As regulatory complexity in the P&C insurance industry intensifies, many carriers are reevaluating long-held strategies for managing bureau updates and compliance. While some continue to maintain in-house regulatory operations, the landscape has shifted rapidly. The speed, volume, and scope of changes today, particularly in anticipation of sweeping updates like the upcoming General Liability rewrite, have revealed the limitations of a do-it-yourself approach.
For years, many carriers have held tightly to a do-it-yourself approach when it comes to bureau and regulatory maintenance. Whether it’s because they’ve built robust internal IT teams, have legacy systems customized within an inch of their lives, or simply believe that control equals stability, the instinct is understandable. But times have changed. And the risks of going it alone have grown, fast.
The New Cost of DIY
It’s easy to think of regulatory management as a back-office function. It’s not client-facing. It doesn’t generate direct revenue. But treating it as an afterthought is a mistake that often doesn’t show up in the budget until it hits your timeline, operations, or compliance standing.
Let’s take a hypothetical: your team is managing General Liability updates, manually ingesting circulars, assessing impact, modifying rates and rules, and testing across multiple jurisdictions. What’s the cost of getting it wrong?
- Delayed speed to market: If your competitors have already implemented the changes using an outsourced partner with automated updates, they’re quoting faster. You’re stuck in regression testing.
- Increased overhead: Maintaining an internal team large enough to keep up with thousands of regulatory changes a year isn’t just expensive. It’s becoming unsustainable. Even major carriers are finding it harder to retain the talent with the skills to keep these systems up to date.
- Compliance risk: Regulatory changes are not just about rate adjustments. They impact documentation, wording, policy structure, and more. A missed update in one state could cascade into compliance violations across multiple jurisdictions.
These are real-world implications. In a business that thrives on precision, a lagging or error-prone regulatory process isn’t just inefficient. It’s risky.
Outsourcing Isn’t Abdicating Control. It’s Enabling Precision.
There’s a growing myth that outsourcing bureau and regulatory management means giving up control. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Outsourcing doesn’t remove your oversight, it just removes your exposure. The right vendor doesn’t just ingest circulars and spit out updates. They bring:
- Expertise in interpretation, especially important with nuanced or high-impact changes like the upcoming General Liability rewrite.
- Automated ingestion pipelines that are QA tested and regression tested across products.
- Performance-tested environments to validate regulatory changes before deployment.
- A team of compliance and insurance experts who’ve implemented thousands of updates and understand both the spirit and the letter of the change.
This is not about shifting responsibility. It’s about giving your teams the ability to focus on differentiators, including your products, your customer experience, and your growth strategy, while a dedicated partner handles the complexity that’s only increasing.
The General Liability Rewrite: A Tipping Point
If you’re still questioning whether it’s time to rethink your regulatory strategy, consider what’s on the horizon. The General Liability rewrite is not a routine update. It’s a comprehensive overhaul of rate, rule, and form content that will touch nearly every aspect of policy administration, from product configuration to compliance documentation to downstream systems. The scope is massive, and the implications are real.
In addition to changes to rating and forms, the entire General Liability classification manual is being rewritten, including all footnotes and form references. The previous manual and classification codes will be fully expired, and ISO will no longer support them. Any insurer that wishes to remain bureau-based will be required to adopt the new classification structure. Statistical coding will also be impacted, further increasing the complexity of implementation and compliance.
Insurers managing this in-house will need to:
- Parse and analyze complex bureau filings
- Rebuild product configurations in systems that may not be designed for agile updates
- Regress against every impacted jurisdiction and LOB
- Retest integrations, forms, and documents across the quote-to-bind process
- Handle release coordination and QA while maintaining day-to-day operations
It’s not a lift. It’s a total transformation. And it’s one that carriers should not, and frankly, no longer need to, shoulder alone.
What the Most Agile Carriers Are Doing
Many of the most agile and forward-looking carriers have already made the shift. They’re choosing to treat regulatory management not as a hidden cost, but as a competitive advantage. They’re investing in:
- Vendors with built-in regulatory content libraries that reduce manual data entry and eliminate spreadsheet-based updates
- Platforms that push updates in real time and allow product teams to apply changes at scale with minimal disruption
- Partners who can predict rather than just react to the next round of updates
And they’re doing this because they’ve seen what happens when a market opportunity arises, and they’re ready while others are still testing.
The Bottom Line
In the past, outsourcing may have felt like a risk. Today, it’s the safeguard. A safeguard against falling behind, against compliance penalties, and against missing the moment when speed to market becomes a differentiator.
As carriers face mounting pressures to modernize while navigating regulatory minefields, the smart move isn’t to double down on internal lift. It’s to align with partners who know this terrain better than anyone. DIY made sense when change was slow. But in a market like this? The cost is just too high.