2025 Global Insurance Outlook: E&Y Report Outlines Growth Through Technology and Data-Driven Transformation

Market Trends and Growth Outlook

Despite ongoing market volatility and geopolitical tensions, the global insurance industry shows robust growth potential through 2025. According to EY's Global Insurance Outlook, the industry has maintained relatively strong performance in recent years and is projected to continue steady growth in both mature and emerging economies.

The US economy is positioned as the global growth leader in 2025, with GDP growth expected to hover around 2.1%. This American exceptionalism has significant implications for insurers, driving capital flows toward dollar-denominated assets and strengthening the dollar. Meanwhile, Europe faces more challenging conditions, with political fragmentation and rising debt pressures straining economic stability and potentially widening protection gaps.

Growth Opportunities by Sector

Commercial Insurance and Reinsurance

The report highlights cyber insurance as a trillion-dollar opportunity, with the market doubling in volume from 2017-2020 and again from 2020-2022. This rapid growth is creating document processing challenges as underwriters face increasing submission volumes with complex, unstructured documentation requiring careful data extraction and validation.

Climate risk presents another significant growth avenue. With annual natural catastrophe losses consistently exceeding $100 billion, parametric insurance solutions are gaining traction. These utilize real-time environmental data to provide faster, more efficient protection. The integration of external data with policy information demands sophisticated document processing capabilities that can handle diverse document formats while ensuring data accuracy.

Personal Lines

For personal lines insurers, growth opportunities center around personalization and flexibility. The rise of autonomous vehicles, evolving mobility ecosystems, and smart homes are driving innovation toward usage-based insurance, product bundling, and embedded offerings. This shift requires efficient processing of both structured and unstructured documents across multiple channels, combining machine intelligence with human validation to ensure accuracy.

Life Insurance

Life insurers are finding growth in retirement solutions addressing the global savings gap. With aging populations worldwide and longer lifespans, the demand for products supporting both the accumulation and decumulation phases of retirement is strong. The increasing complexity of these offerings creates document processing challenges where human-in-the-loop validation becomes essential for compliance and customer satisfaction.

The Underwriting Transformation Imperative

The insurance industry's growth trajectory hinges on transforming underwriting operations to handle increasing submission volumes while improving accuracy. 

This evolution reflects a fundamental shift where AI-powered document processing solutions enable underwriters to focus on risk assessment rather than manual data extraction. The report notes that well-implemented AI solutions can increase underwriting capacity by up to 35%, allowing carriers to process significantly more submissions without sacrificing quality.

Technology as Strategic Enabler

The report emphasizes that technology and data capabilities must be treated as core strategic assets. Key findings include:

• 99% of insurers are either already investing in generative AI or making plans to do so
• 54% of P&C insurers prioritize GenAI investments for predictive risk assessments
• 51% focus on enhanced underwriting capabilities

However, a critical insight emerges: successful AI implementation requires a balanced approach that combines machine efficiency with human expertise. As the report states, "It's an irony of the modern insurance business that human talent is the difference maker between outstanding and mediocre returns on technology investments."

This human-in-the-loop approach is particularly valuable in complex document processing, where context, judgment, and domain expertise remain essential for accurate data extraction from unstructured submissions. Insurers achieving the greatest efficiency gains are those deploying solutions that augment rather than replace human underwriters.

Workforce and Operational Transformation

Organizations that successfully combine modernized technology, sophisticated data capabilities, and refreshed talent strategies will capture the most significant growth opportunities. 

For underwriting teams specifically, the integration of advanced document processing solutions delivers several benefits:

• Reduced manual data entry time
• Faster submission processing
• Improved data accuracy
• Enhanced ability to handle complex, unstructured documents
• Greater capacity to scale operations during high-volume periods
  
  

Conclusion

EY's outlook suggests that insurers who effectively leverage AI-powered document processing within a human-in-the-loop framework will gain significant competitive advantages in 2025 and beyond. By streamlining submission intake, extracting key data with ML and LLM technologies, and maintaining human oversight for validation, carriers can achieve the 5X efficiency improvements necessary to capitalize on emerging growth opportunities while ensuring 100% accuracy.

Read the full EY 2025 Global Insurance Outlook report >