In the late 1680s, a man named Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on Tower Street in London. The place filled up with sailors, merchants and ship owners swapping news about which boats had gone down in a storm and which had come back loaded with sugar. Somewhere in that smoky room, over bad coffee, the modern insurance industry was born. People figured out how to put a price on catastrophe. They learned to look at a rotting hull bound for the West Indies and say, with a straight face, “I’ll take that bet for three percent.”

Three hundred and forty years later, the bet is still on. The coffee is better. The paperwork, somehow, is worse.

This is the strange thing Jonathan Crystal keeps bumping into. Crystal runs Crystal Venture Partners, a firm that backs startups working inside the guts of the insurance business, and he spent two decades in brokerage before that. He recently sat down with Karen Webster at PYMNTS to talk about what’s broken, what’s fixable, and the possibility that the oldest risk-pricing industry on earth might be about to leapfrog everybody.

60% of the Mail Never Gets Read

Crystal told Webster that for 20-plus years and untold billions of dollars, insurance has been trying to go digital. Paper became PDF. The fax became an email attachment. The filing cabinet became a server. And yet: the average underwriter, the human being whose job it is to look at a risk and decide whether to insure it, only gets to about 40% of the submissions that land on their desk, he said.

The other 60% of the work sits there in a big stack waiting to be read, and eventually expires or gets declined by default. An entire industry has been busy digitizing its inbox without actually reading the mail.

Crystal calls this “the industrial model of production,” which is a fancy way of saying: we put the old assembly line inside a computer and called it a transformation. It wasn’t. The paper stacks just got thinner.

The Leapfrog

And this is where the story takes a turn, because the thing about being late is that sometimes you get to skip a step.

Think of the countries that never built landline networks and jumped straight to mobile phones. Places that never had a banking branch on every corner and went straight to payments on a screen. They didn’t have to un-build a legacy system. They just started fresh.

Crystal sees something similar happening now in insurance, but with artificial intelligence. The industry that couldn’t quite get its act together to become digital might accidentally become smarter instead.

His thesis is this: AI can read. A lot. Fast. You hand it a thousand-page litigation file or a patient’s medical history going back 20 years, and in roughly the time it takes to refill your coffee cup, the technology has pulled out what matters. The signal inside the noise. The detail an underwriter would have flagged on page 847 if they’d ever gotten to page 847.

Right Pricing, Not Fast Pricing

Crystal is careful not to oversell this. He doesn’t think AI is going to replace the pricing models insurers have spent centuries refining. What he thinks it will do is execute those models properly for the first time. All the risk has been there. Most of it just wasn’t being priced correctly because nobody had time to look.

He calls this “right pricing.” Not faster pricing, not cheaper pricing. Just pricing that actually reflects what’s in the file.

Then he goes further. Imagine, he says, a world where risk is priced not once a year at renewal, but continuously, every time a new piece of information becomes available. A customer adds a warehouse. Their rate adjusts. A region’s wildfire data updates. Their rate adjusts. The model is always on. “Fully autonomous,” in his words.

A Conversation, Not a Letter

That’s a big swing. It would reorganize the way customers relate to their insurance. And let’s be honest: that relationship is currently defined by confusion, irritation and the suspicion that you’re being overcharged for reasons nobody will explain.

Crystal thinks can AI change that too. Instead of a letter that reads like it was drafted by a committee of attorneys in 1978, you’ll be able to ask your insurer, out loud, in plain English: “Why is my coverage priced this way?” and “What could I do to pay less?” And get an answer that makes sense. On the spot.

Where the Humans Still Win

Crystal is not a techno-utopian. Ask him about the limits and he gets specific. There’s a whole category of risk where the data is thin, the history is anecdotal, and the only real tool is human judgment. The weird stuff. The long-tail stuff. The one in-100-years event. Earthquakes in places that don’t usually have earthquakes. Novel cyberattacks. New drug classes. The rare, the unprecedented, the genuinely strange. Those still need a person in the room.

The coffeehouse, in other words, isn’t going anywhere. It’s just getting an AI assistant.

Where Crystal Ventures Is Putting the Chips

The firm’s portfolio traces the thesis. Sixfold AI helps commercial underwriters get through their pile. With Coverage is a brokerage platform. Roe is trying to make the customer-facing side of insurance feel less like a DMV visit. And Charter Space is pointed at financial infrastructure in newer industries, like space.

Ask customers what they hate about insurance, and they’ll rarely lead with price, Crystal said. They’ll lead with saying it’s slow, the service is bad, and nobody explains anything. Three hundred and forty years of practice, and the industry still hasn’t figured out how to be pleasant and understandable.

That, Crystal said, maybe more than any actuarial model, is what AI has a real shot at fixing.

The Twist

The business that was born pricing catastrophe (fires, shipwrecks, plagues) spent two decades failing to manage a much smaller catastrophe — its own paperwork. Now, just as it was finally getting around to the job, something bigger arrived.

And the companies that were behind on email might end up ahead on intelligence.

“When the world changes,” Crystal told Webster, “a lot of things change together.”

Who knows, maybe somewhere Edward Lloyd is nodding into his coffee.

Insurance carriers are under pressure and operating on the edge. With margins often hovering between 1% and 2%, even small inefficiencies can erase profitability. One of the biggest and most overlooked drivers of margin compression sits inside the payments function.

According to One Inc CEO Ian Drysdale, payments modernization is no longer a technology upgrade. It is a financial strategy.

In a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Drysdale framed the issue clearly. Insurers are not losing margin only in underwriting. They are also losing it through outdated, check-based payment systems embedded in claims operations.

The Hidden Cost Center Dragging Down Margins

Legacy payment workflows were built for a different era, one with lower claims volume, less fraud and fewer expectations around speed. Today, they are creating operational drag at exactly the wrong time.

Paper checks remain embedded across claims, commissions, refunds and subrogation payments. Each check carries cost, not just the $4 to $20 issuance expense cited by financial institutions, but also the downstream burden of tracking, reissuing, reconciling and managing exceptions.

Those costs compound quickly.

Payments often involve multiple stakeholders including policyholders, contractors, medical providers and lenders. Each requires validation. The result is friction-heavy processes that can stretch payout timelines to four to eight weeks.

That delay is not just an operational issue. It directly impacts customer satisfaction, increases claims severity and ultimately erodes margins.

At the same time, fraud risk is escalating. Checks can be intercepted, altered or misdirected, exposing insurers to losses that are both preventable and growing.

Why Payments Modernization Is a Margin Strategy

The shift to digital payments changes the economics fundamentally.

Modern payout platforms validate recipients up front, reducing fraud exposure while enabling near-instant disbursements once claims are approved. More importantly, they remove the manual processes and administrative overhead tied to paper.

Drysdale said the impact is measurable.

He points to savings that can reach tens of millions of dollars annually for large carriers. In some cases, digital methods such as virtual cards can eliminate payout costs entirely for insurers, while vendors accept small fees in exchange for faster access to funds.

This is not incremental improvement. It is structural margin expansion.

“It’s a margin recovery strategy,” Drysdale said, noting that digitizing payments alone can add one to two percentage points back to the bottom line. That is a meaningful shift in an industry where that margin defines viability.

From Operational Fix to Strategic Priority

What is changing now, Drysdale said, is how insurers think about payments.

Historically treated as a back-office function, payments are being reevaluated as a core lever of financial performance and competitive differentiation. Faster payouts improve customer experience. Lower costs improve profitability. Reduced fraud improves resilience.

Adoption curves reflect that shift. Carriers that begin with low digital penetration often move quickly to a majority of payments processed electronically once modern infrastructure is in place.

Artificial intelligence is also beginning to play a role, not as a sweeping transformation, but as a targeted tool for improving reporting, reconciliation and operational visibility. Adoption remains cautious, given regulatory and privacy concerns.

Modernization Under Pressure

The urgency is being driven by external forces insurers cannot control.

Catastrophe losses are increasing in frequency and severity, putting pressure on claims volumes and costs. At the same time, policyholders expect payouts to move as quickly as any other digital transaction.

Legacy systems were not built for either reality.

That mismatch is forcing a broader rethink. If insurers cannot fully control losses or pricing, they must control costs. Payments are one of the few areas where immediate gains are achievable.

The Bottom Line

Payments modernization is no longer optional, and it is no longer just about efficiency.

It is about margin expansion.

Insurers that modernize can reduce cost, accelerate claims, limit fraud and improve customer outcomes, while reclaiming critical basis points of profitability.

Those that do not risk watching their margins erode further under the weight of systems built for a different time.

As Drysdale put it, the industry’s future will hinge on a single capability: resilience.

The collaboration is designed to “enhance the insurance and medical assistance services embedded within Visa cards,” the companies said in a news release Monday (April 13).

Visa cardholders will get access to new insurance features, more transparency on protections, “digitally enhanced” claim processes, and the ability to personalize protections based on individual users, the release added.

The partnership will begin in France before rolling out to other countries in Europe. It is designed to “elevate” the way cardholders engage with their embedded insurance, the companies said.

Florence Mélique, senior vice-president group, and managing director for the France, Belgium, and Luxembourg region at Visa, noted that the company’s embedded insurance programs already protect more than 25 million cardholders just in France.

“As usage scales, expectations are changing – cardholders want clarity, personalisation and faster, digital‑first claims experiences,” Mélique added.

“Through our partnership with Neat, we are reinventing card‑embedded insurance by combining Visa’s scale and trust with next‑generation technology. This partnership allows us to deliver more intuitive, more transparent and more relevant protection, reinforcing the Visa card as an everyday companion that brings real, high‑value benefits well beyond payments.”

Neat’s product offerings include travel and ticket insurance, device protection programs, along with insurance for payments providers and FinTech companies.

In other news from the insurance world, PYMNTS spoke with Rick McCathron, CEO of InsurTech company Hippo, about the changes and challenges facing the industry, in an interview posted Monday.

That report pointed out that the insurance model spent decades largely unchanged. Agents took care of writing policies, underwriting cycles could last weeks, and customer relationships were handled through paperwork and intermediaries. It was an industry that often focused inward, McCathron told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

“Insurance companies didn’t even call customers ‘customers’ until recently,” but rather ‘insureds’ or ‘policyholders,’” he said.

That inward focus has begun to clash with a more complicated operating environment, PYMNTS added. Climate-related losses have introduced volatility that makes pricing and risk selection harder. Insurers must price policies with no idea of when claims will happen, a dynamic McCathron addressed fairly directly.

“Insurance is the only product I can think of that you don’t know what the cost is to manufacture until years down the road,” he said.

Ask most people about their homeowners insurance and you’ll get a shrug. It’s not exactly a dinner-table conversation starter. But behind that ho-hum product sits one of the most structurally complicated, climate-rattled and technologically disrupted markets in financial services. And right now, it’s at a genuine inflection point.

That’s the terrain Karen Webster navigated in a sharp Monday Conversation with Rick McCathron, the CEO of Hippo, a company that has been through its own very public reckoning with what it means to be an InsurTech in 2026. McCathron didn’t come to the conversation with spin. He came with evidence: a turnaround story, a new strategic partnership with Progressive Insurance and a pretty clear-eyed view of where the industry goes from here.

For decades, the insurance model remained largely unchanged. Policies were written through agents, underwriting cycles stretched across weeks, and customer relationships were mediated through paperwork and intermediaries.

As McCathron noted, the industry often focused inward. “Insurance companies didn’t even call customers ‘customers’ until recently,” he said, recalling an era when they were referred to as “insureds” or “policyholders.”

That inward focus now collides with a more complex operating environment. Climate-related losses have introduced volatility that makes pricing and risk selection more difficult. Insurers must price policies without knowing when claims will occur, a dynamic McCathron described pretty directly.

“Insurance is the only product I can think of that you don’t know what the cost is to manufacture until years down the road.”

 Payments, Regulation and the Burden of Longevity

The pressures extend beyond underwriting. Payments remain fragmented, with checks still embedded in workflows, even as fraud risks grow. At the same time, insurers operate within a regulatory framework that limits how quickly they can modernize.

Those constraints are compounded by the industry’s age. Many insurers have operated for decades, if not more than a century. As McCathron observed, these companies have built scale and expertise over long periods, making rapid transformation difficult.

Webster framed the challenge in terms of scale and distribution, noting that reaching customers efficiently remains central to growth.  Technology alone does not solve for customer acquisition or retention.

Technology at the Front End

Where technology has begun to reshape the industry is at the front end of the customer relationship. Insurers can now assemble detailed customer profiles before an application is completed, drawing on third-party data and internal models.

That capability allows insurers to align risk appetite with customer characteristics in real time. McCathron described how distribution partners, like his new deal with Progressive, can route prospective customers to carriers based on underwriting criteria, geography and exposure.

AI supports this process but does not replace human judgment. Regulatory requirements still mandate licensed professionals for key decisions such as claims adjudication. AI, instead, reduces friction in routine tasks and surfaces data for human review.

“Those human agents that very much embrace technology are upleveling their work,” McCathron explained, shifting from routine processes to more complex decision-making.

What It Takes to Compete

Against that backdrop, competitiveness in insurance has become a function of discipline as much as innovation. Hippo’s own trajectory reflects that reality.

When McCathron assumed the CEO role from his seat on the Board, the company was attempting to address multiple priorities at once. “We were trying to do sort of all things to all people,” he told Webster, describing a period that required strategic recalibration.

The reset centered on underwriting discipline, geographic diversification and product focus, not to mention McCathron’s experience in the insurance industry for nearly three decades. Growth would no longer be pursued without a path to profitability. His approach mirrors a broader shift across InsurTech, where early expansion has given way to more measured strategies.

Distribution emerged as a central constraint. Digital-native insurers, McCathron acknowledged, underestimated the difficulty of scaling without established channels. “They miscalculated how difficult it is,” he said, pointing to the time required to build both products and customer pipelines.

From Disruption to Partnership

That realization informs Hippo’s partnership with Progressive, which places its homeowners’ products within a large-scale distribution network across multiple states.

The mechanics of the arrangement are straightforward. Progressive identifies and qualifies customers, while Hippo applies its underwriting and pricing models. The alignment depends on matching customer profiles with each insurer’s risk appetite, a process enabled by data and analytics.

McCathron characterized the outcome as additive. By combining distribution scale with underwriting precision, the partnership creates what he described as a “one plus one equals three scenario in which the customer ultimately benefits.”

The use of AI supports that alignment, particularly in screening and routing prospective customers. However, the structure remains grounded in regulatory compliance and human oversight.

The agreement also reflects a more selective growth strategy. Rather than broad expansion, Hippo is targeting specific geographies and customer segments that align with its underwriting model.

“You can’t run all your business in one particular area,” he said. “You need to diversify geographically. And we very much did that. We got right-sized in each of the areas in which we wrote business. And we refined the strategic direction of the company, which is to have discipline, make sure you’re geographically diversified, but then also make sure the products that you support, offer and take underwriting risk on are also geographically diversified.”

The New Shape of InsurTech

The partnership signals a broader evolution in InsurTech. Early narratives emphasized disruption, with digital-native firms positioned against incumbents. That framing has softened.

McCathron expressed a clear preference for collaboration over confrontation.

“What InsurTech…companies are very good at doing is helping the incumbents modernize their tech stacks,” he stated, while legacy insurers contribute data, scale and experience.

This synergy suggests that the next phase of the industry will be defined less by competition between platforms and more by integration across them.

As McCathron emphasized, the goal is not to capture the entire market but to participate in it more effectively.

“Where we can partner with others, and create better outcomes, it’s a true win-win.”

That gap is widening just as a generational shift hits the industry. Many independent insurance agency owners are nearing retirement, and the path forward can feel like a choice between selling to a large consolidator or trying to modernize alone.

Mike Witte thinks there’s a third option. Witte is founder and CEO of Equal Parts, a platform that acquires independent agencies and provides technology, capital and operational support so they can compete at modern speed and scale while preserving the trust-based model clients value.

Before launching Equal Parts, Witte built workflow technology in oil and gas. In a conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, he explained why the leap made sense: both sectors are huge, but relationship-driven.

“I don’t think oil and gas and insurance are actually that far apart,” Witte said. “They’re both really big industries in which, once you get into it, everybody knows everybody. And it has a heavy relationship dynamic.”

The lesson he carried over is that innovation should strengthen the people doing the work. “It wasn’t about automating the people away,” he said. “It’s using innovation to enhance the human connection.”

Equal Parts is now scaling that thesis with new funding. The company has announced a $23 million Series A round led by Inspired Capital. Since its March founding, Equal Parts says acquired agencies have driven nearly 40% revenue growth and almost 50% bottom-line improvement. The company’s targets are bold: acquire 25 agencies this year and become the fastest company to $1 billion in premiums within the next 24 months.

Succession Plans

The pitch to agency owners starts with succession and sometimes frustration. “If you’re 65 years old and you’ve built a small town agency at some point you think ‘Where do I retire? What is my succession plan?’” Witte said. For many smaller agencies, he added, there aren’t many appealing options such as selling to private equity or big conglomerate.

Equal Parts wants to offer an exit without stripping away culture and autonomy. And for owners who still want to stay active, the company offers a different division of labor. Witte described one agency owner in his late 60s who knew he needed to sell but “wasn’t quite ready to … hang it up.” After joining Equal Parts, the owner stayed close to customers while the platform took over the blocking and tackling.

Witte summarized their message to the owner: “Just go spend time with your customers,” he said. “We’ll take care of it.”

What, exactly, is being “taken care of?”

Witte argued the industry’s biggest drag is less a lack of software than a lack of connection between systems.

“I came in with this idea that insurance had a technology problem. And I don’t believe that’s true,” he said. “Insurance has a massive connectivity problem. Nothing connects. Everything is a point-to-point system.”

In plain terms, he said, the insurance companies underwriting policies often don’t connect cleanly to agency management systems (the software that tracks policies, renewals and documents). Those systems may not connect to CRMs (customer relationship tools) or to websites and intake forms.

The outcome is predictable: people spend time moving information instead of serving customers.

Equal Parts’ operating system is designed to standardize workflows across acquisitions and automate repetitive back-office steps so relationship managers can focus on clients and growth.

“We’re absorbing that complexity for the people that are the heart of the agencies, which are the relationship managers,” Witte said. “Let us absorb the complexity of everything else.”

That people-first view also defines how Witte picks agencies to acquire.

“It’s not about a book of business. It’s not about a location. It is about people,” he said.

Early acquisitions set the tone for the broader network, so Equal Parts looks for owners who can be culture anchors and who are willing to rethink how the work gets done. Agencies that join, he added, tend to be motivated by the technology and the vision, not by a promise that they must give up their identity.

The AI Angle

Webster asked how AI might reshape distribution as consumers increasingly use large language models to describe their needs and compare coverage. Could that pull customers toward buying directly from carriers?

Witte said he expects AI to change how people learn and shop, but he doesn’t see it removing the need for a licensed professional to match products and policies with customers. He also said he sees an upside in customers arriving better informed, because insurance is a complicated product and many people don’t know what to ask for.

For Witte, AI should raise service quality by removing friction, not by replacing the conversation.

“Picking up the phone and calling my insurance agent or sending them a text, and two minutes later I get a text back and things are addressed,” he said, “that’s a pretty good service.”

He doesn’t see insurance as “the space in which people want to talk to robots” when something goes wrong. If AI can strip away some of the manual work behind the scenes, he said he believes agencies can respond faster and with more consistency.

Looking ahead, Witte wants Equal Parts to function less like a consolidator and more like a network. Once agencies share infrastructure, he sees room to expand what trusted relationship managers can offer beyond core property and casualty.

“There’s no reason that agent can’t be given the platform capabilities to sell great group benefits or to sell financial services if the back office is built to handle the complexity,” he said. “The world will look very different in five years than it does today, and even very different in a year. The companies that will be great are the companies that can move fast and adapt.”

Competition Has Turned Insurance Into a Buyer’s Market

The report “The Demand for Instant Insurance: Why Speed Is the New Trust,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Ingo Payments, underscores that insurance markets are now firmly tilted toward consumers, with elevated shopping levels and declining tolerance for friction.

A growing share of customers report low satisfaction, and those customers are far more likely to change carriers when renewal approaches. In this environment, loyalty is increasingly transactional and time-sensitive.

Customers Are Willing to Pay

One of the clearest signals in the research is that policyholders do not just want faster payments; many value speed enough to pay for it. PYMNTS Intelligence finds that 23% of consumers receiving insurance disbursements between $500 and $1,000 are willing to pay a fee for instant access to funds, along with 18% of those receiving smaller payouts.

That willingness reframes disbursement speed from an operational upgrade into a perceived premium service. In moments of loss or disruption, faster access to money is treated as relief, not convenience.

Speed and Satisfaction

The report shows that payout speed has overtaken nearly every other factor in shaping how customers judge their insurance experience. Nearly half of all claimants rate speed as the most important element of the payment process, ahead of choice, simplicity or cost.

This effect intensifies during catastrophic or severe-weather events, when more than half of policyholders prioritize quick payouts above all else. In these moments, speed becomes synonymous with care.

Why Loyalty Is Ultimately About Trust and Churn

Trust is built when insurers deliver at the moment customers feel most vulnerable. The research shows that customers who are dissatisfied with their claims experience are far more likely to cite slow payments as a central failure, while highly satisfied customers consistently point to payment speed as a reinforcing factor.

This dynamic directly affects churn. Delayed payments erode goodwill and increase switching intent, even among customers who otherwise value their insurer.

How Disbursement Methods Reinforce Loyalty

While checks still dominate insurance payouts, the report highlights a growing shift toward digital options that give customers control. Policyholders who are offered payment choice report markedly higher satisfaction than those limited to a single method.

Among instant disbursement recipients, push-to-credit card payments emerge as the most commonly used rail, followed by digital wallets, real-time bank deposits and push-to-debit cards. The preference for card-based speed reflects the urgency many customers feel to access funds immediately.

Why Disbursements Have Become a Loyalty Strategy

The core insight of the PYMNTS Intelligence and Ingo collaboration is that disbursements now sit at the center of the insurance loyalty equation. Payments are no longer a back-office function but a defining brand moment that shapes trust, satisfaction and renewal behavior.

For insurers competing in a crowded, price-sensitive market, the ability to move money quickly is becoming one of the most reliable ways to keep customers when it matters most.

The company’s Series D round, announced last week, will allow it to bolster its operating system, which it says it constructed to combat the industry problem of slow decisions and innovation cycles that could stretch into years.

“Telematics and AI have changed that equation,” wrote Co-Founder and CEO Rushil Goel. “For the first time, it became possible to continuously learn from real-world driving behavior at scale, and to rebuild insurance around live signals rather than static assumptions.”

He added that Nirvana saw a chance to rethink that model, building the company as an “AI-native issuer” that employs data, machine learning and human expertise to improve and accelerate decisions on pricing, underwriting and claims.

“Because of that foundation, our teams can test, ship and iterate far faster than traditional carriers,” Goel added. “Over the past year alone, being AI-native has allowed us to release dozens of new features and platform enhancements, rapidly experiment across the insurance life cycle, and turn real-world outcomes into immediate improvements.”

The company said its systems let safe fleets get upfront discounts of up to 20%, based on driving behavior instead of “broad averages.” The systems can also “analyze risk and deliver precise quotes in minutes, giving fleets back their most valuable resource, time,” Goel said.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown how crucial quicker decisions can be for the insurance industry.

“The industry’s math has changed. Affordable coverage attracts buyers; fast claims keep them coming back,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

“Forty-six percent of insurance claimants say payment velocity is their top priority — eclipsing concerns like convenience, choice or security.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS took a closer look at the way AI is impacting the insurance sector earlier this year in an interview with Aviad Pinkovezky, CEO of InsurTech platform First Connect.

He said that eventually, the technology will affect all aspects of the industry once the regulatory frameworks are hammered out, touching everything from pricing to claims construction.

First Connect’s AI efforts  have expedited the process of analyzing and approving, or rejecting, errors and omissions policies that agents need to upload to the company as part of their onboarding experience.

“There is some manual, human validation here, but at the end of the day, AI has proven to be a game changer,” Pinkovezky said.

Payments are maturing into a utility layer for the global economy.

The unsung heroes of the sector’s operations can increasingly determine which companies can grow with confidence and which will falter.

“My infrastructure team, cloud, site reliability and database are remarkable,” One Inc Chief Information Officer Elizabeth Hoemeke told PYMNTS during a discussion for the What’s Next in Payments Series, “Unsung Heroes.”

“They don’t get enough kudos and credit … but they move the needle very quietly behind the scenes,” Hoemeke said.

That quiet work is foundational. As One Inc itself scales toward larger, tier-one insurance carriers, expectations around uptime, security and recoverability escalate. High availability is no longer aspirational; it is contractual. Over the past year, One Inc completed a step change in resilience by implementing multi-region disaster recovery across its products.

“We already had a high availability configuration, but this year we implemented, through our infrastructure group, high multi-region DR,” Hoemeke said.

This was not a compliance exercise.

“We don’t just tabletop exercise it,” she said. “We are now executing a full failover every quarter for both of our products.”

Those rehearsals matter. Each failover surfaces new insights, edge cases and opportunities to harden systems further. The payoff comes not just in theoretical resilience, but in real-world crisis response.

Orchestrating an Expanding Ecosystem While Maintaining Resilience

Payments resilience today extends beyond internal systems. Platforms like One Inc operate within dense ecosystems of banks, payment service providers, digital wallets and insurers. Orchestrating those relationships requires technical sophistication and operational accountability.

One Inc’s approach starts with “high availability, multi-region DR” and extensive automation around monitoring and alerting, Hoemeke said. It also depends on tight collaboration across product development, engineering, security and compliance.

“Those four pillars work very closely together … just to make sure that we’re thinking of everything as we do that design,” she said.

Infrastructure in this context is not treated as a cost center or a reactive function, but as an enabling layer for product innovation.

“Our engineers just want to put hands on the keyboard,” Hoemeke said. “They want to do great work.”

On the external side, One Inc integrates with a range of payment providers, including Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle, and traditional banking partners like JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bank. The goal is breadth without fragility.

“We are trying to meet every client that we have where they want us to be,” Hoemeke said.

Identity, Risk and Invisible Security Are Infrastructure Tentpoles

Scalability, reliability and security standards are increasingly non-negotiable in today’s always-on environment. As One Inc scales, identity and fraud controls have become central to its architecture. Like many payment platforms, it faces persistent automated attacks.

“BIN attacks are really prevalent,” Hoemeke said, referring to fraud attempts that exploit card number patterns.

Identity federation is another resilience pillar. Single sign-on via security assertion markup language allows carrier partners to integrate seamlessly while reducing credential sprawl. Strong multifactor authentication policies, improved audit trails, and Microsoft Entra as a trusted identity provider form part of what Hoemeke described as a defense-in-depth strategy.

Looking ahead, One Inc is exploring risk-based authentication with an emphasis on adaptive controls that escalate only when risk justifies it.

Underlying these capabilities is a deliberate architectural consolidation. Over the past several years, One Inc migrated its platforms fully into Microsoft Azure, choosing focus over multi-cloud complexity.

“We chose to centralize into Azure so that we could take advantage of human-scale training,” Hoemeke said.

Standardization allows engineers to spend less time context-switching and more time building differentiated capabilities.

The company is leaning into cloud-native patterns, API-first design and event-driven architectures. New services are being built as composable components on Kubernetes, enabling faster iteration and clearer ownership.

“We want to focus our engineering efforts on our own IP,” Hoemeke said, rather than rebuilding commodity capabilities already offered by hyperscalers.

Data sits at the center of this strategy. Extensive data warehouses support internal analytics and client-facing insights, helping insurers understand payment trends and customer behavior over time. In an industry where margins are tight and expectations are rising, such visibility increasingly differentiates platforms.

The future of payments, it turns out, depends less on what launches next than on what quietly holds everything together.

In the meantime, we did have several new cases come to the forefront over the past week. That’s where we will focus as more companies develop the trust and security necessary to fulfill agentic AI’s promise. The first one comes from Harvard Business Review, who put out a report last week that spelled out agentic AI’s promise as an internal enterprise workhorse.

The report takes the stance that while companies are eager to apply agentic AI to customer-facing operations, those environments are too variable and error-sensitive for current systems. It argues that the real near-term value lies in internal workflows where tasks are structured, repetitive, and supported by humans in the loop. Agentic AI is progressing through a clear maturity curve, from prompting, to retrieval-augmented generation, to multi-agent architectures that divide work into small, supervised steps. These systems can meaningfully raise accuracy and efficiency, but only when deployed in controlled settings with defined inputs and strong guardrails.

HBR highlights case evidence showing that multi-agent systems can reduce resolution times, improve data quality, and save costs when embedded in back-office processes such as technical field operations. Still, the authors stress that building and scaling these systems requires significant organizational effort: deep process literacy, cross-functional governance, integration with legacy systems, and ongoing experimentation. True autonomy remains distant; in the near term, value comes from augmenting workers rather than replacing them. Companies that develop internal capabilities—data engineers, context designers, and what the authors call “gen AI black belts”—will be best positioned to capture the next decade of AI-driven operational gains. 

“Customer-facing contexts are a bad fit for the current capabilities of AI agents,” the article states. “They’re messy and unpredictable… Backend and operational processes are fertile ground because they are structured and repetitive—much better suited for agentic workflow automation.” 

Insurance, Agentic Style

But apparently the insurance business didn’t get the memo. It is zooming ahead in the agentic revolution, with a major trade publication carrying a warning about adopting it and detailing some use cases. Insurance Business reports that major global insurers are accelerating their shift toward agentic AI, moving from controlled pilots to real operational deployment. While early adopters such as Allianz are beginning with highly specific tasks—like automating food spoilage claims—insurers across the industry are now exploring how autonomous agents can reshape customer interactions, underwriting, and claims workflows. Competitive pressure is rising as insurtechs test AI agents capable of handling live customer conversations, pushing traditional carriers to evaluate where and how agentic systems should fit within their technology stacks. Early gains are compelling: analysis cited in the article shows that insurers deploying agentic AI across dynamic workflows may achieve productivity improvements of 20% to 30%. 

The article emphasizes that the long-term transformation will depend as much on people and process as on technology. Zurich’s Tim Kane argues that insurers must rethink distribution models, redesign workflow orchestration, and adopt hybrid architectures that blend customer-facing automation with deeper “core” decisioning systems. But successful rollout demands a workforce trained not only to use agentic AI but also to supervise, refine, and co-manage it. Even after deployment, significant effort goes into continuously training and calibrating agents, ensuring compliance, and preserving human judgment where empathy or nuance is required. The insurers that adapt fastest—both technologically and organizationally—are poised to lead as agentic AI becomes embedded in the industry’s operational core. 

Financial Services

Insurance also figured heavily in CapGemini’s prospective use cases for agentic AI in financial services. It argues that agentic AI represents a major shift for financial services, enabling systems that can plan, act, and adapt across complex workflows in banking and insurance. Unlike generative AI, which assists with narrow tasks, agentic AI is designed to make autonomous decisions and manage end-to-end processes such as claims triage, fraud checks, loan onboarding, underwriting, and personalized customer engagement.

Yet most financial institutions struggle to move beyond pilots. Only 26% have the capabilities to scale AI effectively, with many stalling due to project complexity, regulatory demands, and the challenge of integrating governance, data, and model controls from day one. Capgemini stresses that the opportunity is meaningful—cycle-time reductions, higher straight-through processing, and consistent decisioning—but firms need structured methods and experienced partners to avoid stalled programs and unrealized ROI. 

The article highlights that agentic AI is already improving performance across the financial services value chain. Insurers are using agents to accelerate claims, enhance underwriting accuracy, personalize distribution, and improve servicing. Banks are deploying agentic systems in retail engagement, wealth management, investment research, cards, and payments, with one Capgemini client reporting a 20–30% increase in developer throughput using agentic workflows. Capgemini also details how agents are reshaping cloud modernization by autonomously assessing legacy systems, assisting production teams, and orchestrating hybrid environments. Strong governance—explainability, auditability, human-in-the-loop design, and model risk controls—is essential as EU and U.S. regulators tighten oversight.

Ultimately, Capgemini concludes that firms win not by flashy demonstrations, but by disciplined engineering, clear guardrails, and measurable outcomes that scale responsibly. “Agentic AI isn’t magic – it’s disciplined engineering and change management,” it states. “The winners… deploy with strong guardrails, prove impact, and scale responsibly.” 

The top spot for October in the insurance category comes from a newcomer: Jerry: The AllCar App. It posted a six point gain. Jerry markets itself as “America’s first AllCar app,” giving drivers a single mobile hub to compare car insurance quotes from dozens of carriers, buy or switch policies inside the app, monitor driving behavior, refinance auto loans, and track maintenance and repair costs, with features like PriceProtect, DriveShield and GarageGuard designed to cut premiums and make ownership less stressful. A spike in Jerry’s recent usage is consistent with the broader environment the company itself has documented, in which car insurance inflation has hit a four-decade high, with annual increases near 20 percent in October driving more consumers to shop aggressively for savings. 

At the same time, Jerry has scaled to roughly 5 million U.S. customers and invested in visible consumer marketing, including October 2025 social campaigns positioning the app as a fast way to handle quotes, comparisons and switching in one place, while reviews highlight its ease of use and ability to surface better rates without spammy follow-up calls. Taken together, surging insurance costs, a clear “one-tap savings” value proposition and active October outreach give a plausible explanation for why Jerry would climb rapidly in PYMNTS’ insurance app rankings that month.

Also posting a six point gain was a more familiar name, Liberty Mutual. Liberty Mutual’s mobile app functions as a “one-stop insurance resource” that lets customers securely log in, view digital ID cards, pay bills, change payment schedules, update coverages, access policy documents, and file and manage auto and property claims, including uploading damage photos and calling 24/7 roadside assistance, all from a single interface. The app also ties into Liberty Mutual’s RightTrack telematics program, which runs in the background to capture driving behavior and reward safe drivers with premium discounts, giving policyholders a concrete reason to keep the app installed and active.

A sharp October usage gain would be consistent with the broader environment of elevated insurance premiums, as Liberty Mutual itself notes that inflation, higher repair costs and labor shortages are pushing auto and home insurance rates higher, prompting consumers to monitor bills, adjust coverage and seek discounts more aggressively via digital channels. Recent industry research also spotlighted Liberty Mutual among the top digital performers in P&C insurance, with strong mobile and security capabilities, which may have further nudged policyholders to rely on the app as their primary service touchpoint during that period.

Lemonade Insurance took the third spot with a three point gain. Lemonade’s app is the front door for its fully digital insurance business, letting consumers buy and manage renters, homeowners, car, pet and term life policies in one place and handle almost everything through an AI assistant. Customers are required to use the app (or web) to manage their policies and file claims, which are driven by Lemonade’s chatbots Maya and Jim, designed to guide users through quotes, policy changes and claims in a conversational flow that can approve simple claims in minutes. The same app surface also lets users swipe between multiple product lines and take advantage of bundling discounts across car, renters, homeowners and pet insurance, reinforcing the “all in one” positioning.

Lemonade has not reported an October app-usage spike specifically, but several developments around that period make a jump in PYMNTS’ rankings plausible. The company has been rolling out Lemonade Car to more states, reaching about 42% of the U.S. car insurance market by mid-2025, which directly increases the addressable base of app users. Management also highlighted strong Q2 2025 results, 35% revenue growth, rising in-force premiums and stepped-up customer acquisition spend in its August shareholder letter and early-October investor coverage, putting a brighter spotlight on the brand ahead of Q3 earnings and likely supporting higher download and engagement volumes into October. Combined with a backdrop of elevated insurance costs that push consumers toward digital tools for savings and faster service, those expansion and marketing dynamics offer a reasonable explanation for Lemonade’s three-point gain in the PYMNTS insurance app rankings.