Original text here from Patrice Bernard (LinkedIn)
Once hyped for its promise to enhance customer experience, open insurance never truly gained traction in the industry. Now, it’s making a comeback—this time fueled by strategic goals more aligned with today’s digital and AI-driven imperatives. A case in point: a recent initiative by Generali.
While the original vision of open insurance hasn’t completely vanished, Generali still lists it as one of three pillars of its strategy. This includes the deployment of API offerings for its partners—designed to let them quickly embed insurance solutions into their own workflows. These APIs aim to simplify both product design and integration, contributing to the broader idea of forming a digital ecosystem.
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What’s particularly striking is that Generali’s scope appears to go well beyond standard use cases like onboarding and claims. The company is also tackling back-office administrative processes, with the goal of ensuring interoperability across often fragmented and heterogeneous legacy systems.
Another highlight of the initiative is its adoption of a “design-first” API approach. Rather than building services around legacy software constraints—as is still common in the banking sector—Generali is aligning APIs with business capabilities. If fully realized, this marks a significant maturity leap in how open insurance is approached.
But behind this strategic shift lies a deeper motivation: artificial intelligence. Generali’s partner, MuleSoft, now markets API integration as a primary enabler of AI. The logic is simple—AI agents need access to backend applications in order to deliver on their promises, and APIs are the connective tissue.
Generali claims strong early results from its API transformation efforts, reporting a 27% reduction in development time and a 15% faster time-to-market. These improvements highlight how reusable APIs can boost IT agility and streamline the digital product lifecycle.
However, this progress should be viewed in light of recent warnings from McKinsey (referenced last week). On one hand, the initiative clearly aligns with new pressures—especially those tied to AI adoption—that are accelerating legacy IT transformation. On the other, it exposes a latent risk: wrapping modern APIs around outdated core systems might provide short-term gains, but it’s not a sustainable solution.
Indeed, layering modern, streamlined APIs onto software originally designed for manual process automation inevitably introduces fragility and trade-offs. Such a strategy only makes sense if treated as a transitional phase toward full modernization. In that context, APIs aren’t just tools—they’re stepping stones to the next era of insurance infrastructure.
