Ask any InsurTech founder what slows them down, and the answer is almost always some version of the same thing: the legacy insurer they are trying to partner with. The deal takes too long. Decisions stall. The IT team has a different list of priorities. The business sponsor keeps changing. The pilot never quite becomes a production rollout.
Bryan Falchuk has spent his career on both sides of this dynamic. As Managing Partner at Insurance Evolution Partners and President and CEO of PLRB, he has studied what separates InsurTech collaborations that succeed from those that quietly fall apart. At a recent ITA webinar, he shared the findings from his Insurance Collaboration Index research and the practical framework he has developed for making these partnerships actually work.
The core message: the problem is not that insurance is slow. The problem is that most InsurTech teams do not understand why insurance moves the way it does, and they enter partnerships without the structure needed to succeed inside that reality.
Why “Insurance Is Slow” Is the Wrong Frame Here is what he covered.
It is tempting to explain every collaboration friction as a symptom of an industry that simply resists change. But that framing leads InsurTech teams to the wrong solutions: more pressure, longer pitch decks, better demos. None of those address the actual constraints carriers operate within.
Bryan identified six real reasons why carrier partnerships move slowly:
- IT constraints: legacy infrastructure, limited integration capacity, and competing technology priorities that have nothing to do with your product.
- Culture and politics: internal stakeholders with different agendas, risk tolerances, and definitions of what a successful partnership looks like.
- Regulation: compliance obligations that affect what carriers can adopt, how quickly, and with what level of documentation.
- Failed past attempts: institutional memory of vendor relationships that did not deliver, which creates skepticism that has to be earned back.
- Budget cycles: capital allocation processes that move on annual timelines and require approvals well above the day-to-day sponsor.
- Process and bureaucracy: procurement, legal, and governance requirements that are not obstacles to work around, but realities to plan for.
Understanding these constraints does not make them disappear. But it does change how you design a partnership from the start, which is where most collaborations succeed or fail.
What the Research Actually Shows
Bryan’s Insurance Collaboration Index analyzed real InsurTech and carrier partnerships across eight key factors, rating each on how important it is to collaboration success and how satisfied the parties actually are with how it is handled. The results are instructive.
Only one factor rated as having no significant disconnect: executive sponsorship. When senior leadership on both sides is genuinely committed, that alignment holds partnerships together through friction that would otherwise kill them.
Every other factor showed either a disconnect or a high disconnect between importance and satisfaction. The most serious gaps appeared in decision making, budget and funding, issue resolution, and business and IT alignment, all areas rated high or very high in importance, and all rated low in satisfaction. In other words, the things that matter most are the things being handled worst.
This is not a technology problem. It is a collaboration design problem. And it is one that can be solved with the right structure going in.
Three Foundations for Successful Carrier Partnerships
Bryan distilled the patterns from successful collaborations into three principles. These are not soft suggestions. They are the structural conditions that allow everything else to work
1. Make Fast, Rational Decisions
Slow decisions are not inherently safe decisions. In a partnership, delayed decisions compound friction, create misalignment, and erode trust on both sides. The goal is not to rush; it is to match the scale of the decision to the appropriate level of decision-making authority and move at the pace the situation requires.
Partnerships that get this right establish frequent, non-optional steering committee meetings where real decisions get made, not just status updates exchanged. They are also honest with themselves about the customization versus configuration question: how much of the carrier’s process genuinely needs to be custom-built, versus how much can be handled through configuration of an existing solution? That distinction has major implications for cost, timeline, and risk.
Real-world examples from Bryan’s research include American European Insurance Group and Protosure, as well as Mountain West Farm Bureau and Guidewire, both of which navigated complex decisions by scaling the decision-making process to the actual complexity involved.
2. Be on the Same Team
This sounds obvious. In practice, it is one of the hardest things to sustain. Carriers and InsurTechs often enter partnerships with different definitions of success, different internal pressures, and different timelines. When things get hard, those differences can start to feel adversarial.
Being on the same team requires honesty from both sides about their actual experience and where they need help. It requires the carrier to resist the temptation to strong-arm the InsurTech internally, and it requires the InsurTech to give honest, frequent feedback rather than managing perception. It also sometimes requires removing third parties whose interests are not aligned with the partnership’s success.
Bryan cited the Nationwide and Kinetic partnership, as well as Homesteaders Life Company and Benekiva, as examples of teams that built genuine alignment by being transparent about challenges rather than suppressing them.
3. Respect the Lanes of Responsibility
In a successful partnership, open discussion is healthy and expected. But at the end of that discussion, there is one decision-maker per domain, and everyone respects that boundary. Ambiguity about who owns a decision is one of the most reliable predictors of partnership failure.
This principle also applies to the separation between investment activity and customer-facing activity. When those lanes blur, it creates confusion and potential conflicts of interest that erode trust. The Homesteaders Life Company and Benekiva partnership provided a clear case study in how deliberate lane separation, maintained consistently, protects the relationship under pressure.
Aware, Prepare, Defend: A Framework for Managing Collaboration Risk
Bryan’s framework for managing collaboration risk operates across three modes.
Even well-structured partnerships encounter problems. What separates partnerships that recover from those that collapse is whether the teams saw the risk coming and had a plan for it.
Aware: Know what to look for.
Most partnership problems do not arrive without warning. They show up first as small signals: a steering committee that gets rescheduled repeatedly, a budget conversation that keeps getting deferred, a business sponsor who stops being reachable. Learning to recognize these early signals, rather than rationalizing them, is the first discipline.
Prepare: Build success into your approach.
The best time to address collaboration risk is before it materializes. That means establishing clear governance upfront, agreeing on a shared definition of success before any work begins, building in structured checkpoints, and creating an escalation path that both sides understand and have committed to use.
Defend: Intervene early when risk materializes.
When a problem surfaces, the instinct is often to give it time or hope it resolves on its own. That instinct is almost always wrong. Early intervention, while the issue is still small, is almost always less costly and less disruptive than waiting until the situation forces a response.
The Bottom Line
InsurTech collaboration with legacy carriers is hard. It will remain hard. The goal is not to make it easy; it is to make it structured enough that the difficulty is manageable and the outcome is worth the effort.
Bryan Falchuk’s research and framework offer InsurTech founders and carrier innovation teams a clear-eyed view of why these partnerships stall and what it actually takes to move them forward. The answer is not a better pitch or a more impressive proof of concept. It is governance, honesty, and a genuine commitment to operating as one team toward a shared outcome.
For ITA members who want to go deeper on this topic, Bryan’s book series The Future of Insurance: From Disruption to Evolution explores these dynamics through detailed case studies from carriers, startups, and collaborators across the industry. Volume III covers insurer and InsurTech collaboration specifically. The series is available at future-of-insurance.com/3
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is it so difficult for InsurTechs to partner with legacy insurers?
The difficulty is structural, not attitudinal. Legacy insurers operate under real constraints that InsurTechs often underestimate: aging IT infrastructure with limited integration capacity, annual budget cycles that govern what can be funded and when, regulatory obligations that affect what technologies can be adopted and how quickly, and institutional caution built from prior vendor relationships that did not deliver. When InsurTechs frame these constraints as resistance to change, they misdiagnose the problem and design the wrong solution. The partnerships that succeed are the ones that account for these realities from the beginning rather than trying to work around them.
What is the most common reason InsurTech and carrier partnerships fail?
Based on Bryan Falchuk’s Insurance Collaboration Index research, the most pervasive failure pattern is a combination of weak decision-making structures and misaligned definitions of success. These two problems reinforce each other: when both sides have different ideas of what a successful outcome looks like, decisions become harder to make, escalation paths become unclear, and minor issues grow into partnership-ending conflicts. Executive sponsorship is the one factor where collaboration tends to score well; everything else, including budget management, issue resolution, and business and IT alignment, shows significant gaps between how important these factors are and how well they are actually handled.
What should InsurTechs do before approaching a carrier partnership?
Before entering a carrier partnership, InsurTech teams should invest time in understanding the carrier’s actual operating environment: their IT constraints, their budget cycle, their regulatory context, and any history of prior vendor or technology initiatives that did not go as planned. This due diligence shapes how you position the partnership, what governance you propose, and what timeline is realistic. You should also be clear internally on your own definition of success and how you will handle situations where things are not progressing as expected. Entering a carrier partnership with optimism but without a plan for friction is one of the most reliable ways to end up frustrated on both sides.
What does good governance look like in an InsurTech and carrier collaboration?
Good governance in a carrier partnership includes four elements: a shared and documented definition of success agreed upon before work begins; a steering committee that meets frequently, is mandatory for key stakeholders, and is empowered to make real decisions rather than just exchange status updates; clear accountability with one named decision-maker per domain rather than decisions by committee; and an escalation path that both sides have committed to using early when problems emerge rather than late when they have become serious. Governance is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the structure that allows both sides to move with speed and clarity through the inevitable friction points.
How should InsurTechs handle conflict with a carrier partner?
Conflict in a carrier partnership is not a sign that the partnership is failing; it is a sign that it is real. The question is whether both sides have the structure and the trust to address it directly. Bryan Falchuk’s Aware, Prepare, Defend framework offers a practical approach: stay alert to early warning signals like recurring delays, reduced executive engagement, or budget conversations that keep getting deferred; build escalation and issue resolution mechanisms into the partnership structure before problems arise; and intervene early, while issues are small, rather than waiting for the situation to force a response. The InsurTechs and carriers that maintain honest, frequent communication throughout a partnership, even when the news is hard, are consistently the ones that reach productive outcomes.
