This report analyses regional IT spending patterns of insurance companies. It examines estimates for IT budgets based on premium growth and allocations of IT budgets by resources and domains. To help clients navigate challenges facing the industry, Celent has updated its IT spending forecast model based on recent primary insights from business and technology industry leaders from its Dimensions program. The IT spending estimations provided in this report are based on this year’s Dimensions survey with regional insurance CIOs and architects. Our Dimensions survey-based reports across regions are updated every year and help us estimate insurers’ IT budgets and how these budgets are split across various domains and resources. This year we have also added specific questions by activity types.

• IT spending by APAC life insurers will almost reach US$180 billion in 2029
• We estimate life insurance IT spending at about $134 billion this year. Following the expected growth of the market over the next five years, we expect life APAC insurers to increase their IT spending by about 34% to reach almost $180 billion by 2029.
• APAC life insurers tend to spend more on internal resources
• We estimate internal IT expenditure to amount to $69 billion in 2025 and to increase to $92 billion in 2029. Our estimations show also an increase for external IT expenditure from $65 billion to $88 billion in five years. It is difficult to anticipate major shifts between IT spending in internal versus external expenditures. These highly depend on the insurers’ strategies and business objectives that IT supports, and therefore on investment in various technologies that have a direct impact on this split—for instance, the cloud.
• We estimate spending in IT management to be the highest domain spend by APAC life insurers.
• Applications is the second highest spend and includes staff-supporting application development or run. Infrastructure is the third-largest IT spend, and spending on external services is the fourth largest.
• The political and economic outlook remain highly uncertain
• While we anticipate smooth growth of IT spending in the next couple of years, we understand the current geopolitical and economic situation is highly uncertain, including new tariffs imposed by the US—even though they have been delayed at the time of the writing of this report—that can impact APAC companies, the global economy, and therefore financial markets