Global insurance intelligence is becoming harder to use as regulation fragments across markets.
Speaking to Insurance Business UK at the Axco Global Insurance Summit, executives at Axco Insurance Information said firms are navigating a system that is simultaneously diverging and converging, complicating how intelligence is gathered and applied.
“You’ve got this interesting mix of divergence and convergence,” said Mark Trumper, managing director at Axco Insurance Information.
At one level, geopolitical shifts are driving fragmentation, with some regulators becoming more protectionist and placing greater constraints on how firms operate within their markets. At the same time, other jurisdictions are aligning themselves with larger trading blocs to support cross-border business.
The result is a more complex regulatory environment for global insurers operating across both dynamics.
That complexity is being compounded by the volume of regulation itself.
“There’s a growing trend in the volume of regulation,” said Patrick Baker, director of product and innovation at Axco Insurance Information.
New rules are being driven by digitalisation, global risk and emerging technologies. But the challenge is not just the pace of change, it is how those rules are implemented. Regulation is often fragmented in how it is issued, varies in how it is interpreted, and differs in how quickly it is enforced.
Trumper said regulators are becoming more assertive in how they apply those rules.
“They are more inclined to punish those who aren’t setting up in the right way, doing business in the right way,” he said.
For insurers and brokers, that creates a multi-layered problem: tracking regulatory change, validating its accuracy and understanding how it will be applied in practice across different markets.
As regulatory demands increase, the challenge shifts from accessing information to making it usable. Baker said firms face growing difficulty not only in keeping up with regulatory developments, but in understanding how those changes are adopted locally.
“Markets will treat them very differently,” he said.
That creates an additional layer of complexity, where formal rules do not always reflect market practice.
At the same time, internal constraints are tightening. Compliance teams are required to manage increasing volumes of information without additional resource, while also competing for talent in a market where specialist expertise is becoming harder to find.
“They’re not a profit centre,” Trumper said. “They’re not exactly awash with lots of money.”
Against that backdrop, technology is raising expectations about how insurance intelligence should be accessed and used, but the reality inside many organisations remains uneven.
“There’s still a huge amount of processes run on spreadsheets and email,” Trumper said.
That disconnect is creating pressure within firms, as more advanced tools sit alongside legacy systems that have not evolved at the same pace.
The deployment of platforms is also increasing demand for integrated data. Firms are looking to bring together fragmented datasets across jurisdictions, systems and formats, with growing interest in embedding intelligence directly into workflows rather than accessing it separately.
The ability to turn data into actionable insight remains constrained. Large organisations continue to operate with siloed information across multiple systems, languages and regulatory environments.
“You’ve got different languages, different currencies, different regulations,” Trumper said.
Bringing that information together in a usable form remains a significant challenge, particularly when firms need to apply it in real time.
While AI is beginning to support areas such as data extraction and comparison, its effectiveness remains dependent on the quality and consistency of the underlying data.
For Baker, the firms that succeed will be those that treat data and intelligence as a strategic asset, rather than an administrative function. That requires investment not only in technology, but in data quality, systems and people.
“The combination of AI and experts will really bring out the value,” he said.
But both he and Trumper cautioned against treating technology as a solution in itself.
“There’s a temptation to deploy AI for AI sake,” Trumper said.
Instead, firms that move ahead will be those that define clear outcomes, whether that is faster claims processing, improved compliance or better decision-making, and align technology, processes and people around those goals.
