(Image source: IIR.)

When Insurance Innovation Reporter spoke with Tim Hardcastle in 2022, the INSTANDA co-founder and CEO made an audacious forecast: Within five years, he expected the company to be one of the world’s leading insurance platforms. At the time, the London-based provider had more than 75 clients and was best known as a no-code challenger that let insurers launch and modify products without waiting on a vendor or IT team.

Four years later, Hardcastle stops short of declaring the ambition fulfilled. “I’d say we’re well along the road,” he says. But the markers he cites suggest a company that has moved beyond proving its original premise. INSTANDA now reports more than 100 clients globally, more than 60,000 insurance professionals using its platform and client products operating in more than 170 countries. The company says its compound annual growth rate has exceeded 50 percent during the past three years and that a product is built and deployed on its platform every 1.98 days.

The next test is North America. INSTANDA has operated in the region for seven years, but Hardcastle acknowledges that the company remains less well known there than in the U.K. or Australia. Its appointment of Josh Hall as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for North America, effective July 20, signals a more concentrated effort to convert a handful of significant proof points into a repeatable regional growth engine.

Hardcastle’s description of the opportunity is more pointed than the customary observation that North America is the world’s largest insurance market. “North America is the biggest pool of frustration anywhere in the world,” he says.

From Challenger to Modern Alternative

That frustration, in Hardcastle’s account, is rooted in a decade of costly, delayed and sometimes abandoned core replacement programs. He argues that executive teams are less willing to approve five-year transformations with uncertain business cases—particularly when the pace of technological change makes it difficult to predict what the business will require at the end of such a program.

Hardcastle is careful not to attribute every troubled implementation to the software vendor. Clients and systems integrators also shape the outcome, he says. His broader complaint is that the core systems market has too often rewarded marketing gloss and tolerated overpromising and underdelivery. The underlying point is not merely rhetorical: Buyers now expect evidence of time to value rather than assurances that complexity is unavoidable.

INSTANDA’s original proposition remains the foundation of its response. Insurers should be able to create and change products themselves, quickly and economically. What has changed is the scale at which the company says it can deliver that proposition. Hardcastle describes INSTANDA today not simply as a Greenfield enabler, but as “a modern alternative for a carrier that’s decided the traditional core replacement isn’t a path they’re prepared to walk again or even try.”

The company continues to serve start-ups and greenfield programs, which Hardcastle sees as a useful test of implementation speed and unit economics. At the same time, it is working with larger insurers and more complex books. He points to a large U.S. client that migrated seven products and associated data from another policy administration platform within 12 months. Hall says the program also included more than 77 integrations.

Why Hall, Why Now

For Hardcastle, three developments converged to make this the moment for dedicated North American commercial leadership: dissatisfaction with conventional replacement programs, evidence that INSTANDA’s model can work at substantial U.S. scale, and the need for a leader who understands the region’s buying culture and has established industry relationships. Hall is the “single accountable owner” for North American growth, Hardcastle says.

Hall brings more than 20 years of insurance, InsurTech and commercial leadership experience, most recently as Head of Sales and Business Development at ManageMy. His attraction to INSTANDA was grounded partly in experience on the other side of competitive sales. “I watched INSTANDA beat me time and time again when I was selling core systems because of what they can offer,” he says. The contrast that mattered was between submitting a change request and waiting months for a rate or coverage change, and enabling the business to make that change the same day.

Hall does not define readiness by company size. He sees the strongest immediate opportunity among midsize and large regional carriers that have already experienced the cost and risk of traditional transformation, and among MGAs and program administrators whose existing or homegrown platforms have become barriers to launching a second product or scaling the business.

The common signal is organizational rather than demographic: a business team that knows what it wants to change but cannot act without entering an IT queue. “That frustration is very easy to spot when I’m sitting across the table from folks,” Hall says.

His answer to concerns about choosing a smaller platform provider is similarly practical. Rather than asking a carrier to “bet the farm,” Hall proposes starting with one program, line of business or region. A bounded implementation gives both parties a chance to prove speed, delivery and working compatibility without placing an entire transformation at risk. “If we’re going to get it wrong about each other, let’s find it out in a quarter, not in three years,” he says.

AI Makes the Governed Core More Important

The rise of generative and agentic AI might appear to weaken the strategic importance of the policy administration system by allowing intelligence and workflow orchestration to sit above it. Hardcastle argues the opposite. An AI agent needs a canonical definition of the policy, boundaries on its authority and a record of what it did and why. Without those controls, he says, the agent is not autonomous so much as unaccountable.

That makes a modern core more central to an insurer’s risk position, in INSTANDA’s view. The durable distinction will not come from every vendor adding an AI copilot or adopting similar cloud and configuration language. It will come from whether the underlying platform can represent insurance-domain complexity, govern agent behavior and demonstrate compliance across jurisdictions.

INSTANDA now describes its platform as AI-augmented. Hardcastle cites INSTANDA Max, a production offering for ingesting and underwriting large schedules of assets in non-admitted commercial lines, and INSTANDA Clear, which he said was approaching production at the time of the interview. He is less interested in relatively familiar functions such as policy querying and summarization than in using AI to compress product creation while retaining an auditable, testable structure.

Natural-language product creation therefore does not eliminate the value of no-code, according to Hardcastle; it becomes a new front door to the same governed model of rating factors, coverage hierarchies and jurisdictional rules. INSTANDA has a capability that can ingest source material such as Word or Excel files and construct a product in minutes, he says. The competitive issue is what happens after generation: whether the result remains manageable, maintainable and subject to controlled change.

Hardcastle’s rule of thumb is that AI should accelerate anything reversible and auditable before it reaches production. A human should remain in the loop for changes affecting in-force policies, rating decisions or customers. “The moment you let a model touch production without that checkpoint, you’ve turned speed into your biggest liability instead of your biggest advantage,” he says.

A Measured Status Check

INSTANDA’s trajectory since 2022 supports neither the dismissal of an ambitious challenger nor an automatic declaration that its global ambition has been achieved. The company has expanded from more than 75 clients to more than 100, established larger-scale references and extended its proposition from rapid product launch toward governed AI and core replacement. Hardcastle says INSTANDA’s market standing has risen sharply in Australia and that it is regarded as a leading digital platform provider in the U.K.; North America remains the less mature part of the story.

That, of course, is why Hall’s appointment matters. INSTANDA believes it has accumulated enough product maturity, implementation experience and customer proof to shift from establishing viability to building a more systematic commercial presence.

The wager is—at least in part—that North American carriers’ accumulated frustration has reached the point where a modern alternative no longer has to win by matching the scale and marketing machinery of an incumbent. It can win by narrowing the initial commitment, demonstrating value quickly and giving the business greater control. Hall’s task is to show that INSTANDA can repeat that formula often enough to turn Hardcastle’s 2022 ambition into market position.

INSTANDA’s Drive to Become a Leading Global Insurance Platform