Annually, Celent examines the business priorities, IT budgets, and investments being made by North American life insurance company technology executives. Celent publishes similar reports on EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In November and December 2024, Celent distributed an online survey to North American life and annuity insurance company technology executives, across both individual and group lines. While the survey was reasonably short, it covered a broad range of topics, including business priorities, IT budgets, investment plans, SaaS adoption, and open insurance. A few findings include:

• Operations cost reductions / efficiency will have the most significant influence on IT investments this year followed by growth and cybersecurity.
• North American life insurers' planned spending is back to the levels seen in during the pandemic suggesting that the 2024 data might have been an anomoly. Expenditures on external services continues to increase.
• PAS investments top core system plans, but claims has become an area of interest. Frontend investments continue to highlight the need for agent efficiency and user experience. Data and analytics investment plans include significantly enhancing or maintaining existing systems.
• North American life insurers are moving to SaaS for many applications, and they have plans to move more of their core backend systems to SaaS in the near future.