Insurity report says data quality slows carrier modernization efforts

The real brake on carrier modernization is no longer just the old core. Insurity’s new benchmark-style report said policy, billing and claims projects often slow down because insurers lack clean data, clear ownership and the operating discipline needed to make cloud migration pay off.

Built from conversations with insurance leaders, the report was meant to let carriers compare their own transformation plans against common industry patterns. Insurity said the hardest problems show up before a single platform goes live: incomplete inventories of legacy data, inconsistent product rules and tangled dependencies between policy, claims, billing, document management and analytics systems. Those gaps get even more painful when one line of business moves to the cloud while the rest of the stack stays fragmented on older platforms.

The report’s central message was blunt. Cloud migration by itself does not create value unless carriers standardize data, rationalize workflows and assign clear ownership across operations and IT. Insurity framed that as a practical issue, not a theory exercise. The company said many carriers still try to copy old processes into new systems, instead of redesigning the work that slows them down in the first place.

Change management came through as another weak spot. Insurity said carriers often underestimate the effort required to move from a product-centric legacy structure to a more configurable, API-connected operating model. In practice, that means deciding which historical fields deserve to be migrated, which business rules must be preserved and which processes should be rebuilt rather than replicated. That discipline matters for both mid-market carriers and larger regional insurers trying to launch products faster and clean up reporting.

The report also pushed insurers to attach each phase of modernization to a measurable operating gain, such as less manual handling, faster quote turnaround or reduced claims leakage. That matters because modernization budgets are easier to defend when leadership can point to a specific business payoff instead of a vague cloud ambition.

The findings fit a broader industry shift. McKinsey & Company said in May 2025 that modernizing core P&C systems remains one of the most pressing challenges for insurers, arguing that legacy platforms built for a slower, paper-driven model are no longer fit for purpose. Insurity has also leaned hard into the same message, saying it is trusted by 22 of the top 25 P&C carriers and 7 of the top 10 MGAs in the U.S., with more than 400 cloud-based deployments and 20 customer go-lives in 2025 to date. Its Borealis release on February 26, 2026, pushed faster policy workflows, AI-enabled self-service and modernized claims, billing and marine experiences, all of which point to the same conclusion: modernization succeeds only when the data and the operating model are ready to carry it.