The reinsurance market has long relied on legacy spreadsheets and manual administration, often lagging behind broader digital transformation. Today, though, the merging of cloud-native Software as a Service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence (AI) is driving an essential modernisation across the sector, according to Sapiens.
Sapiens, a global provider of software solutions for the insurance and reinsurance industry, is entering a new growth phase following its acquisition by Advent in 2025 and ADIA investment earlier this year.
Heading up reinsurance in this next chapter is Yaron Lavie, who is SVP Head of Products and will assume responsibility for the industry alongside Property and Casualty and Life and Pensions, succeeding Udi Matot.
At the same time, Paul Wheeler, the current Chief Financial Officer, is to become Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Mike Ettling, who will continue to serve as Executive Chairman of the Board and will support Wheeler as CEO Designate throughout the leadership transition.
In light of this, we spoke with Lavie as he looks to build upon his predecessor’s foundations while helping the re/insurance industry transition to a SaaS model.
“The idea is not to customise a separate platform for every individual reinsurance company. Instead, we aim to provide a centralised, standardised product that clients can adapt to their own needs, and this is the process that we are currently going into,” said Lavie.
He continued: “Obviously, regulations change, reporting requirements change. There are some things that were required in the past, and are no longer needed. And then we understand what is also specific to each customer. And the migration we’re doing towards software as a service is essentially mapping this, with all our clients going one by one, and gradually moving them all to a standardised product.
“Essentially, what we want to do is merge the best of both worlds. That means pairing the deep specialisation that we’ve built over decades with a standardised SaaS product that is continuously being updated.”
Unlike traditional setups – where adding new features required lengthy, month-long implementation projects – Sapiens now rolls out quarterly updates, keeping clients continually updated on the latest software release.
AI offers significant advantages, Lavie highlights, most notably the concrete business benefits derived from fully automating workflows that are traditionally manual and paper based.
The technology analyses these documents to extract required data and capture institutional expertise. Rather than relying entirely on human processes, generative AI is used to automate the workflow, escalating only the necessary cases to human judgment.
Lavie commented: “Part of our transformation is moving from specific or individual product offerings that solve one problem to an overall end-to-end platform. So, if we have the entire end-to-end process you can get insight into the impact of this on your insurance. This is a huge benefit because the database of reinsurance is a gold mine for decision making as you have all your risks, all your claims, everything that you retain and everything that you cede in one place.
“Overall, this saves time and saves mistakes because if you have one vendor’s policy system and another vendor’s reinsurance system, you need to integrate things, and they can fall between the cracks.”
Despite the clear benefits of a SaaS model, the speed of adoption across reinsurance varies significantly, as in many cases, it depends on the appetite of each reinsurance company, Lavie noted.
He said: “They need to have some kind of an appetite to do that. Some companies are much more early adopters, and some are very conservative in how they do that. I think that the migration from on-premises to pure SaaS has taken several years and the reason is not the technology, it’s the maturity of the organisations, and the perceived risk.
“The risk now from a technology, IT security perspective, is extremely low. I think in other cases it is around budgets, and it takes time. People are just accustomed to doing things in an old way. The technology itself is no longer a limiting factor. And sometimes, part of that is also around migration, what we’ve just referred to earlier on, which is you know if you’ve spent many years customising a particular platform to your specific needs.”
Another challenge is the reliance on complex spreadsheets that have captured the institutional know-how for years.
Lavie said: “In a lot of cases, years ago, someone may have created built-in formulas into these humongous Excel sheets and there’s always a challenge to move away from them. To some extent, AI is acting as a bridge. It can take some of these manual or semi-manual processes, re-codify them, and then implement them in the SaaS platform.”
By leveraging AI to unify complex spreadsheets into a single SaaS platform, Sapiens is eliminating manual workflows and continuous integration errors.
Ultimately, transitioning from custom, on-premises setups to a standardised, cloud native model, allows re/insurers to turn their centralised risk and claims data into a powerful tool for decision making.
