Despite strong market incentives, many insurers find themselves slowed by internal complexity and outdated tooling. One of the most persistent challenges is time-to-market. Launching a new product, or even updating an existing one, can often take six to twelve months, due to siloed teams, manual processes, and lengthy development cycles.

According to Datos Insights (formerly Aite‑Novarica), a firm that provides market intelligence to financial services and insurance companies, many carriers still rely on legacy core systems and lack the cloud agility, low-code tools, API connectivity, and centralized versioning needed to move faster.

Compliance and governance introduce additional friction. As insurers adapt products for different regulatory areas, they must manage variations in rating, forms, and documentation, often without purpose-built tools to handle version control or traceability. Meanwhile, customer and distribution expectations have surged ahead, requiring personalized products, real-time updates, and digital experiences that most traditional processes cannot support at scale or speed.

For organizations ready to build greater agility into the process, several core solution providers now offer modern product design capabilities:

Guidewire Software, the market leader in P&C core systems, offers Advanced Product Designer (APD), a cloud-native solution designed for rapid, business-led product configuration. APD integrates seamlessly with Guidewire PolicyCenter, Jutro UI, Cloud Rating, and its Predict solution, enabling visual product modeling, version control, and automated propagation of changes across the ecosystem. Duck Creek Technologies offers Product Studio, a modular SaaS tool for configuring and deploying insurance products. It has a strong U.S. presence and is popular among mid-sized carriers. Sapiens provides Product Designer and CoreSuite, used primarily in Europe, Latin America, and APAC. Its tools support regulatory compliance and flexible product management across jurisdictions.

Complementing these solutions are low-code and no-code platforms such as Instanda, Socotra, and Unqork, which are often used by MGAs or digital-first carriers to spin up embedded or niche products. On the pricing side, platforms like Earnix, Hyperexponential, and Quantee enable faster iteration and data-driven decision-making for rating and personalization.

Whether building new products or modernizing existing ones, insurers should seek platforms that do more than digitize old workflows. Today’s most effective product design tools are cloud-native, business-user-friendly, and tightly integrated across the insurance value chain. They offer capabilities such as:

• Visual product modeling for intuitive design and faster cross-team collaboration
• Segmentation and reuse, allowing variation by state, line, or tier without duplication
• Versioning and auditability to manage updates across jurisdictions
• Automated propagation of changes to UI, rating, APIs, and data layers
• Support for business-led configuration, reducing reliance on development resources

Beyond accelerating time-to-market, modern product design platforms also deliver stronger compliance and auditability, lower IT burden, and greater flexibility in pricing, bundling, and distribution experimentation.

System integration partners can help insurers adopt and scale these tools effectively moving quickly from proof-of-concept pilots to full-scale rollouts while ensuring alignment with long-term modernization and governance goals.

Speed is no longer optional in the P&C market; it is a competitive mandate. Carriers that delay modernization risk not only slower product launches, but higher compliance risk, mounting technical debt, and lost opportunities to serve emerging market segments.

In contrast, those who invest in advanced product design platforms today can unlock faster time-to-market, create greater product flexibility, and enhance customer experiences, while laying the foundation for AI-driven innovation, embedded distribution, and dynamic risk management.

In a market that rewards agility, the best time to start with advanced product design is now.