The Top Competitor to Low-Code Isn’t Another Vendor — It’s Custom Code

Jake Sloan opened Episode 52 of InsurTechTalk talking about drag racing, not insurance. It’s a genuine weekend hobby of his in Kansas City, one he shares with his two sons at “test and tune” events — casual track days where you bring your own car and push it safely rather than compete. What caught his attention lately is the split forming in that world between traditional internal-combustion drag racers and the new wave of electric cars, headlined by Tesla’s Model S Plaid, now among the fastest production cars ever built. Jake doesn’t own one himself — he races against them — but the split struck him as a useful parallel to what he sees playing out in insurance technology: an established way of doing things being challenged by something faster, and a healthy skepticism from the people who’ve spent years mastering the old way.

Jake is Global Industry Manager for Insurance at Appian, a low-code automation platform. His path into the industry ran through the first half of his career in telecom technology at Sprint, then into Farmers Insurance’s large Kansas City contact center, followed by a stint as CIO for AEON’s specialty flood unit, before landing at Appian four years ago to lead its insurance practice.

What Low-Code Actually Means

Jake’s explanation of Appian starts with the basics: it’s a platform for building applications and workflows through a visual, drag-and-drop designer rather than traditional hand-written code — closer to drawing a flowchart than programming in the conventional sense. That “low-code, low-touch” approach, he says, delivers applications 10 to 20 times faster than traditional high-code development, depending on the analyst firm cited, while cutting long-term maintenance costs by at least half. It also widens the talent pool that can build enterprise applications at a moment when technical talent, as IDC and others have reported, is in genuinely short supply — making low-code, in Jake’s framing, as much a staffing and succession strategy as a development methodology.

CNA’s Award-Winning Compass Platform

Jake pointed to CNA’s Compass application — an underwriter placement platform spanning 226 business partners across 164 countries — as a concrete example of what low-code can do at real enterprise scale. The application won a Celent Model Insurer Award, recognized specifically for legacy and ecosystem transformation. The regulatory complexity behind an application like that is significant: aligning to local policy requirements and governance standards across dozens of countries, each with its own regime, alongside the well-known challenge of even a single country like the US, where each of 50 states can carry its own regulatory variation on top of federal frameworks like GDPR’s rough American analogues.

Appian’s approach to that complexity, per Jake, centers on reusable components it calls “records” — build a compliance component once, and if it applies to three-quarters of a set of jurisdictions, reuse it as the base and customize only the remaining variance, rather than rebuilding logic from scratch for every jurisdiction.

Where RPA Falls Short, and Where Legacy Systems Fit In

We talked through how Appian handles the reality that most large insurers still carry legacy technology — mainframes, COBOL, custom wrappers — somewhere in their stack. Jake described Appian’s approach as attaching to that legacy layer as a “system of process,” meeting the data on its own terms via APIs or RPA rather than requiring a rip-and-replace. For claims specifically, Appian offers what it calls “Connected Claims,” a set of seven modules spanning the claims journey, designed to connect into a carrier’s existing legacy claims systems on both the P&C and life sides rather than replace them outright.

On the specific question of RPA as a “band-aid” versus genuine system integration, Jake was candid: a number of large tier-one insurers who doubled down on RPA-only strategies have found them falling short of expectations. His framing is that Appian typically integrates with and leverages existing RPA investments rather than ripping them out, then layers a broader orchestration layer on top — straight-through processing, underwriting workbenches — that a point solution like RPA alone can’t deliver. He also acknowledged real, earned skepticism toward low-code in the market given past missteps from RPA-only projects that promised more than they delivered, and said Appian’s answer to that skepticism is speed itself: the average Appian insurance application, from requirements gathering to full global deployment, takes about eight weeks.

Asked about competitors, Jake named custom code — built and maintained by internal IT teams protective of institutional knowledge of “their stack” — as the most common alternative insurers actually choose, ahead of platform competitors like Salesforce, Majesco, and Pega.

IoT, Parametric Triggers, and a Mercedes-Benz Proof of Concept

Jake described hyperautomation, per Gartner’s definition, as the recognition among enterprise architects that scaling automation strategically requires more than RPA alone — pulling together workflow, RPA, AI-driven decision rules, API integration, and intelligent document processing into one coordinated approach. He pointed to several live examples Appian has built with insurers: agricultural IoT sensors monitoring weather, fertilizer application, and flooding to trigger proactive alerts or claims processing; a water-monitoring device on a home’s main line that, once triggered, can proactively prompt a policyholder and even dispatch a plumber before a claim is formally filed; a proof of concept with fine wine shippers tracking logistics data against defined criteria in a parametric-style structure; and a recent proof of concept with Mercedes-Benz’s publicly available telematics SDK, exploring what fully automated, criteria-triggered claims handling could look like.

ITC Vegas Plans

Looking ahead to ITC Vegas (this episode recorded just before the conference), Jake previewed Appian’s plans: a lunch session on connected insurance and hyperautomation, and a showcase of the Connected Claims platform. He reflected on the pandemic’s effect on the industry’s appetite for change — CEOs and CIOs pushed to rethink workforce and policyholder engagement virtually overnight — and noted a corresponding shift in how insurers approach modernization: less appetite for multi-year, big-bang implementations, more interest in incremental, iterative delivery.

Advice: Intelligent Automation, and a Grow Tent Gone Sideways

For his closing recommendation, Jake pointed to the audiobook he was in the middle of: Intelligent Automation by Pascal Bornet, whom he follows on LinkedIn. His second, more personal life hack came out of the pandemic: an indoor grow tent he bought for his kids, aged nine and four, to teach them where food comes from. Their first attempt — carrots planted alongside cilantro — failed outright; it turns out, per the gardening community, the two don’t grow well together. Round two, lettuce and strawberries, went considerably better. Jake closed with genuine appreciation for how difficult even a small-scale growing effort turned out to be, and by extension, real respect for the people who do it at agricultural scale for a living.

Key Takeaways

• Appian’s own data point on the value of low-code: the average insurance application takes about eight weeks from requirements gathering to full global deployment, versus the multi-month or multi-year timelines typical of traditional custom development
• CNA’s Compass platform — a Celent Model Insurer Award winner spanning 226 business partners across 164 countries — illustrates how reusable, jurisdiction-specific compliance components can scale a single application across dramatically varied regulatory environments
• Jake’s honest read on the market: the biggest competitor to low-code platforms isn’t another vendor, it’s internal custom code — defended by IT teams protective of institutional knowledge and wary of a backlog-deep transition
• RPA-only strategies have fallen short for a number of large tier-one insurers; Appian’s approach is to integrate with existing RPA investments rather than replace them, then add orchestration on top
• IoT and telematics are moving connected insurance from hype to practical deployment — from agricultural sensors and home water-leak devices that can trigger claims proactively, to a Mercedes-Benz telematics proof of concept exploring fully automated claims handling
• The pandemic shifted insurer appetite away from multi-year, big-bang system implementations toward faster, incremental modernization — a trend Jake sees as directly favoring low-code approaches