Bermuda’s regulatory approach helped turn insurtech from concept into market reality
Bermuda’s role in the development of insurtech was characterised as an enabler that helped turn experimentation into regulated, investable business models. That was the message from the session “Insurtech Panel: Navigating Tomorrow’s Risks and Opportunities” at the 2026 BMA Forum, entitled “Charting the Course: Managing Risk and Complexity in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape”, which took place in Bermuda last week.
The session brought together George Alayon, deputy director, supervision (FinTech), Bermuda Monetary Authority, as moderator, alongside Adrian Jones, head of underwriting and speciality retail, Acrisure; Dawn Miller, chief commercial officer, Lloyd’s and CEO, Lloyd’s Americas; Dr. Magdalena Ramada Sarasola, global insurtech innovation leader and senior director, Willis Towers Watson; and Marco Mirabella, founder and CEO, Ensuro.
Alayon opened by placing Bermuda’s insurance innovation journey in the wider context of the island’s approach to regulation more broadly. He noted that in 2018, as Bermuda was advancing digital asset legislation, it was also making major changes to its insurance framework, including the creation of an innovation hub, regulatory sandbox and new classes for innovative insurers.
Eight years on, he argued, the conversation in Bermuda is no longer theoretical. “We can’t spend hours and years to discuss whether or not we regulate something. We just go ahead and think about how to do this responsibly,” he said.
That willingness to act early, and to do so pragmatically, was a theme picked up in different ways by all four panellists. For Jones, the evolution of insurtech over the past decade is clear enough that it no longer makes sense to treat it as a niche or temporary phenomenon. “Insurtech, when it first came about in 2015, was a thing that a lot of people just dismissed,” he said. Now, in his view, the distinction between insurtech and the mainstream market has largely broken down. “All the insurance companies are becoming insurtech now.”
Jones said the most obvious evidence of that shift is how deeply technology has moved into the core of insurance businesses and how fluently senior leadership now speaks about it. The challenge, he suggested, lies less at the top of organisations and more in the middle, where longstanding processes and habits can slow change. But from an investor perspective, he said there is now much greater comfort in backing the sector.
Miller, from the Lloyd’s perspective, described a similar maturation. The early wave of insurtech often involved firms trying to solve one narrow problem or building tools in search of a use case. What has changed, she said, is that innovation is increasingly embedded in the core operations of insurance businesses. “The companies that are being purchased,” she said, “are the ones that have spent the time working on those core processes inside their organisation.”
For Lloyd’s, that has shaped the development of Lloyd’s Lab, which she described not as an incubator in the strict sense but as an accelerator designed to help relevant businesses reach the market more quickly. The aim is not merely to encourage novelty, but to support innovation that is useful to the market itself. That includes product development, but also services and operational improvements. The important point, in her account, is that innovation has to enhance performance. It cannot be separated from the question of whether the market remains investible and commercially attractive.
That emphasis on outcomes rather than hype also ran through the comments of Ramada Sarasola, who reflected on having worked in insurtech before the label itself had really taken hold. She said the original promise of insurtech was often tied to microinsurance and closing protection gaps, but the impact has not always been as dramatic as many expected 15 years ago. Even so, she believes the sector has still had a profound effect by changing the industry’s mindset and pushing it to become more digital, more data-driven and more aware of technology risk.
“It has been a significant impact because we are more digital than 15 years ago,” she said. That matters not only because it improves internal operations, but because it creates the data foundations the market needs to tackle harder problems such as underinsurance and emerging risk. She also argued that insurtech has changed the regulatory challenge itself. As underwriting, pricing, claims and capital management become more dynamic and interconnected, regulators increasingly have to focus less on static products and more on behaviour, workflows and decision-making across systems that combine human judgement with AI and other technologies.
Mirabella provided perhaps the clearest illustration of Bermuda’s practical role in this process. Ensuro, he explained, moved through Bermuda’s sandbox and into full licensing as a blockchain-enabled insurer, using digital assets to support real-world parametric insurance products. His account showed both the opportunities and the friction points. He said the BMA’s approach was marked by openness and a principles-based mindset. “They allow us to grow together with the regulation,” he said, describing a process in which the regulator focused on the outcomes it wanted while still allowing the business model to evolve within the framework.
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