The future of insurance is already in the room

This article forms part of CN&CO’s series covering The Insurance Conference Western Cape 2026. Across the series, we revisit the ideas, stories and conversations shared by the conference’s speakers, highlighting the insights that are shaping insurance, business and leadership in a changing world.

When the insurance industry talks about its future, the conversation tends to move quickly towards technology. Artificial intelligence, climate risk, cyber threats, changing customer expectations and new products usually dominate the agenda.

But Rianet Whitehead, editor of FAnews and founder of The Insurance Apprentice, posed a different question during The Insurance Conference 2026: is insurance an industry that the next generation will still want to choose?

Joining Rianet were the top three contestants from The Insurance Apprentice 2026: winner Karabo Mashego, runner-up Tyrell Moodley and third-placed Asanda Magwaza.

Their discussion covered innovation, customer experience, product design and emerging risks. But it also explored the industry itself as a workplace. Are young professionals being prepared to lead? Are they being given opportunities to challenge established thinking? And is insurance changing quickly enough to remain relevant to customers and employees alike?

Make insurance easier to understand

One message came through repeatedly: insurance remains too complicated.

Asked what would define the future of the industry, Karabo pointed to the need to make insurance relevant and understandable, while Asanda argued that insurers need to adapt their services as quickly as the risks around them are changing.

This becomes particularly important in a South African context, where a significant portion of the population remains outside the short-term insurance market.

The panel questioned whether traditional products have really been designed around the needs of this market. Complex policy wording, unfamiliar terminology and difficult concepts can make insurance inaccessible to people who might otherwise see considerable value in protecting their assets.

“Insurers need to become much better at explaining what they do,” argued Asanda. “Terms that make perfect sense inside an insurance company can mean very little to customers.

“Clients don’t understand insurance – and that’s why they don’t value it as much as they should. We need to get to a point where we communicate insurance in a way that someone will understand.”

The answer, she suggested, lies partly in education and partly in simplifying the language the industry uses with its customers.

Innovation or digitisation?

Another challenge was whether the industry is genuinely innovating or simply putting old processes onto new technology.

Karabo offered a useful distinction.

“Moving a tedious process from Excel onto a digital platform may improve its technology, but it does not necessarily improve the process itself,” she said.

True innovation requires organisations to go back to first principles and ask whether a process is still necessary and whether a product designed today would look anything like the one inherited from the past.

That question becomes more urgent as risk changes.

Karabo, who works in property risk consulting, used lithium-ion batteries as an example.

“Businesses are adopting new technologies rapidly, sometimes without fully understanding the associated risks,” she said. “Insurance policies, risk management practices and industry expertise need to keep pace.”

As she pointed out, incidents and risks do not wait for policy wordings to catch up.

The same applies to artificial intelligence, cyber risk and technologies that have not yet emerged. New innovations create new businesses, new exposures and potentially entirely new categories of insurance.

For Tyrell, this is one of the reasons to be optimistic about the industry.

“Short-term insurance,” he argued, “is far from being a solved problem. There will always be new risks requiring new thinking, new expertise and new products.”

More value before the claim

The panel also challenged the traditional relationship between insurer and customer. For many people, insurance is something they pay for every month while hoping they never need to use it. The moment of truth arrives only when something goes wrong. The panellists believe insurers have an opportunity to change that relationship by becoming more involved in risk management.

Rather than appearing predominantly at claim stage, insurers could help customers understand and reduce their risks throughout the policy lifecycle.

Tyrell suggested something as simple as an insurer asking a motor customer whether they have changed their tyres in the past four years. That interaction could help prevent a loss while providing useful information about the customer’s risk.

Karabo pointed to existing examples such as telematics and programmes that reward positive behaviour. These approaches give customers a reason to engage with their insurer even when they are not claiming.

Insurance then becomes less about selling a promise to pay after something goes wrong and more about helping customers prevent the event from happening in the first place.

Permission to question

Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion concerned the people who will eventually inherit the industry.

Karabo argued that young professionals are naturally inclined to ask questions. That should not be interpreted as disrespect for experience or institutional knowledge. Often they simply want to understand why something is done in a particular way.

“They don’t want to simply follow processes. They really want to know why they are following those processes.”

Asanda questioned whether many graduate and learner programmes genuinely prepare young people to lead or simply teach them to comply with existing processes.

Young employees can learn how a system works without ever being encouraged to ask whether that system should work differently.

For Karabo, her own experience showed what can happen when employers take another approach. Early in her career she was given access to senior people and opportunities to engage across different parts of the business. That exposure helped shape her career and gave her permission to question established ways of working.

Tyrell offered another warning to senior leaders: don’t try to create younger versions of yourselves.

“With AI increasingly capable of replicating processes, knowledge and aspects of human behaviour, the value of the next generation may lie precisely in its ability to think differently,” he said. “If all we are all clones of the previous generation, we’re really not moving things forward.”

Despite their criticisms, all three remain enthusiastic about insurance as a career.

They see an industry that combines technology, human behaviour, economics, risk and social purpose. They see an industry that helps people when things go wrong and enables businesses and economies to take risks, invest and grow.

Asanda described insurance as an industry that ultimately “shows up” for people when they need help. Tyrell sees huge opportunity in the fact that emerging technologies and changing businesses will continually produce new risks requiring new insurance solutions.

Rianet closed the discussion with a reminder that the future of insurance will not be determined solely by the technology the industry adopts or the products it creates. It will depend on the people it attracts, the voices it listens to and the opportunities it is willing to give them.

The next generation isn’t waiting to inherit the future of insurance. It is already helping to build it.