AI adoption points in the same direction. Dossetor notes that customers are increasingly using their own AI tools to lodge policies and claims first, which insurers then have to process “in a really thorough way and with lots of integrity,” she says, because it’s generating “just a lot of kind of junk, claims that are not legitimate.” 

This year’s 5-Star Insurance Innovators don’t share a habit. Every one of them treats artificial intelligence as infrastructure, built directly into the job and judged against one real problem, not a demo. AAMC’s managers interrogate their own contact centre data. TautSec fuses cyber risk assessment and insurance into a single platform. PropertyExpert keeps its data processing in-house, on principle. Gallagher Bassett pulls fraud detection earlier into the claims process. 

Half this year’s cohort backed that habit with a real budget – 31% or more, from 10-person outfits to organisations of 500-plus. Scale didn’t decide who won here. Every winner built for the exact problem in front of them, then checked whether it actually worked. 

Kylie Bryant brings more than 20 years of local and global experience in financial services, with deep industry knowledge spanning banking, insurance, investment management and technology. She’s known within Deloitte New Zealand as a progressive change leader, supporting organisations across strategy, business growth, systems thinking, design and delivery, with a particular focus on guiding organisations through change at the intersection of people, business and technology. 

IB put six questions to Bryant on where insurance innovation across Asia-Pacific is heading in 2026. Her comments on execution challenges and the next phase of AI adoption appear earlier in this report. Here’s the rest of her insight on customer expectations, measuring success, and the one area she believes deserves far more attention than it currently gets. 

Q: How are customer expectations and behaviour shaping the innovations insurers are prioritising? 

A: Customers increasingly expect the same speed, transparency and personalisation from insurers that they receive from leading digital brands. This is driving investment in simplified onboarding, digital self-service, personalised products, real-time communication and more seamless claims experiences. 

However, customers still value human interaction during complex or emotionally significant moments, particularly when making claims or seeking advice. As a result, insurers are prioritising innovations that combine digital efficiency with human empathy. The goal is not simply to digitalise processes but to create experiences that are faster, simpler and more trusted. 

Q: How do you measure whether an innovation is actually working, for the business or for customers? 

A: Innovation should be measured by outcomes, not activity. For insurers, that means assessing improvements in productivity, operating costs, claims performance, retention, growth and risk management. For customers, measures such as customer satisfaction, trust, complaint volumes, speed of service and claims experience are equally important. 

The most effective organisations use balanced scorecards that track business outcomes alongside customer outcomes. If an innovation improves efficiency but degrades customer experience, or vice versa, it is unlikely to create sustainable value. Successful innovation delivers measurable benefits to both the organisation and its customers. 

Q: What’s an underused technology, process or approach that deserves more attention from insurers in this market? 

A: One area that deserves significantly more attention is open insurance and secure, consent-based data sharing. While much of the industry focus has been on AI, Open Insurance has the potential to fundamentally improve onboarding, advice, claims, underwriting and customer engagement. 

The real opportunity lies in creating a more connected ecosystem where customers can securely share information, reduce duplication and receive more personalised and relevant services. Rather than viewing Open Insurance as a compliance exercise, insurers should see it as foundational infrastructure that enables future innovation and supports stronger customer outcomes. 

In summary, the insurance sector is entering a new phase where success will be defined not by who adopts technology first, but by who can translate innovation into measurable business value, stronger customer outcomes and greater trust.

Simone Dossetor has led Insurtech Australia since October 2021, heading the national not-for-profit body that supports collaboration and investment across the country’s insurtech ecosystem. She brings more than 20 years of insurance industry experience across Australia and the UK, including a term as Chief Operating Officer for Munich Re in Australasia, alongside earlier roles at Calliden Group, Deloitte and the Trowbridge Group, now part of Finity. She also serves as a non-executive director of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF). 

We asked Dossetor for her read on where insurance innovation is heading across Asia-Pacific in 2026. Her comments on investment momentum and the shift towards prevention appear earlier in this report. Here’s the rest of her insight on how brokers are adapting, what insurers should watch for as adoption scales, and how the region compares on the global stage. 

Q: How are brokers responding to the AI tools now available to them? 

A: I think it’s starting to solve some of the drag problems they had. They had these old CRM systems, and then they had insurer platforms, and there was a lot of double-keying and a lot of inefficiency. So, we’re seeing a lot of point-to-point AI solutions that are bridging those gaps, helping brokers spend less time doing admin and more time talking to customers. But it’s still a variety of solutions; there’s no one winner yet. 

The other thing we’re starting to see is an increase in people wanting to launch their own digital broker offerings. Those have been around for a while, but I’m hearing more of them now, because the technology is so available. Someone can get a platform, and if they’ve been an insurance broker, they can launch something quite quickly. 

Q: Do you think customers going straight to AI tools themselves could reshape distribution? 

A: Customers are now going first to their LLMs and their favourite tools, and I think combined with digital brokers becoming easier to launch, there could be a bit of a tipping point. We’re not quite seeing it yet, because you can’t necessarily buy insurance inside the LLMs yet, but I don’t think that’s too far away. There are definitely people building solutions that will let you go straight into that. I think the next 12 months will be quite interesting, and I think it’ll move quite fast. 

Q: What should insurers be mindful of as AI adoption scales? 

A: There’s still a bit of a move in terms of understanding the governance. People were very much in the let’s try stuff phase, and now it’s more, ‘Okay, how are we governing it, and how are we managing the cost?’ People have started talking about token maxing, so how do you actually understand you’re doing the right things with the right tools? 

As more of the approach becomes agentic-first or AI-first, you’re seeing some tech businesses that have been going for three or four years completely shift their business model to AI-first. Insurers aren’t there yet and probably won’t be for a while; it’s about how they get to that next phase of robustness. It’s also very much about people, what their roles are, how you bring them up to speed, and making sure you’ve still got the accountability in place. 

Q: How do you judge whether an innovation is actually delivering, rather than just generating buzz? 

A: There’s a lot of talk about what the moat is and whether it’s sustainable. We’re starting to see a few businesses that had something relevant pre-AI that you can now do anywhere. So I think it’s really about where there’s some particular expertise that’s niche and isn’t replicable. 

Sometimes it’s an MGA business that’s identified a risk that isn’t captured and can now be managed; you can put parameters around it, a parametric trigger, and those kinds of things. You’re starting to get quite different risk-sharing solutions, and now you’ve got the technology that can be set up pretty quickly around that. That will drive quite a bit of product innovation, and you’ll have a lot of spin-offs. Which ones get enough traction is always the challenge. 

Q: How does Asia-Pacific’s insurance innovation landscape compare with other global markets? 

A: Asia-Pacific is incredibly broad. You’ve got amazing tech, particularly in India and China; they’re far advanced in some of their purest technology plays, and then it’s about how you apply that to insurance. Then you’ve got very undeveloped markets where there’s a huge opportunity, and you’ve got Japan and Australia, which are very mature and established. 

I think the technology is up there with anywhere else, the US or London. Because there’s an unmet need and very digital customers, it probably leads in those areas, and there may not be some of the hindrances around regulation and legacy that you have in other markets. 

London leads in the areas coming out of Lloyd’s, specialty cover, where you need that deep insurance expertise. The US is about being such a big market with access to capital, so you get scaling opportunities there. They all have different pros and cons.  

And in Asia, it isn’t one market; it’s many markets, so people can be successful there, really anywhere. The other key differentiator is the life and health market, which brings different dimensions than the more mature markets, where there’s a lot more motor, casualty and property risk.

5-Star Insurance Innovations, Products and Leaders in Asia-Pacific

• 
  TautSec
   
  
• 
  AAMC
   
  

• Allianz
• BizCover Australia
• CFC
• ClaimsGateway
• Cova AI
• Curium
• Elders Insurance
• FreightInsure
• Gallagher
• Gallagher Bassett
• Grappler.io
• Hutch Underwriting
• Insurance Advisernet
• InsuredHQ
• IQumulate Premium Funding
• Kanopi
• National Transport Insurance
• PropertyExpert
• Sedgwick
• Stelvio
• Tower
• Wilbur
• Xceedance