America Buys, Europe Builds

Ask a CIO in Chicago and their counterpart in Paris the same question, "make or buy?", and you'll get two opposite answers. In the US, the vast majority of large insurers have gone with buy, running their business on off-the-shelf platforms. In France, historically, more than three quarters of P&C insurers (38 out of 50) run on systems built in-house. Same industry, same dilemma, two radically different technology cultures. And in 2026, the make model, long the default in Europe, is starting to look outdated.

Why the question isn't the same on both sides

The make-or-buy dilemma isn't just a matter of preference. It's shaped by the geography of the market.

In the US, an insurer deploying a core system addresses a continental market: one language, consistent distribution practices, comparable products from one state to the next. Despite 50 state regulators, the market is standardized in practice. A software vendor can therefore spread its development costs across dozens of carriers with similar needs.

In Europe, every country is a market of its own: language, tax rules, contract law, distribution habits, mandatory coverages. A "pan-European" platform has to absorb all of that complexity, which long made vendor offerings less compelling than in the US. The result: European insurers built their own systems, country by country, tailored to their home market.

Add the cost of a core platform replacement (often more than $5 million and 12 to 18 months for a large insurer, and considerably more in practice for full programs) and it's easy to see why nobody replays that game lightly.

The US: buy rules

The American market has consolidated around a handful of dominant vendors, now the de facto standard among large carriers. The make-or-buy question was settled there a decade ago: you buy, you configure, you integrate.

Make hasn't disappeared, though. It has moved: VC-backed full-stack insurtechs are the ones building from scratch, because their business model rests precisely on owning that technology. For a traditional mid-sized insurer, however, building in-house has become an anomaly.

The flip side of this model: heavy dependence on a vendor oligopoly, high license and integration costs, and time-to-market that remains slow despite what the brochures promise.

Europe: the legacy of make

Europe went the other way. European insurers, French ones in particular, historically favored in-house development: large IT teams and homegrown systems built over decades, perfectly fitted to local specifics. Systems nobody else controls, and nobody else depends on.

That independence comes at a price, and it isn't measured in euros alone. Insurance CIOs now spend more than half of their IT budget just maintaining these homegrown systems. But the real gap is elsewhere: an in-house system can't keep pace with the innovation of software whose sole purpose is exactly that, improved continuously for dozens of clients. And AI is widening the gap further: these twenty- or thirty-year-old foundations, with no APIs and data locked in proprietary formats, are structurally unfit for the use cases now emerging. It's no coincidence that legacy obsolescence has become the number one trigger for modernization projects (cited by 48% of insurers surveyed in a 2025 industry study), ahead of customer experience (44%) and regulatory compliance (42%).

Buy is gaining ground in Europe, but slowly. Many European insurers are moving toward a hybrid model, keeping legacy systems for the back book and buying modern components for new products.

The third way: neither make nor buy, at least not the old way

What if make or buy, as the industry has framed it for twenty years, were the wrong question?

Old-school make produces systems nobody knows how to evolve anymore. Old-school buy, the monolithic platform deployed over 18 months, often ends up recreating the very problem it was meant to solve: after a few years of custom configuration, the platform becomes legacy in its own right, and proprietary legacy at that.

What's emerging on both sides of the Atlantic is a third way: the modular, API-first SaaS core system. You buy the foundation (policy administration, billing, claims) and you build what truly sets you apart: products, journeys, distributor integrations. Make focuses where it creates value; buy covers what has become a commodity.

For Europe, this approach has one decisive advantage: modularity absorbs market fragmentation. Launching a product in a new country becomes a matter of configuration and a few integrations, not a rewrite. It's also what finally makes the pan-European ambitions of MGAs and mid-sized insurers credible, the very players for whom neither full make nor the $5 million platform was ever within reach.

A false choice

Europe and the US didn't answer make or buy the same way because their markets weren't asking the same question. The US standardized; Europe customized. In 2026, both approaches are converging on the same conclusion: what matters is no longer "build or buy" but "where to draw the line between the two."

The insurers and MGAs who win the next decade won't be the ones who built everything, nor the ones who bought everything. They'll be the ones who bought a modern foundation and kept control of what makes them unique.