INSTANDA awards spotlight insurers driving transformation and growth

INSTANDA used its third-year INSPIRE Awards to draw a sharp line between insurance software and business results. The June 10 program was built around submissions that launched new products, entered new markets, created new ways of working, or delivered operational efficiency at scale, with Will Wood, INSTANDA’s director of client solutions and growth, named as lead judge.

The category list showed exactly what the vendor thinks matters now: Digital Transformation and Strategic Impact, Product Innovation and Market Impact, and Platform Excellence and Scalable Growth. Those are not cosmetic labels. They point to the same repeatable outcomes carriers and MGAs keep chasing, faster product launches, less dependence on custom code, broader distribution reach, and platforms that can be reused across lines of business and geographies instead of rebuilt for every deal.

The awards also fit the way INSTANDA has framed the program since it launched in 2024. Last year’s materials said the company was recognizing clients pushing the boundaries of insurance, using the platform to build transformative products, streamline processes, and create better customer experiences. This year’s language was more explicit about scale and commercial impact, which matters in a market where vendors are increasingly judged on whether their technology changes operating behavior, not just whether it goes live.

That broader market is still under pressure to modernize. McKinsey has said modernization is one of the most pressing challenges facing property and casualty insurers, and that core systems built for a slower, paper-driven model are no longer fit for purpose. McKinsey has also found that larger IT investment programs have produced roughly 5% to 10% profit-margin improvements in P&C insurance and about twice the top-line GWP growth of low IT investors, with those gains realized over three to five years.

Deloitte’s 2026 global insurance outlook says insurers are heading into the year facing modernization pressure, while dealing with changing customer expectations, broker shifts, and the need to scale AI without fixing the underlying foundations first. Celent’s 2025 North America P/C IT survey makes the same point from another angle: the key business goal is to grow efficiently, and more than 40% of insurers said growth and operations streamlining were their primary goals.

Put together, the INSTANDA awards are less a trophy cabinet than a test case. The message is that modernization should be measured by speed to launch, operational discipline, and growth that can be repeated, not just by the fact that a new platform replaced an old one.