Snapshot: A Quick Look at the Insurance Industry in Belgium

4 minutes, 33 seconds read

Published on Nov 12, 2019

Updated on May 18, 2020

The market for insurance in Belgium has been stable for over a decade. Unless Insurers adopt new strategies and embrace external partnerships, organic growth seems next to impossible.

While insurers in other parts of the world are leveraging technology for better customer acquisition, Belgian Insurers struggle with stringent customer data protection laws.

This is the time for major business alignments to keep up with the changing customer expectations. For instance, the brokerage system dominates nearly 60% of non-life insurance distribution in Belgium. Unfortunately, 31% of the brokers have a negative attitude towards digitization and InsurTech, mainly because of the lack of awareness about the subject.

With current business models, there’s negligible hope that Belgian Insurers will remain competitive. Let’s look at the key drivers of ‘change’.

Challenges-and-opportunities-of-insurance-in-Belgium

The ‘Change’ Drivers for Insurance in Belgium

The threat to lose customers for being slow in a fast-moving age is imposing some serious pressure on Insurers in Belgium. The change in customer expectations and lifestyle will drive the transformation of the Belgium Insurance Industry. The other factors that will impact the insurance include- economy, technology, life expectancy, climate change, and competition.

Digital and Mobile Adoption

The Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey 2018 reveals— 84% of Belgians own at least one mobile device. This indicates a growing preference for digital, self-service platforms, and ease of access irrespective of location. Insurers are, thus, compelled to look beyond agent-driven pitches.

For example, Trov— an American technology company provides ‘on-demand’ insurance for individuals’ properties for short durations. Customers only need to register their properties, activate insurance for a desired duration, and pay a daily premium.

Now that over 60% of non-life insurance products are distributed by brokers, this is also the time to train and equip brokers with handy apps.

Economical Changes

The world is rapidly moving towards a sharing economy, which involves short-term P2P (Peer-to-peer) transactions for shared use of products and services. The societal shift towards the open data economy fueled the open banking trend. Recently, insurers are following the trend as open insurance.

“..The economy has been moving beyond narrowly defined industries built around large, vertically integrated, and mainly “self-contained” corporations. New means of creating value have been developing everywhere in the form of ever-denser and richer networks of connection, collaboration, and interdependence…” (Business ecosystems come of age. Kelly, E., 1 April 2015, p. 4.)

Belgium is set to witness the following major economic shifts-

Mobility – Belgians demonstrate an inclination toward multimodal mobility solutions. For example, Antwerp-based Olympus Mobility- an app for cars & bike pooling and parking services is set to expand its services in more Belgian cities.

IoT – Lifestyle and product preferences are changing with connected devices. With new customer expectations, insurance needs and opportunities are also growing. For example, Phil at Home by AG Insurance is a compound product with services in the field of prevention, protection, and assistance for elderlies.

Adoption of Technologies across Industries

Digital has put customers in the center. While other industries stay ahead with technological adoption, Insurers need to invest in innovative products that cover emerging risks. For example, Spotify’s personalized recommendations and Apple’s assistant – Siri are setting a benchmark for customizing the products at an individual level. “Yet what has become the new normal for those companies, remains a challenge for insurers,” says Dirk Vanderschrick, CEO, Belfius.

The Insurance industry in Belgium is yet to adopt biometrics, recommender systems, sentiment detection, and natural language generation. Currently, 60% of Belgian Insurers use text analysis; 40% use chatbots and object detection; 20% exercise automated decision making and pattern detection; according to Monitor Deloitte’s One Minute Survey, Artificial Intelligence (May 2018).

Apart from AI-enabled tools, the Belgium Insurance sector will soon adopt blockchain, Automation, Analytics, XaaS, and IoT.

Competition

Today, business models have a shorter life cycle because of digital disruption. The competition for incumbents is fierce- with 4 bEUR potential investment in InsurTech in Belgium.

Many have thought of phygital experience as progressive- where paper and paperless processes coexist. However, in the long term, their existence is questionable. For example, Lemonade is racing the core insurance with paperless and personalized insurance packages delivered to the customer in just 90 seconds!

In line with the fact that customers want a solution to their problems – the one who provides the most appropriate solution in the easiest way possible, wins.

Regulatory Changes

Compulsory health and car insurance policies had a great impact on sales volume. Apart from being an entry barrier for small players, the existing regulations no more align with climate changes, longevity, and technological disruptions.

The Belgian Government is set to launch Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2) by 2024 and IFRS 17 (International Financial Reporting Standard) by 2021. Nearly 70% of Insurers believe PSD2 will have a positive impact in the insurance value chain.

‘Beyond’ Insurance is the Future

According to Insurance Experts from Deloitte, non-core insurance products and services drive 10-30% of the revenue. Therefore, complementary services or value-added services can bring a greater competitive advantage to the insurers.

For example, the US-based Oscar Health Insurance encourages a healthy lifestyle by financially rewarding its customers. It tracks footsteps, eating habits, workouts, etc. on its app through wearables. It further supports customers with doctoral advice and scheduling appointments. These value-added services, along with traditional health insurance is a win for customer loyalty.

We’re an InsurTech100 company championing back and front-office automation solutions along with interactive applications for the new-age digital insurer. Drop us a line at hello@mantralabsglobal.com to know more.

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

Snapshot: A Quick Look at the Insurance Industry in Belgium