How Insurers Can Coordinate Build, Buy, Borrow and Bot Decisions

When there is a critical skills gap in an insurance business, there are four key options to resolve it: build an internal capability, buy it via permanent hire, borrow it through contingent or interim support, or automate the work with a bot. With each options, there is a different cost, speed and often a different person making that decision.

That is where coordination can become more difficult. Underwriting and claims leaders may prioritise whoever can start fastest. Talent acquisition owns the permanent hiring pipeline. Procurement manages contingent panels. Technology holds the automation roadmap. Four routes, potentially four owners, without always having a shared view of which one makes the most sense for the role in question.

Four Routes, Often Different Owners in Insurance

Build 

Growing capability internally through technical academies, actuarial and underwriting rotation programmes, or graduate pipelines. This protects deep product and risk knowledge that can take years to develop, but it is slow, and insurers may be competing with other carriers for the same narrow pool of actuarial and underwriting talent across multiple markets.

Buy 

Permanent hiring from the external market. Effective when the skill exists externally, but specialist underwriting, actuarial, and claims leadership roles can be scarce in many markets, and approval cycles in larger insurers can be slower than the market moves.

Borrow

 Contingent workforce, interim leadership, or managed claims resource. This is often the fastest lever, and in insurance it gets pulled hardest around claims surges following catastrophic events, regulatory reporting deadlines, or system migrations. The challenge is that this spend may be reactive by design, provisioned after a surge hits rather than planned for, and may sit outside formal workforce planning. For a close look at  bringing this route under proper control see our complete guide to contingent workforce management. 

Bot

 Automation across claims processing, first notice of loss (FNOL) intake, and straight-through underwriting for simpler policies. This is genuinely reshaping parts of the insurance value chain, but adoption can be constrained by legacy policy administration systems that were not built to integrate with newer automation tools, so the “bot” route may be more available in theory than in practice.

Why the Decision Can Be More Complex in Insurance

Insurance regulation is set jurisdiction by jurisdiction rather than through a single global standard, and licensing or authorisation requirements for claims adjusters, underwriters, and distribution roles vary from market to market. This means the sourcing route available for a given role can depend on where the work is performed and what's authorised there, which restricts options that would otherwise be the fastest fix. Claims volume is also inherently unpredictable, tied to weather events and catastrophe cycles, which means the "borrow" route gets activated in emergency mode rather than as a planned decision. And legacy core systems, still common across the industry worldwide, limit how much of the "bot" route is realistically deployable without a wider technology investment.

The result is a talent strategy that reacts route by route, rather than one that's planned across all four at once.

What A Governance Framework Needs To Cover

A working framework should not be complicated and only needs three core elements that can help guide decision-making:

• Single point of visibility across build, buy, borrow, and bot activity
• Consistent set of criteria for evaluating them, including cost, speed, regulatory authorisation, and catastrophe readiness
• A named decision owner for roles above a defined complexity or cost threshold

This does not mean removing decision-making from underwriting or claims leaders. It means making sure that when a role opens, or a claims surge hits, the choice between the four routes is made with the full picture in view rather than defaulting to whichever route is easiest to access at that moment. This kind of coordinated decision-making is a core part of building a scalable talent strategy, one that holds up whether demand comes from steady hiring needs or sudden claims surges.

H2: What This Means for Leaders in Insurance

A useful starting point is to ask whether your organisation can clearly identify who currently owns the decision between these four routes, particularly for claims capacity during a surge. Map where each type of sourcing decision sits today, who approves it, and whether it's planned or reactive. In our experience supporting financial services organisations through this type of challenge, the biggest gains can come from making existing decisions visible and consistent, not from switching routes altogether. We saw a version of this when accelerating high-volume recruitment for a UK insurance services firm through a modular RPO approach, where the real gain came from a more coordinated, high-touch hiring model rather than simply adding headcount.

Worth a conversation

If workforce sourcing decisions in your organisation are spread across underwriting, claims, procurement, and technology without a shared framework, it's worth a conversation. Robert Walters, as a talent solutions provider, works with insurance and financial services organisations to bring build, buy, borrow, and bot decisions into a single, coordinated view, including planning ahead for claims surge capacity rather than sourcing it under pressure. Speak with our experts to discuss what that could look like for your business.