3 Things We Learned at ITC 2026 About the Future of Insurance Payment Modernization

For most policyholders, paying a premium is the only regular contact they have with their carrier. Payments are where an insurer’s technology becomes visible to the customer, which is why the payment experience keeps surfacing in modernization conversations.

At ITC Vegas 2026, more than 9,000 insurance leaders gathered at Mandalay Bay, and the main stages focused on embedded AI use cases, claims, and distribution. In the conversations around them, we heard a consistent shift in how carriers talk about payments.

The question is no longer whether to modernize. It is what modernization should deliver, and how anyone will know when it has. Three themes stood out.

1. Modernization Is Moving From Digitizing Channels to Automating Outcomes

The first generation of payment modernization was about carriers expanding the breadth of their available channels: add an online portal, accept cards, establish trustworthy email reminder cadences.

While this was a critical first step, the investment in these payment experiences means nothing if they’re not being used at a high enough rate to produce outcomes for insurance organizations. The next phase is about all about how to effectively leverage digital payment systems to drive real business results.

That shift changes how any payment platform should be judged. Specialization is only valuable when it converts into ROI, and a payment platform built for insurance should be measured on how it can have a long-reaching, positive impact on the entire operation. There are a few meaningful measurements to consider, including:

• Adoption lift: how many policyholders move from manual, paper-based billing and payment methods to digital self-service, and how quickly.
• Call deflection: how many billing calls never reach the service team because policyholders can source accurate answers themselves.
• Reconciliation automation: how many payments post to core systems without manual matching.
• Claims payout speed: how long an approved claim payout takes to reach a claimant or vendor.
• Upgrade-safe integration: whether connections to policy, billing, and claims systems survive the next core upgrade.

We also heard many carriers talking about the importance handling inbound collections and outbound disbursements in one place. It’s becoming increasingly clear that connected money movement across the policy lifecycle keeps implementation risk lower and ensures the policyholder experience continuously improves over time.

2. Modernization Stalls at the Last Mile

Many carriers have already upgraded core systems and launched digital payment options and can’t understand why some policyholders still mail checks and call the customer service line.

This gap is the least discussed part of modernization, and it’s mostly about behavior. People move through a sequence when they pay: they notice a bill, decide whether they trust it, understand what is owed, choose how to pay, complete the payment, and confirm it. Friction at any step sends them back to what they already know. A portal that goes live on schedule but doesn’t change those habits has modernized the technology without modernizing the experience.

Closing the gap takes strategic adoption work, which is a different discipline from standard customer service. Traditional customer service teams resolve issues as they come up. Teams that are dedicated to Adoption Growth Services work with carriers to plan outreach, test messaging, and measure enrollment against targets after launch. The carriers making the most progress treat it as an operating-model decision, with fewer calls, less paper, and less manual effort as the goal.

A few questions help separate real modernization from a completed project. Who owns adoption targets after go-live? What does support look like at month six? How will success be measured a year from now?

3. Modernization Is Changing What Carriers Build and What They Buy

Core insurance platforms keep evolving, and carriers are expected to keep pace. That puts pressure on every system connected to them, and it makes the payments layer a strategic decision as well as a technical one.

Some of the most instructive conversations at ITC were with carriers weighing whether to build a payment solution in-house. The instinct to build is understandable: control and ownership matter, and payments touch nearly every part of the business. The better starting point is to define what good looks like. For most carriers, that usually means:

• Claimant and vendor payments by EFT, virtual card, or check, handled in one workflow.
• Real-time payment status for staff.
• Clean posting to core systems, so reconciliation doesn’t become a month-end project.
• Security and compliance that keep pace with changing card rules, fraud patterns, and regulations.
• Reporting that finance and operations can use without a custom request.

Measured against that list, the cost of building is rarely visible in the first estimate. PCI scope, new payment methods, fraud defense, integration upkeep through every core upgrade, and around-the-clock policyholder support all continue long after the first release. The engineers doing that work are not improving underwriting or claims, which is where a carrier competes.

Buying is also a decision to invest in expertise: teams that have seen many implementations, know where integrations break, and have already absorbed changes a new in-house team would meet for the first time. A workable rule for modernization strategy is to build what differentiates your underwriting and claims, and partner for the payments layer.

What Comes Next: How AI and Customer Experience Will Shape the Next Era of Insurance

Across these conversations, the bar for modernization is rising. Carriers want payment programs judged on measurable results, accountable after go-live, and built on an architecture that survives the next upgrade.

The next frontier, which was highly discussed at ITC, was how AI will impact the future of the insurance space. Our team spoke with Digital Insurance about this very topic and what new research is showing us about the most critical insurance applications for AI. Watch that session on demand now.