Summary
- 01 The basics no longer set you apart. Guidance does. Real-time premium calculation, mobile-friendly flows and clear product comparison are now table stakes. What separates the leaders is human support at the moments that matter.
- 02 Transparency is turning into an edge. AI increasingly decides premiums and acceptance, yet customers can barely see how. Insurers that explain how those decisions are made earn trust ahead of the pack.
- 03 The number-one reason people abandon a flow isn't form friction. It's confusion. Consumers prize 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 journeys offers anything beyond Dutch, even as international customers, labour migrants and expats become a fast-growing audience. Be the second insurer to invest here and you'll stand out almost overnight.
- 05 A poor sign-up experience rarely costs you the customer. It costs you the margin. Only one in five consumers walks away after a bad experience. The rest stay, then start shopping your price.
"The insurance market is moving faster than ever, and the online sign-up flow, once an afterthought, has quietly become the sharpest competitive front."
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 supplier of the software these flows run on, we watch every day why one insurer keeps pace and another falls behind. The answer rarely comes down to willpower. It comes down to architecture.
This is our second year of systematically testing the market: 16 insurers and authorized agents, 19 criteria, 250 consumers. The basics are now in order. But the players pulling ahead aren't doing it with big technical leaps. They're doing it with small design choices they can ship quickly, 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 scored 22 non-life insurers against 14 criteria, then sorted them into three digital profiles. Together they show where each group stands and where the biggest room for improvement lies:
The conclusion was clear: digital maturity was still rare. Personalization stayed shallow, mobile was often the weak link, and a sizeable gap sat between the customer promise and the reality. Almost no player was genuinely future-proof.
What changed in a year
Twelve months on, the basics have visibly improved. Mobile-friendliness is now sorted across the market. Real-time premium calculation has become the norm.
The next layer up, though, is still largely unexplored. Adaptive flows, AI transparency, guidance during sign-up and multilingual support remain far from common. Tellingly, a foreign insurtech now outscores several established names in the Dutch market.
The question for 2026 isn't whether the basics are in order. They are. It's who takes the next step first, and who uses technology not just to convert faster but to guide customers better, earn more trust and pull ahead for good.
Drop off or convert? Customer experience as a competitive lever
The online sign-up flow isn't a marketing feature or an IT project. It's the moment a customer decides whether to switch, stay or walk away. The numbers bear that out.
Here's what the survey of 250 consumers tells us:
Customers abandon over uncertainty, not over forms
The three biggest reasons people quit all come down to clarity, not technology.
have abandoned an online sign-up at least once. 30% more than once.
A good sign-up experience does more than lift conversion. It also makes customers less likely to go price-shopping the moment they're done.
Customer experience, then, decides not just who wins the customer but who keeps the margin.
What this looks like in practice
The weak link is rarely the form. Customers get stuck when they can't tell what's covered, why a question is being asked, or how a premium was calculated.
The top performers solve this with three design choices: pop-ups that answer "what's covered?", policy terms always within reach, and sticky pricing that keeps the premium on screen as the customer moves through the flow.
The battle is no longer won on the application form. It's won in the moments where customers hesitate. The insurers that bring the most clarity to those moments convert better and shield their premium from comparison.
The methodology: how we tested 16 online purchase journeys
To judge digital maturity, we ignored the plans, roadmaps and presentations. We tested the online journeys themselves.
In April 2026 we worked through sixteen online sign-up flows using the same realistic test data. For twelve players that meant a car insurance product; for the other four, their main consumer product.
We scored each journey on nineteen criteria across seven domains: accessibility, usability, personalisation, automation, explainability, performance and AI.
The 19 criteria break down across seven categories:
Each criterion was scored from 1 (not present) to 5 (fully optimised). On top of that, we ran a consumer survey (n=250) and spoke with experts from the market.
The biggest surprise was Alpina. Last year the company still counted as a traditional player. Twelve months later we see a fully rebuilt online purchase journey that performs better on almost every component. It shows that digital maturity isn't a matter of waiting years for a new system. Organisations can move far faster than people often assume.
Jeroen Riesewijk · Digital Marketeer, Novulo
Digital maturity: three types of players
As in 2025, we again split the market into three groups: digital frontrunners, hybrid players and traditional players.
One thing stands out: the top 3 holds no classic insurers, just two authorized agents and an intermediary. It's a reminder that digital maturity is decided less by the product than by how freely an organization can reshape its digital chain.
In the sections that follow we zoom in on the dimensions that matter most in the benchmark. For each one we set out what we observed, what consumers say, and what it means for the market.
The thread that runs through all of it: what separates frontrunners from 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 journeys run in Dutch only; just Alpina adds English and Polish. That pulls the average score for multilingual support down to 1,19.
The basics, meanwhile, are solid: mobile-friendliness 4,8, readability 5,0, browser compatibility 5,0. The interface is accessible. The audience is not.
02Usability
Basics in order+
The market scores high on consistent UX (4,75) and product comparison (4,93). The basics are largely covered.
The real challenge is process friction (3,31). Sign-up flows vary wildly in length and complexity, from fewer than 15 questions to more than 40.
The consumer survey confirms it:
- 54 percent of consumers have abandoned a purchase process at least once.
- The top 3 reasons: unclear coverage (36%), too many or too complicated questions (24%), no immediate premium shown (22%).
03Adaptive and personalised journeys
In motion+
Personalisation is coming along, but it isn't yet woven through the whole journey. There's a clear split between personalisation in the end result and support along the way.
The scores tell the story: personalised premium 4,33, personalised recommendations 4,38, support during the flow 3,38.
Consumer expectations run higher:
- 77 percent want or expect an adaptive customer journey.
- 59 percent want to speak to a person in complex situations.
- Just 3 percent always want human contact.
Rowin du Gardijn · du GardijnAlpina puts a specialist on screen (Anne, Car Product Specialist) next to an AI colleague flagged with a clear disclaimer. Unigarant's chatbot surfaces on its own after a moment with "Hi, can I help you with anything?" and offers a direct line to a specialist. Independer pairs chat with a quality mark, customer reviews and free cancellation help.
Behind every one of these choices is a platform where AI, chat and human contact slot in as separate building blocks, so a small change never becomes a long IT project.
Geertjan Weijman · Insync
04Data and automation
Standard+
Real-time premium calculation is now standard (5,0), and so is real-time acceptance (4,73). Where players part ways is in the use of external data sources (4,44). Frontrunners routinely pull in sources such as licence plate, postcode, identification and switching services, while some insurers still make the customer look up the chassis number or registration code by hand.
The consumer survey:
- 36% had data filled in automatically. 42% said this didn't happen and they had to look up and enter all the data themselves. 22% don't remember.
- For that 36%, it was address-via-postcode in 72 percent of cases. Licence plate and Chamber of Commerce data sources turned out to still be rare, both mentioned 8 times.
05Explainability
Biggest gap+
On explanation and policy terms (average 3,69) the gap between frontrunners and traditional players is at its widest. Independer puts policy terms, customer reviews and a quality mark right beside every offer, with a per-coverage explanation under its "Independer Advies" labels. Several hybrid players use modal pop-ups, "what's covered with third-party plus limited comprehensive?", that keep the customer in the flow. At traditional players, policy terms tend to surface only on the final page, or down a click path that leads away and never brings the customer back.
06Performance
Laggard+
This is where the market struggles. Visible waiting times scores 1,62 on average. Most sites give no sign that something is happening, or how long it will take.
Ominimo, a Hungarian insurtech operating in the Netherlands through Zurich, averages 4,06. What sets it apart, above all, is how it handles waiting. As the premium is calculated, it tells you: "Sit back and relax, we're currently calculating our premium based on the details provided. This usually takes less than a second."
Hardly a breakthrough feature, just a simple way to keep the customer in the loop. That a foreign player clears established Dutch names on this measure says a lot about a bar the market still isn't setting for itself.
07AI
Barely visible+
AI is mostly deployed as a standalone feature (chat or support), but still rarely as part of the core logic of acceptance and pricing. This theme has its own chapter (see chapter 5).
08Omnichannel
New, limited data+
This category is new in 2026 and still lightly measured, but the picture is consistent: only a handful of players recognise existing customers across channels. In most cases the customer starts from scratch, even with an established relationship. There's plenty of room to improve.
Digital maturity in insurance isn't decided by interface quality or feature lists. It's decided by the architecture underneath.
The gap between frontrunners and traditional players shows up in the UX, but it starts in the depth of the platform. Change fast and you win. Can't, and all you can do is polish the surface.
Differences between insurers and authorized agents
Authorized agents and intermediaries average 3,92, edging out insurers by a hair (eight organizations in each group). One finding holds firm, though: the top three are not traditional insurers. Independer (authorized agent, 4,47), Unigarant (authorized agent, 4,28) and Alpina (intermediary, 4,26) set the pace.
There are two sides to it.
Insurers start from complexity. They run a broad, often international product portfolio. The online journey has to absorb dozens of product variants, widely diverging policy terms and acceptance rules, and internal sign-off across product, legal and underwriting.
The result is a journey that isn't designed around the customer alone. It's a balancing act between internal complexity and external simplicity.
Authorized agents and intermediaries trade on focus and agility. They tend to work in a narrower domain or distribution role. That keeps the product range tighter and more consistent, the decision lines shorter and the changes quicker to ship. That headroom shows up directly as a more consistent digital experience.
As one intermediary puts it:
"Technically, anything is possible. The thing is, we're the middleman, so we always depend on the insurer. We have no products of our own. We're always dependent on their rating engine."
Rowin du Gardijn · du Gardijn
At the same time, that dependence shows up in how insurers work internally:
"Insurers are very stuck in fixed ways of thinking, everyone has to have an opinion about it."
Rowin du Gardijn
This makes clear that the difference isn't only technological, it's also organizational: who gets to decide how the customer journey works?
Which makes one thing clear: what happens inside the online journey is now the brand experience.
Patrick Huizinga, co-founder of Insync, which builds software for insurers and authorized agents, knows this pattern from the inside:
"At larger, traditional insurers, digitization takes forever. The will to innovate is often there, but before a digital product really gets off the ground, a long time has already passed."
Patrick Huizinga · Insync
