From pipelines to platforms: the quiet shift inside boardrooms
A quiet shift is underway inside the boardrooms of insurers, banks, and travel companies. It shows up in a simple but increasingly urgent question: are these businesses building the right kind of infrastructure for what comes next?
CEO
Ebix Technologies
For decades, scale in these industries came from expansion. More products, more geographies, more channels, more partnerships. Growth was largely additive. But that model has limits, and those limits are now becoming visible. You see it when a customer drops off during a policy renewal because the process takes too long. You see it when a cross-border transaction slows down because systems cannot connect. You see it when an underwriter is still relying on static data in a market that changes in real time.
The industries that built some of the most sophisticated operating pipelines of the last century are now realizing that those same pipelines may not be enough for the next one.
The pipeline problem
A pipeline does one thing well. It takes an input, whether that is a loan application, a travel booking, or an insurance claim, and moves it through a defined process to an outcome. Banks, insurers, and airlines built these systems with great precision, each one optimized for its own balance sheet, compliance model, product structure, and customer relationship.
That is exactly why so many large institutions now operate with 50 to several hundred legacy applications across the enterprise. Each one supports a product line, a channel, a geography, or a function. Many of them are well built. But many of them were also built for a world that no longer exists.
What has changed most is the customer journey. A traveler buying flight insurance does not experience the journey as separate steps handled by separate providers. They do not think of the ticket, the policy, and the currency conversion as unrelated products. They experience it as one moment of intent. But the institutions serving that customer are often still operating through disconnected systems that cannot share context, data, or decisions in real time.
That gap is not just inconvenient. It is expensive. According to IDC Research, large banks lose roughly 30 percent of annual revenue to inefficiencies caused by siloed operations. For insurers and travel businesses running similar architectures, the underlying issue is not materially different.
The role of platforms
When multiple producers and consumers operate within a shared ecosystem, the value created does not grow in a straight line. It compounds. Every new participant, whether that is a hospital network joining an insurer’s ecosystem, an airline connecting to a travel financial services platform, or a payments provider integrating into a banking layer, increases the value of the system for everyone already in it. That is the power of network effects, and it remains one of the most durable advantages in the digital economy.
Today, seven of the ten largest companies in the world by market capitalization are platform businesses. They do not necessarily own everything that flows through the system, but they enable it, govern it, and benefit from it. That list includes companies such as Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
In regulated industries, platform logic has especially strong applications. It creates a structure in which multiple participants can interact more efficiently, data can move with greater purpose, and the customer relationship can become more continuous rather than episodic.
Intent at the point of need
One of the clearest examples of platform logic in financial services is embedded finance, the idea of offering financial products at the exact moment a customer needs them.
The market numbers reflect how important that shift has become. According to Embedded Finance Market forecasts from 2025 to 2030, the embedded finance market was valued at roughly $146 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $690 billion by 2030. McKinsey’s research also suggests that companies adopting embedded finance can achieve two to five times higher customer lifetime value while reducing acquisition costs by around 30 percent. At the same time, nearly 70 percent of banks now describe embedded finance as central to their digital strategy.
What makes this work is not simply the front-end technology. It is the platform underneath it that makes integration feel seamless and timely.
The same principle applies in insurance. Dynamic underwriting cannot work well on top of static models alone. A platform that can bring together behavioral data, location data, and contextual signals can price risk far more accurately in real time. Once that level of integration becomes possible, it does more than improve efficiency. It changes the economics of the product itself.
Governance as architecture
One of the biggest barriers to platform adoption is not always technology. Often, it is the lack of a coherent internal strategy. Many banking executives continue to cite that as a primary reason progress remains slow.
The organizations that are getting this right have made one important shift. They no longer treat governance as something that sits outside the system. They treat it as part of the architecture. Data-sharing rules are built into API contracts. Regulatory controls are triggered at the point of transaction. Compliance becomes part of how the platform works, not an extra layer applied after the fact.
Customer journeys are increasingly concentrating within platforms. Distribution is concentrating within platforms. So are data, financial services, and travel services. The organizations that recognize this early will be in a stronger position to shape the ecosystem rather than simply respond to one built by others.
This is no longer just a technology decision. It is becoming a strategic one.
Authored by Gagan Sethi, CEO, Ebix Technologies