Summary
- 01 The basics no longer set you apart. Guidance does. Real-time premium calculation, mobile-friendly flows, and clear product comparison have become standard. What sets you apart now is human support at the right moments.
- 02 Transparency is becoming a competitive advantage. AI increasingly determines premiums and acceptance, but customers can barely see how. Insurers that explain how decisions come about build trust before anyone else does.
- 03 The number-one reason people abandon a flow isn't form friction. It's unclarity. Consumers value simplicity and clarity over personalized advice. Make it understandable before you make it smart.
- 04 Multilingual support is the blind spot. Only one of the sixteen sign-up flows supports more than Dutch alone, while international customers, labor migrants, and expats make up a growing audience. Whoever invests in multilingual support second gets an almost instant edge.
- 05 A poor sign-up experience doesn't cost you the customer, but it does cost you margin. One in five consumers switches providers right after a bad experience. The rest stay, but start comparing on price.
"Why does one insurer lead the market and another fall behind? The answer is rarely willpower. It's architecture."
The insurance market is moving faster than ever. And the online sign-up flow, once an afterthought, has quietly become the sharpest competitive front.
We see it from the inside. As the vendor behind the software that runs these sign-up flows, we see every day why one insurer keeps pace with these developments and another doesn't. The answer is rarely willpower. It's architecture.
This is our second year of systematically testing the market. 16 insurers, MGAs, and intermediaries, 19 criteria, 250 consumers. What we found: the basics are in order. But the players pulling ahead today aren't doing it with big technical leaps. They're doing it with small design choices they can ship quickly and on their own. That's no accident.
This report shows what those players do differently, and what it takes to keep up.
Where did the sector stand in 2025?
Last year we assessed 22 non-life insurers and MGAs against 14 criteria. Based on their score, we split them into three digital profiles, showing where each group stands and where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie:
The conclusion was clear: digital maturity was still the exception. Personalization stayed superficial, mobile was often a weak link, and a sizeable gap remained between the customer promise and the reality.
What changed in a year
In 2026 we're seeing movement. Mobile-friendliness is now sorted out market-wide. Real-time premium calculation is standard. But the second layer, with adaptive flows, AI transparency, help during sign-up, and multilingual support, remains largely open ground. Also new this year: one foreign insurtech scores above established names in the Dutch market.
The question is no longer whether the basics are in order. They are. The question is who takes the next step first, and who keeps watching.
Drop off or convert? Customer experience as a competitive factor
The sign-up flow isn't a marketing feature or an IT project. It's the moment a customer decides whether to switch, stay, or disappear. The numbers back that up.
Here's what the consumer survey of 250 consumers tells us:
Customers don't drop off over forms. They drop off over uncertainty
The three biggest reasons people abandon a sign-up all come down to clarity, not technology.
abandoned an online sign-up at least once. 30% did so more than once.
A good sign-up experience doesn't just lift conversion. It also lowers the odds that customers go straight to price-comparing with a competitor.
Customer experience, then, decides not just who wins the customer, but who keeps the margin.
What this means in practice
The weak link is rarely the form itself. Customers get stuck when they don't understand what's covered, why certain information is being asked for, or how a premium was calculated.
The best performers here rely on three design choices: pop-ups answering "what's covered?", policy terms visible at all times, and sticky pricing, where the premium stays visible as you move through the flow.
The battle is no longer won on the application form itself. It's won in the moments when customers hesitate. The insurance firms that offer the most clarity there convert better and protect their premium from price comparison.
The methodology: how we tested 16 sign-up flows
To judge digital maturity, we didn't look at plans, roadmaps or presentations. We tested the sign-up flows themselves.
In April 2026, we worked through sixteen online sign-up processes using the same realistic test data. For twelve players that meant a car insurance policy; for the other four, their main consumer product.
Each sign-up flow was scored on nineteen criteria across seven core domains: accessibility, usability, personalization, automation, explainability, performance, and AI. We also looked at an eighth topic: omnichannel. Can the customer switch to a different channel without starting over? Customers switch between channels more and more during sign-up, but we couldn't yet test this as thoroughly at every player, so we discuss it separately from the nineteen main criteria.
The 19 criteria we tested are split across seven core categories, plus an eighth topic: omnichannel continuity.
Each criterion was scored from 1 (not present) to 5 (fully optimized). We also ran a consumer survey (n=250) and spoke with experts across the market.
The biggest surprise came from one of the frontrunners. Last year the company still counted among the traditional players. Twelve months later, we're looking at a fully rebuilt sign-up flow that performs better on almost every component. It shows that digital maturity isn't a matter of waiting years for a new system. Organizations can move much faster than most people assume.
Jeroen Riesewijk · Digital Marketeer, Novulo
Digital maturity: three types of players
As in 2025, we distinguish three groups in the market in 2026: digital frontrunners, hybrid players, and traditional players.
*The yardstick changed: 2025 tested 22 non-life insurers and MGAs against 14 criteria (point count), 2026 measures 16 insurers, MGAs, and intermediaries against 19 criteria (average score 1-5). The comparison is therefore directional, not an exact score-for-score match.
In the sections that follow, we zoom in on the key dimensions of the benchmark. For each one, we show what we observed, what consumers say, and what it means for the market.
The common thread: the difference between frontrunners and laggards isn't functionality, it's the architecture that determines how fast you can change.
01Accessibility
Blind spot+
Multilingual support is the blind spot of 2026. Fifteen of the sixteen sign-up flows are available in Dutch only. Only one sign-up flow supports English and Polish alongside Dutch. That leaves multilingual support with an average score of 1.19.
At the same time, the basics are in order: mobile-friendliness 4.8, readability 5.0 and browser compatibility 5.0. The interface itself is mature, but reaching the whole audience isn't yet.
02Usability
Basics in order+
The market scores well on consistent UX (4.75) and product comparison (4.93). The basics are largely in order.
The biggest challenge is process friction (3.31). Sign-up flows vary widely in length and complexity, from fewer than 15 to more than 40 questions.
The consumer survey confirms this:
- 54% of consumers have abandoned a sign-up process at least once.
- Top 3 reasons: unclear coverage (36%), too many or too complicated questions (24%), no premium shown up front (22%).
03Adaptive and personalized journeys
In motion+
Personalization is developing, but not yet fully integrated across the whole customer journey. We see a clear gap between personalization in the end result and support during the process itself.
That pattern shows up in the scores: premium personalization 4.33, personalized recommendations 4.38, and support during the flow 3.38.
Consumer expectations run higher:
- 77% want or expect an adaptive customer journey.
- 59% want to speak to a person for complex situations.
- Only 3% always want human contact.
One frontrunner shows a specialist on screen (for example: "Anne, Product Specialist Auto") alongside an AI colleague with a transparent disclaimer. Another has its chatbot pop up on its own after a while with "Hi, can I help you with anything?" and offers a direct line to a specialist. Yet another combines chat with a trust mark, customer reviews, and free cancellation help.
Behind all these design choices sits a platform where AI, chat, and human contact can be deployed as separate building blocks. That keeps every small change from turning into a long IT project.
Geertjan Weijman · Insync
04Data and automation
Standard+
Real-time premium calculation is standard (5.0). Real-time acceptance too (4.73). The difference lies in the use of external data sources (4.44). Frontrunners integrate external sources like license plate, postcode, identification, and switching services as a matter of course, while some insurers still make the customer look up their own chassis number or claims code.
The consumer survey:
- 36% had their data auto-filled. 42% said this didn't happen and they had to look up and enter everything themselves. 22% couldn't recall.
- Of that 36%, 72% of the time it involved address-via-postcode. License plate and Chamber of Commerce data sources turned out to be rare, each mentioned only 8 times.
05Explainability
Biggest gap+
On explanation and policy terms (average 3.69), the gap between frontrunners and traditional players is the widest. One frontrunner shows policy terms, customer reviews, and a trust mark right alongside every quote, with explanations for each add-on via clear labels. At several hybrid players we see modal pop-ups answering "what's covered under third-party plus limited comprehensive?" that keep the customer in the flow. At traditional players, policy terms often only surface on the final page, or via a click-through path with no way back.
06Performance
Laggard+
The market performs poorly here. Visible waiting times average 1.62. Most sites don't tell the customer that something is happening, or how long it will take.
Ominimo, a Hungarian insurtech operating in the Netherlands via Zurich, averages 4.06. It stands out mainly for how it communicates wait times. While the premium is being calculated, this appears: "Sit back and relax, we're calculating your premium based on the details you provided. This usually takes less than a second."
Not a revolutionary feature, but a concrete way to bring the customer along for the process. One foreign player scoring straight above established Dutch names shows exactly which bar the market hasn't set for itself yet.
07AI
Barely visible+
AI mostly gets used as a standalone feature (chat or support), and still rarely as part of the core logic behind acceptance and pricing. This topic gets its own chapter (see chapter 4).
08Omnichannel
Limited data+
Can the customer resume the sign-up process through a different channel, for instance after switching from app to website, or between two connected environments? Customers are switching between channels more and more during sign-up, which makes this a more relevant question. Our measurements here are still limited, but the picture is consistent: only a handful of players recognize existing customers across channels. In most cases a customer has to start over, even as an existing relationship. At one company this created real friction: switching between two connected environments felt like jumping between separate systems rather than one continuous process.
Digital maturity in the insurance market isn't determined by interface quality or feature sets, but by the underlying architecture.
The differences between frontrunners and traditional players show up in the UX, but they originate deep in the platform: whoever can change fast wins. Whoever can't is only polishing the surface.
