A faster path to market

As insurers look to modernise their systems and respond to evolving customer expectations, legacy infrastructure continues to be a constraint—particularly for organisations aiming to bring new products to market quickly or adapt to shifting regulatory and operational demands.

Policy administration platforms that once formed the backbone of insurance operations are increasingly seen as inflexible, expensive to maintain and slow to change. To address this, innovative no-code technology solutions have emerged, giving insurers far greater control over how products are configured and deployed.

INSTANDA is setting itself apart in this space.  The UK-based firm, now expanding into the Australian market, is building on its global presence, which already includes offices in the US and Japan and a portfolio of over 120 clients. This local expansion is driven by growing demand from international clients with operations in Australia—as well as domestic agencies seeking more agile systems.

“Australia has long been recognised as an innovator that punches above its weight on the international insurance scene,” Group CRO and Co-Founder of INSTANDA Derek Hill says, “We have some larger clients that already have a presence here, and we were asked to work with them to replicate success in other regions.”

The company now operates a Queensland office staffed with a local team supporting sales, business development and implementation. Local partnerships with world-leading technology and delivery providers have also been established to meet market-specific needs—a model INSTANDA applies across its global operations.

At the centre of its offering is a fully configurable policy administration and distribution platform that allows users to design and modify products through an insurance-specific no-code interface. INSTANDA positions this approach as a way to eliminate common friction points for insurers and agencies trying to innovate within the constraints of traditional systems.

“Globally, we’ve had clients that get super excited by a product demo that we have built in two weeks, which can be better than what they have today,” Hill says. “We also have clients that have gone from product idea to launch in less than eight weeks, following an agile approach where all stakeholders across the business are involved in the product configuration and deployment.”

Once live, products can be modified in hours. For some, even the initial proof-of-concept environment outperforms their existing systems in terms of functionality and usability.

INSTANDA’s platform is currently being used by agencies, including Enthusiast Motor, and Coverforce Group. While others are not named publicly, the company says the use cases span multiple segments—from large carriers to niche brokers.

The model is designed to appeal to insurers that want to reduce reliance on external developers and take more direct ownership of product management. Business logic traditionally hardcoded into legacy platforms is exposed through configuration tools that allow product and underwriting teams to make changes directly.

This structure, Hill says, appeals to organisations that “want to be innovative—get first mover advantage, test new ideas, create models for greater speed of change” but are being held back by systems that were never built for modern digital distribution.

INSTANDA reports growing interest from brokers managing high-volume schemes, agencies seeking to scale distribution, and carriers modernising legacy estates. In each case, the company highlights adaptability and speed as the platform’s most relevant attributes for the local market.

The platform is hosted in Microsoft Azure’s Australian data centres and aligned with APRA’s prudential standards, including CPS 231 (Outsourcing), CPS 232 (Business Continuity), and CPS 234 (Information Security). The company also recently renewed its ISO27001:2022 certification and says measures to support upcoming CPS 230 (Operational Risk Management) obligations—such as uptime guarantees, automated monitoring, and business continuity tools—are already built in.

INSTANDA’s Australian clients also gain access to new features and capability enhancements as they’re released across the global platform, as well as lessons learned from clients operating in highly regulated and innovation-focused environments overseas.

With the platform now established locally, INSTANDA is focused on delivering what it describes as “transformative client projects,” working with both carriers and agencies to deploy capability already proven in other markets.

Hill says the Australian industry is well-positioned to benefit from this approach, particularly as organisations look to accelerate product development and streamline operations.

“Our focus is on collaborating with large insurers seeking to modernise operations or enhance efficiencies of their current platforms; underwriting agencies looking for a scalable solution to expand their product and distribution offerings; and brokers seeking to better manage a large number of schemes, and affinity businesses that need to competitively service smaller books,” he says.

INSTANDA’s configurability is a key part of that offering. “INSTANDA’s flexibility and agility are its greatest strengths, particularly when it comes to the unique requirements of the Australian market,” Hill says.