Pricing technology is moving beyond its traditional home in actuarial and underwriting teams. Rating engines are increasingly being used by marketing, innovation and product teams to launch offers faster, adjust campaigns and respond to changing customer expectations.
Earnix argues that this shift reflects a fundamental change in how insurers view pricing. Rather than being a back-office calculation, pricing is becoming where profitability, risk appetite, customer experience and speed to market converge. The competitive question is therefore no longer just whether an insurer can calculate an accurate price, but whether it can turn that output into an actionable and explainable decision.
Personalisation is also moving further upstream. Insurers have typically approached it through targeted communications or more tailored digital journeys, but the bigger opportunity could lie in how products are designed. Cover, exclusions, limits, eligibility and underwriting terms can all influence whether an offer feels relevant to a customer.
Research from Les Transformers de la relation clients highlighted the gap between policy inception and claims, describing the insurer-customer relationship as often “silent”. Julie Berbesson, customer experience and excellence director at BPCE Assurances, referred to this as the “paradox of silence”, with the challenge of “turning a relationship of necessity into one of perceived value”.
That shift gives marketing a role much earlier in the insurance product lifecycle. Instead of simply communicating a completed offer, marketing teams can become involved in decisions around how products are structured, priced and taken to market. Pricing, product development and customer strategy consequently need to operate on a more connected timeline.
Explainability becomes more important as these decisions become increasingly automated. Earnix director Nicolas Rabot said, “zero effort does not mean less information or less understanding; it means less friction.”
Rabot also pointed to the tension between rising customer expectations and continued pressure on price. He said, “Personalisation is no longer a competitive advantage; it is the standard. Policyholders now expect simplicity, immediacy and expertise all at once. Yet in a context of intense cost pressure, price is still their first consideration. That is the challenge: finding the right balance between price competitiveness and the quality of the relationship.”
The technology challenge is not necessarily a lack of sophisticated systems. Insurers already use CRM, underwriting and actuarial platforms, but information and decision-making can remain fragmented between the teams responsible for them. This can make it harder to translate pricing intelligence into a consistent customer proposition.
The focus is therefore shifting from the rating calculation itself towards what happens around it. Pricing infrastructure can connect profitability targets, market signals, underwriting rules and customer-facing decisions, potentially giving different functions access to the same information when making commercial decisions.
Earnix’s work with Engage-It is aimed at another part of this connectivity problem. The collaboration seeks to make product information, including details on cover and benefits held across internal documents, more accessible and consistent at the point of customer interaction.
For insurers, the growing role of AI in pricing could make this connectivity even more important. The value of new technology may not come solely from creating more sophisticated models, but from linking risk, customer and profitability data so those models can influence decisions across the business.
Earnix frames this broader opportunity as orchestration. As pricing moves beyond actuarial ownership, insurers that can connect pricing, product, underwriting and customer strategy may be better placed to respond to market changes while maintaining consistency across the customer journey.
Copyright © 2026 InsurTech Analyst
