Insurance's growth problem isn't price, it's value

Most of us picture insurance as a policy you buy once and renew once a year. You buy it, set it aside, and the next year you only talk about the price. That description is really the description of a subscription: a recurring payment, an automatic renewal, an ongoing relationship. The industry’s real problem isn’t that it lacks a subscription. It lacks the thing that makes subscriptions grow, a value people actually use.

Why the same money buys a different scale

Picture two companies. They raised similar money, employ similar numbers of people, reached similar valuations in their last round. One takes its subscription business to a completely different scale. The other stays put. The difference isn’t capital. It’s whether anyone uses the product.

A digital content or music subscription usually costs less than a policy, and people open it almost every day. A policy costs more, and most people never use it. The customer pays more for the product they use less. By its nature, the good scenario in insurance is the one where you never touch the product. No claim, the policy sits on a shelf, the year ends, the renewal goes through quietly. That creates an odd equation: the customer is happiest at the exact moment the product gave them nothing.

Perceived value is usage frequency multiplied by felt benefit. In insurance both run low. You can’t close that gap with price. A cheaper policy isn’t a more-used policy. A discount doesn’t grow a subscription, it just thins your margin. The real scorecard of a subscription business is renewal, not new sales. If you don’t understand why people stay, you can’t stop them from leaving.

This is why value-first businesses can absorb years of losses. As the value they deliver compounds, each new customer adds to the last and the relationship thickens. In a subscription with nothing real to offer, every new customer is just backfilling the one who slipped out the back door. You carry the same bucket, hole and all.

Some policies do get used

Not all of insurance shares this fate. Health and supplementary health are usage-based products. The customer touches them many times a year, not once. The product steps in when they see a doctor, run a test, fill a prescription. In these lines both renewal rates and the bond the customer forms with the product run clearly stronger. That’s no accident. A product used more often delivers value more often, and a product that delivers value more often renews more easily.

The lesson is plain. The answer isn’t to accept insurance as a product nobody uses. The answer is to design touchpoints that raise how often the customer reaches for it. Instead of waiting for the claim, build moments that create value before the claim and outside it.

The “what’s your key ingredient” test

Ask a subscription service for the one thing that makes it exist and you get a clear answer: content, music, library, community. There’s a single defining thing, and everything else turns around it.

Ask an insurer the same question. The answer scatters: affordability, speed, convenience, trust, broad coverage, transparency, a flawless experience. You get seven answers, and none of them alone is the thing that makes the product exist. Half that list isn’t even a feature, it’s the result of a good product. Trust isn’t an ingredient, it’s what you earn once you deliver value. You can describe a restaurant with seven different promises, but people go somewhere for the one thing it does best. A place that is fine at everything stays memorable for nothing.

Here’s the hard part. Without a single real value that sets you apart, you can’t build a genuinely good product. A product that is average at everything is unforgettable at nothing. Building a subscription relationship on a forgettable product runs hard, because the customer looks for a reason to stay, not a reason to leave. What insurance offers in most places isn’t a convincing reason to stay, it’s an excuse that isn’t strong enough to leave on.

Without value, you rent your growth

A company with nothing real to offer leans, sooner or later, on someone else’s channel to grow. A bank, an agent, a retailer, a software platform. The logic of “if I can’t grow enough on my own, let someone else sell me.”

The real question is the position you enter that partnership from. With no genuine value in hand, you sit down at the table from weakness. As the middleman, you can’t pay the partner a high enough cut to sustain it. The space you walk into is already crowded; dozens of similar players knock on the same doors with the same mediocre product. Distribution multiplies your reach, not the value of your product.

McDonald’s shows the fine line here. It built an empire largely by getting others to sell its product, through franchising. That worked because the product itself carried a consistent value; it promised the same experience in any city. Getting others to sell a mediocre product only multiplies the mediocrity. A franchise scales a good product. It doesn’t rescue a bad one.

Today we can place insurance almost anywhere. Into an e-commerce cart, a banking app, the purchase screen of a car. But putting it everywhere doesn’t make the product more used or more valuable. Embedded distribution opens a new door; if what you carry through it is still the same mediocre policy, the number of doors won’t save you. Distribution is a multiplier. When the number it multiplies sits close to zero, the result stays close to zero too.

Value first, business second

One of the best-known companies in business lost money for years and got written off as a failure for a long time. Amazon built value first and the business followed. Nobody questions that order now. A lasting subscription relationship starts by giving the customer a real benefit; the revenue comes behind it.

Most insurers build that order backwards. Business comes first: price, premium production, combined ratio, distribution deals. Value comes last, and often its turn never arrives. Yet you can flip the question: how do you build an insurance product the customer feels the value of even when they never have a claim?

The answer is to widen the definition of insurance a little. Value isn’t only in carrying the risk; it’s in reducing the risk and standing next to the customer through the process. A sensor that warns you about a water leak before it happens. A claims process that genuinely gets easier on the bad day. Advice or a service that helps beyond the policy. These give the customer a touch and a benefit even in the years they don’t use the product. Those touches keep the subscription alive. The customer who doesn’t forget to renew doesn’t grow your business. The customer who is glad to renew does.

AI doesn’t make this question easier, it sharpens it

In 2026 everyone reaches the same models. With the same AI they quote with similar fluency, pay claims at similar speed, ship a similarly clean interface. An assistant that prices in seconds was once a differentiator; today it’s a standard anyone can have. Convenience got cheap. And when something gets cheap and available to everyone, it stops setting you apart.

The “what makes it exist” question turns vital right here. If everyone can buy convenience, speed, and a smooth experience cheaply, the difference falls back to the product’s real value: something the customer actually uses, that gives them something. AI can distribute a mediocre product faster and cheaper, but it can’t turn mediocrity into value. As the same wave levels competition on the surface, only the real value remains. And once customers can compare price and coverage through an AI assistant in seconds, the small surface differences wash out entirely; the only question left is what the product genuinely gives them.

In a market like Turkey, competition long centered on two axes: price and channel. Whoever held bancassurance and the agency network largely set the game; the product itself rarely changed. When the same AI wave reaches this market too, price and convenience will level fast. Once they do, a single question remains: does the customer renew this subscription for its price, or for the value it adds to their life?

Closing

I see insurance not as a policy but as a subscription wrapped in value. I’m after building the value first and letting the business follow. Because what grows the ultimate subscription business isn’t a relationship where the customer doesn’t forget to renew. It’s one where they’re glad to.