Over the last few months, our dedicated Carrier Practice team has been reviewing responses to our 2026 Claims Insights survey, a global survey capturing perspectives from across the carrier market, including insurers, mutuals, MGAs, and program administrators (PAs). The responses provide data-rich insights and invaluable takeaways that are applicable across the industry, helping carriers focus for the year ahead and uncover strategic solutions.
With our 2026 Claims Insights survey now closed, early results suggest the following three challenges will emerge ahead of the rest: attraction and retention of talent, premium affordability and insurability, and data and cybersecurity.
Full insights from our 2026 Claims Insights whitepaper will be released early next year, unpacking industry shifts and changes, as well as how leading organizations are responding. In the meantime, we reflect on The Carrier Perspective: 2025 Claims Insights and compare these results with our experts’ expectations for 2026.
Talent
In 2025, the attraction and retention of talent was a leading challenge for carriers across North America. In fact, 24% of respondents ranked it the number one business challenge facing organizations this year, with 72% reporting that labor shortages were creating a moderate to significant impact on their organization’s ability to grow and manage claims efficiently.
Looking ahead, experts expect this challenge to continue, with early results from the 2026 Claims Insights survey indicating that the attraction and retention of talent will maintain its spot as the top challenge for carriers.
Throughout 2025, we spoke to leaders from across the insurance industry about how their organizations are addressing this challenge. We found that industry leaders are increasingly turning to trusted partners that provide cost-effective solutions for overcoming talent shortages. This strategy empowers partners to recruit staff with transferable skills, benefit from superior training and development programs, and access a pool of highly skilled professionals without needing to invest in extensive internal hiring. Earlier in 2025, Amy O’Brien, Vice President — Carrier Practice Sales, examined how this strategy can be especially beneficial for MGAs and PAs as they look to achieve strategic growth.
Other popular strategies for talent retention included a focus on wider remuneration and lifestyle packages with additional benefits and personalized choices as opposed to previous years where competitive salaries and upskilling were cited as key.
As indicated by early results from our 2026 Claims Insights survey, focus on workforce strategies will remain critical in the new year, as carriers continue to navigate persistent labor shortages that hinder growth and claims management efficiency. The shifting workforce dynamics call for innovative approaches to attract and retain top talent, moving beyond traditional strategies to address employee expectations around flexibility, wellbeing, and engagement.
Premium affordability and insurability
In 2026, premium affordability and insurability are expected to emerge as a top-three challenge, replacing inflation and rising operational costs, and outranking data and cybersecurity. While this challenge would be a new addition to North America’s top three, it is far from being a new problem.
In 2025, global respondents ranked premium affordability and insurability as the top challenge. According to the 2025 Claims Insights survey, 54% of global respondents reported that litigated claims were settling at higher costs, with North American carriers marking a 10-percentage-point increase in litigated claims closing at higher costs.
But while increasing premium rates were once a tried-and-tested means of addressing rising costs and insurability challenges, a significant percentage of industry leaders have recently reported a shift away from this strategy, finding that increasing premium rates no longer adequately addresses the problem of insurability.
Instead, carriers are actively exploring the most productive ways to limit their exposure while maintaining premium affordability to sustain comprehensive insurance solutions. From leveraging advanced data analytics tools that predict emerging trends, to tapping into specialist resources through third-party risk management partners, carriers are proactively seeking alternative methods to address this challenge.
Premium affordability and insurability are challenges fueled by a multitude of factors, so adopting a multifaceted approach to counteract it has been shown to yield the most significant results. Although it is not an easy balance to strike, industry leaders are continuing to investigate ways of diversifying their methods to support the best outcomes.
Data and cybersecurity
With today’s reliance on digital capabilities for business growth and competitive advantage, it’s no surprise that data and cybersecurity remain in the top three both nationally and globally.
In our 2025 Claims Insights survey, nearly half of both North American and global respondents identified data and cybersecurity risks as a common challenge facing businesses in the insurance landscape. Organizations are experiencing an increasing number of threats and growing severity of incidents when they occur.
In 2026, this challenge is expected to continue to evolve, with threat actors shifting their tactics in several ways to devise more sophisticated and strategic attacks.
By exercising patience, threat actors will monitor emails and networks to identify an organization’s key stakeholders before striking, amplifying the impact of their attacks. Generative AI is also empowering threat actors as they increasingly leverage the wider availability of technology to create more convincing social engineering attacks. Finally, threat actors are adapting to the industry’s cyber resilience, shifting the focus of their ransomware attacks away from encryption and towards the exfiltration of data, a process that is proving more cost-effective and time-efficient for threat actors.
As the threat landscape continues to evolve, insurance leaders are finding that reactive financial safety nets are no longer sufficient for cyber resilience. Today, the only way to stay ahead of threat actors is through active insurance with ongoing monitoring and threat detection. For those looking to gain more insight into how to tackle emerging cyber threats, Kristen Mickelson — Cyber Claims Practice Leader, recently took a deep dive into the top five threats to be aware of in 2026.
The 2026 Claims Insights whitepaper will be released early next year. For early access to the full report and insights from industry leaders sign up here.
If these challenges are already shaping your plans for 2026, connect with our team of carrier experts to gain greater insight into what to expect from the year ahead.
