The Future of Expense & Travel Management in Insurance Finance

Executive Summary

The insurance industry is under growing pressure to evolve. Climate volatility, cyber threats, regulatory complexity, and shifting stakeholder expectations are all reshaping insurers' operations. As risks intensify and scrutiny tightens, finance leaders are being called on to modernize operations that were never built for today’s pace or complexity. While the sector has traditionally been cautious in adopting change, the current environment leaves little room for delay.

Travel and expense (T&E) and accounts payable (AP) may not be the most visible areas of transformation, but they are among the most critical. Inefficient, manual processes in these areas introduce risk, drain resources, and obscure spend visibility at a time when insurers can least afford it.

Introduction: Navigating a Shifting Landscape

The insurance industry exists to manage risk—and yet the very nature of risk is evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. From climate volatility to evolving regulatory expectations, insurers today face a multidimensional threat landscape that demands more than traditional underwriting tactics or regulatory solvency.

These pressures are exposing the limits of legacy operating models. Many organizations still rely on fragmented legacy systems and rigid workflows that can’t keep pace with real-time complexity. While short-term strategies like premium increases and selective coverage reductions have offered temporary relief, they do little to prepare carriers for the long-term volatility ahead. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes exceeded $100 billion for the fourth consecutive year in 2023—a sustained impact driving up loss ratios across the industry. As more premium dollars go toward claims, insurers face tighter margins and mounting pressure to preserve profitability elsewhere.

Forward-looking carriers recognize that staying competitive requires transforming how the business operates, from front-end services to back-office finance. Adapting to this change means becoming nimbler in interactions with consumers, distributors, regulators, and the workforce. This includes adopting advanced technologies and evolving operating models to improve enterprise responsiveness, accuracy, and visibility.

This transformation must extend to financial operations, particularly T&E and AP management. When optimized, these often overlooked domains directly influence how efficiently insurers can respond to change, ensure policy compliance, and surface actionable insights. Insurers can no longer afford to treat these workflows as afterthoughts.

By modernizing core finance processes, insurers can improve visibility, reduce risk, and build the operational resilience needed to thrive in an uncertain future.

Key Challenges in Insurance Finance Operations

Despite ongoing modernization efforts across claims and underwriting, core financial processes like T&E and AP remain burdened by inefficiencies that carry real financial and compliance liabilities.

Risk of fraud and policy non-compliance

Insurance organizations manage vast volumes of operational spend across distributed teams—claims adjusters, field investigators, underwriters, retail agents—each with varying degrees of discretion over travel, client entertainment, and day-to-day expenses. Unlike many other industries, insurance organizations often manage expenses across dozens of legal entities, product lines, and regions, each with its own cost centers, reimbursement rules, and approval hierarchies.

Minor violations, such as submitting claims without receipts, misclassifying expenses, or exceeding per diems, can add up fast in a high-volume environment like insurance without standardized, real-time enforcement. Globally, up to $140 billion in T&E spend is lost yearly to errors, misuse, or non-compliance. These risks are amplified in insurance, where decentralized operations and field-based spending are the norm. Without automated controls, these losses usually go undetected until year-end audits—if they’re identified at all.

Complex regulatory and compliance requirements

Insurance is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, placing an exceptionally high compliance burden on operational finance functions. In addition to standard accounting and tax rules, finance teams must comply with a growing array of industry-specific mandates spanning solvency, cybersecurity, and data privacy.

Mid-sized and larger insurers are subject to the Model Audit Rule (MAR), which requires internal control documentation and financial reporting oversight comparable to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Compounding this are data privacy laws such as HIPAA, GLBA, and the NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law, which govern the handling of sensitive financial, health, and personal information routinely processed in T&E and AP systems.

When expenses are tracked in spreadsheets or siloed systems, it becomes difficult to enforce policies, maintain audit trails, or respond quickly to regulator requests. This complexity only increases for multi-entity insurers, with varying expense policies, approval hierarchies, and ledger coding rules across regions.

High volume of operational expenses

Insurance organizations manage an unusually broad spectrum of operational spend, ranging from adjuster travel and underwriting visits to brokerage operations and vendor engagements. Unlike project-based industries, where expenses are tied to a limited number of billable engagements, insurance operational expenses are recurring, decentralized, and widely distributed across functions and entities.

For finance teams, this creates a continuous backlog of small-dollar, high-volume transactions that require categorization, validation, and reconciliation. As the number of expense reports, invoices, and vendor interactions grows, so does the administrative burden, especially when those processes are managed through disconnected systems.

According to Ardent Partners, it takes businesses an average of 17.4 days to manually process a single invoice. Such delays make it difficult to:

• Control discretionary spending
• Surface anomalies
• Produce timely financial reports
• Prevent duplicate payments
• Take advantage of savings opportunities
• Maintain financial agility

Limited visibility into real-time spend

Many insurers still rely on monthly or quarterly reports to assess budget adherence or identify anomalies. But by the time those reports are compiled, the data is already outdated, limiting the organization’s ability to catch overspending, reallocate resources, or enforce policies in real time. This lag is especially problematic during periods of volatility, such as climate disasters, claims surges, or regulatory shifts, when finance leaders need to act quickly and decisively.

Only 38% of AP teams have real-time visibility into invoice and payment data, leaving organizations reactive instead of proactive in managing costs. Without integrated tools and live dashboards, finance teams are forced to chase data across emails, spreadsheets, and siloed platforms—wasting time, increasing error rates, and ultimately putting enterprise-wide financial agility at risk.

Inefficient, manual reconciliation processes

For many insurance finance teams, closing the books is a time-consuming exercise in exception handling, paper trails, and spreadsheet workarounds. Beyond standard close, these teams also support regulatory filings, reserve adjustments, reinsurance settlements, and performance reporting across multiple lines of business. Without automation, reconciliation across different entities, cost centers, and accounting systems consumes a disproportionate share of staff capacity, not just at month-end but throughout the reporting cycle.

The scale of this burden is significant. According to PwC, insurers automating financial workflows have reduced the time and effort required by 37% compared to manual methods. This efficiency doesn’t just speed up reconciliation—it frees finance professionals to focus on higher-value work: improving forecast accuracy, strengthening audit readiness, advising the business on spend trends, and driving more strategic financial planning.

The Opportunity: Transforming T&E and AP

From compliance complexity to decentralized data, insurers face serious operational challenges today. But they also present a clear opportunity to rethink how finance operates and rebuild critical processes in ways that are more scalable, more strategic, and better aligned with the realities of modern insurance.

Modernizing T&E and AP isn’t just about speeding up approvals or reducing paper trails. It’s about gaining real-time visibility into where money is going, embedding controls directly into workflows, and strategically building a finance function that can support the pace of change and scale of growth across the business.

The benefits of transformation are tangible: faster close cycles, stronger audit performance, more accurate data, and clearer spend forecasting. These gains translate into real cost savings through reduced errors, streamlined workflows, and fewer hours spent on manual reconciliation. Just as important, automation enables finance and AP teams to focus on higher-impact work that drives the company forward.

Modern, integrated systems also lay the groundwork for long-term agility. Whether responding to a surge in claims, scaling into new markets, or adapting to regulatory change, insurers need financial infrastructure that can seamlessly evolve with them.

Instead of patching legacy systems, forward-looking finance leaders are investing in future-ready platforms that bring automation, control, and visibility into every corner of spend. These solutions do more than fix isolated process gaps—they unify workflows, embed policy compliance by design, and scale with the needs of a dynamic, highly regulated industry.

Modernize and Future-Proof Insurance Finance with AI-Powered Intelligence

For insurers, managing travel, expense, and accounts payable processes is far more than a back-office task—it plays a vital role in ensuring accuracy, compliance, and agility across the organization. With rising regulatory pressures, complex policy structures, and decentralized operations across multiple regions or entities, finance teams in insurance face unique and growing challenges.At Emburse, we understand these complexities because we’ve helped your peers overcome them. Recognized by IDC as a leader in enterprise expense management and AP automation, we bring deep industry experience and proven solutions to address the challenges insurers face every day. We’ve seen firsthand how fragmented systems and manual processes can slow down operations, introduce compliance risk, and limit financial visibility.Our solutions are purpose-built to address these realities. Emburse combines AI-powered insights, proactive policy controls, and seamless integrations to help insurance finance teams stay ahead of compliance requirements, reduce risk, and gain real-time visibility, without adding unnecessary administrative burden.

Serving the Diverse Insurance Ecosystem

Insurance is not one-size-fits-all. Emburse supports the distinct needs of carriers, brokers, intermediaries, and retail agents through flexible, scalable solutions tailored to the operational realities of each role in the ecosystem.

Carriers

Large carriers face high transaction volumes, complex regulatory requirements, and the need for robust internal controls. Emburse helps enforce policy consistently and at scale through intelligent fraud prevention analytics, AI-powered audit capabilities, and real-time spend visibility. These tools strengthen governance, reduce fraud exposure, and support audit readiness. With enterprise-grade security and scalability, the platform is purpose-built for large, regulated environments without slowing down operations.

Brokers

Brokers manage frequent travel, meetings, and claims-related expenses on tight timelines. Emburse automates T&E with mobile-first receipt capture, AI-powered expense categorization, and fast, automated approval flows. This streamlines reimbursements and allows brokers on the go to focus on client relationships—not administrative tasks.

Intermediaries

Intermediaries deal with multi-party relationships, layered commission structures, and cross-functional spend. Emburse integrates seamlessly with existing systems to deliver unified data views and automated reconciliation. Built-in AI analytics offer real-time insights into partner spend, helping ensure accuracy and compliance across diverse business relationships.

Retail Agent Groups

Decentralized by design, agent networks need fast, mobile-first expense management tools that empower autonomy while maintaining firm-wide control. Emburse offers an intuitive, unified mobile-first experience for expense submission and tracking, paired with centralized oversight, configurable policy rules, and real-time reporting. This balance of usability and control drives adoption and supports compliance—even across distributed teams.

Powering Smarter Spend Management for Insurance Finance Teams

To serve these complex and varied needs, Emburse brings together thoughtful, experience-backed design with next-generation technology. The result is a future-ready platform that addresses industry challenges head-on through automation, visibility, control, and a user experience that supports scale and agility.

Below are some of the key capabilities that enable insurers to reduce risk, improve efficiency, and drive smarter financial outcomes across the enterprise:

AI-Powered Financial Intelligence

Emburse AI leverages proprietary, responsibly sourced data and high-accuracy models to infuse intelligence throughout the expense and invoice lifecycle. With up to 95% receipt capture accuracy and 90% invoice data extraction, Emburse AI supports intelligent categorization and recognition of global currency and date nuances— reducing manual effort, coding errors, and reconciliation time.

Automated Policy Compliance

Real-time policy enforcement is built into the platform via automated approval chains, audit logs, business rules engines, and compliance dashboards, ensuring traceability and alignment with both internal policies and complex industry regulations.

Enhanced Data Security and Privacy

Designed for regulated industries, Emburse protects sensitive financial and employee data through enterprise-grade encryption, localized data processing, and certifications, including SOC1, SOC2, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701.

Improved Financial Visibility and Control

Emburse Analytics provides finance teams with enhanced data insights for better forecasting, benchmarking, and cost control. Real-time reporting makes managing budgets and surfacing opportunities across departments and regions easier. Meanwhile, services like Emburse Insight Advisor offer expert data consulting to maximize the value of organizational spending data.

Streamlined Expense and AP Processes

From mobile-first receipt capture to automated workflows, Emburse reduces administrative burden and accelerates cycle times. Intuitive tools simplify submissions and approvals, freeing finance teams to focus on higher-impact work.

Efficient Invoice Management

Emburse Invoice Enterprise modernizes AP with features like embedded OCR, auto-record generation, purchase order integration, and two- or three-way matching to streamline vendor payment verification and boost accuracy.

Proactive Fraud and Error Detection

AI-driven audit tools flag anomalies and potential fraud at the point of submission. Intelligent alerts help approvers make faster, more informed decisions—reducing risk before issues escalate.

Seamless Integration

Emburse connects easily with leading ERP systems, online booking tools, travel management companies, and accounting platforms for streamlined workflows and a unified, real-time view of expenses across the business.

Scalability and Change Management Support

Emburse offers flexible implementation models (Activate, Best Practice, Tailored) and add-on services such as Change Management, End-user Training, and Validation to help enterprise insurers scale confidently and sustain long-term value.

Fast, User-Friendly Experience

A global, unified mobile interface enables users to capture, submit, and approve expenses on the go. With AI-powered receipt capture and auto-categorization, the experience is fast, intuitive, and built to drive adoption without compromising compliance.

Achieving Measurable Results

By adopting modern T&E and AP solutions, insurers reduce risk, reclaim time, and unlock significant cost savings. Organizations implementing Emburse have achieved:

• 90% reduction in invoice processing time
• 67% faster employee reimbursements
• 50% reduction in time spent on expense audits
• Up to 3x cost savings compared to competitors
• Thousands of hours saved annually through the automation of manual tasks
• Increased spend control, with up to 20% reduction in spend and millions saved annually
• Stronger visibility and control by consolidating systems and standardizing processes enterprise-wide

These tangible results demonstrate how automating and optimizing expense processes directly contributes to the financial health and operational efficiency needed to thrive in the evolving insurance landscape.

Navigate the Future of Insurance Finance with Confidence

The future of expense and travel management in insurance finance is integrated, intelligent, and agile. As known risks escalate and new ones arise, insurers must remain a resilient source of financial security. Achieving this demands transformative strategies, including adopting modern operating models and advanced technologies.

Emburse helps insurance organizations navigate this complexity with clarity, control, and unwavering compliance. By leveraging AI-powered financial intelligence, robust compliance tools, seamless integrations, and comprehensive analytics, Emburse empowers insurance organizations to streamline operations, mitigate risks, and gain unprecedented financial visibility. This creates the foundation for faster decisions, stronger oversight, and more strategic financial leadership.

Moving beyond outdated practices isn’t just about solving today’s pain points; it’s about building a finance function ready for what comes next. For insurance firms, modernizing T&E and AP with a solution built for their unique needs is a critical step toward operational agility, financial resilience, and lasting impact in a rapidly evolving world.