By Katie Butler
Circa 2015, the InsurTech narrative was, “Independent agents and legacy carriers are largely irrelevant and resistant to change. They will be displaced because all the customer really wants is immediacy and access at their fingertips. We’re here to disrupt.”
As we head into 2025, the new InsurTech narrative is, “We know independent agents are here to stay—and we’re here to help.”
No wonder independent agents have a decade of InsurTech-induced whiplash.
“If you rewound the clock, [the relationship] between InsurTech and independent agents was contentious,” says Chris Cline, executive director of the Big “I” Agents Council for Technology (ACT). With billions of dollars of capital coming into the industry and tech startups touting the mantra that independent agents were going away, the future felt unsettled.
Throw in a global pandemic that exacerbated the need for interactions to be fully digitized and remote, and it could have meant the end of independent agents. But the opposite happened.Happily, there are steps carriers and agencies can take that are comparatively inexpensive that will also improve efficiency in transactions.
