Quotes fast. Claims live.

Insurance runs on two clocks, and they are not the same clock. One is commercial: how fast can you return a quote before the customer buys elsewhere. The other is regulatory: how fast can you keep a claim moving, and understand disruption when it happens. Observability matters to both, but for different reasons, and it helps to keep them apart.  

Take quotes first. In a market where customers compare options in moments, a quote journey that is slow or failing is not a compliance problem. It is lost business. Every second of delay, every failed API call to a rating engine or data provider, is a chance for the customer to appear somewhere else at the right moment, with the right price, and for you not to. The cost here is revenue and competitiveness, quiet and rarely itemised.  

Claims are a different matter. When a claims journey is slow to diagnose, the stakes include regulatory exposure. The FCA, DORA and NIS2 expect firms to understand disruption quickly, stay within impact tolerances, and report significant failures. A claims incident that takes too long to identify can drift towards becoming a reportable one. Here the cost is not only a frustrated policyholder at a stressful moment, it is regulatory risk and the scrutiny that comes with it.  

What both clocks share is a dependency on visibility. A single claims journey may rely on policy administration, contact centre platforms, document systems, fraud checks, payment services and third-party data. A quote journey depends on its own chain of rating engines, APIs and providers. When those are watched by fragmented tools, no one can see the whole journey, and both clocks slow down. Splunk estimates downtime costs the financial services and insurance sector around 309 million dollars a year.  

Connecting signals across the estate, and using AI to surface the alerts that matter and the likely cause, lets teams reduce time to identify and time to resolve, and prioritise by what is actually at stake: commercial exposure on quotes, regulatory and customer exposure on claims. It is the difference between treating every alert as equal and knowing, immediately, which journey is at risk and why. Splunk's research found 77% of financial services and insurance organisations say observability has had a positive impact on revenue.  

Quotes fast, claims live. Both depend on seeing the whole journey, and on knowing, the moment something slows, whether you are about to lose a customer or answer to a regulator.  

If you would like to see where your quote and claims journeys are exposed, commercially or to the regulator, an Observability Discovery for insurers from VCG reviews exactly that, along with where the visibility gaps sit today.

→ Book a free Observability Discovery | info@vcg.group | 0161 406 1820 

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