Digital onboarding of the insurance client: from first contact to the signed policy

The client who searches online and signs at the agency

There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of Italian insurance distribution, and it is the starting point for understanding why digital onboarding matters so much. On one hand, industry research portrays an increasingly digital client: according to the Italian Insurtech Association, among consumers inclined toward digital channels the share of those who take out policies online rose from 47% in 2022 to 60% in 2024. On the other, market figures show that sales concluded directly online remain marginal: in the non-life lines the direct channel by phone and internet accounts for just 2.9% of premiums, while agencies and brokers intermediate almost nine out of ten.

The two facts do not contradict each other: they measure different moments of the same journey. The client starts online — searching, comparing, requesting a quote — but closes through an intermediary. The Politecnico di Milano's Fintech & Insurtech Observatory confirms it: 62% prefer to activate simple policies from an app or website, but for more complex ones, such as life cover, 57% go back to choosing the physical agency. It is the phenomenon marketing calls ROPO, research online, purchase offline. And it has a precise consequence for the intermediary: digital is not there to disintermediate them, it is there to avoid losing the client along the stretch that runs from the online search to the signature at the agency. That stretch is the onboarding, and it is there that most prospects are lost today.

Where leads are lost along the journey

A prospect lands on the agency's website, perhaps from a Google search or an ad. From that moment until the signature there are several points at which they can drop off, and almost all of them are avoidable.

The first is the form that is too long. The most solid data comes from e-commerce, but the lesson is transferable: the Baymard Institute, which has studied the usability of online processes for nearly twenty years, measures an average abandonment rate of 70.22% in online purchase journeys, and among the stated causes 18% concern a process that is too long or complicated and 19% the obligation to create an account before proceeding. Baymard also finds that checkout forms contain on average 11.3 fields, when about 8 would suffice. Every extra field that is not really needed is one more reason to close the tab. It should be said honestly: part of the abandonment is unavoidable — 43% of users simply state they were "just looking" — but the part linked to avoidable friction is exactly the part you can act on.

The second critical point is the response time. Here the benchmark study is the one from Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads": across more than 2,200 companies the average first-response time to an online lead was 42 hours, and 23% of companies never responded at all. The same research calculated that contacting a lead within an hour makes qualifying them about seven times more likely than doing so even one hour later. An older MIT study on lead response management had already shown how quickly a lead cools in the first few minutes. Translated for an agency: a quote filled in during the evening that gets a reply two days later is, in most cases, an already-lost client.

The third point is the needless manual steps: data requested twice, documents to print and bring back to the agency, a signature that arrives by post when everything else is already digital. Every break in the flow is a chance to reconsider.

Shortening the journey: four concrete levers

Reducing drop-off does not mean adding technology, but removing friction. Four levers in particular act on the critical points just described.

Targeted landing pages, not the homepage for everyone

A client searching for "professional insurance for nurses" who ends up on the agency's generic homepage has to reconstruct on their own the connection between what they were looking for and what they see. A landing page dedicated to that specific need — with the right language, a single call to action and no distractions — shortens the distance between the question and the answer. Fewer choices, less noise, more conversions.

Progressive data collection

Instead of presenting a form with twenty fields, the journey should be broken into short steps that ask one thing at a time and give value back at each stage. The logic is the same one that reduces abandonment in well-designed checkouts: the user stays because at each step they see progress, not a wall. Complete personal details are collected once the client is already engaged, not as an entry toll.

Fast quoting

The client asking for a quote wants, first of all, a ballpark figure. A tool that returns it quickly — ideally straight away, by talking to the rating engines — keeps attention alive at the moment of maximum motivation. Deferring everything to a callback means handing yourself over to that 42-hour average delay that makes the lead vanish.

Integrated digital signature

The last mile is often the most neglected: after digitising search, quote and data collection, many agencies still have people sign on paper. A digital signature integrated into the journey closes the loop at the moment the client is most decided, with no travel or printing. It is also the point where it pays to know the rules well, because not everything is permitted and not everything is forbidden.

The digital signature: what the rules really say

On the legal side, the correct reference is IVASS Regulation No. 8 of 2015, whose Article 5 establishes that the policy may be formed as an electronic document signed with an advanced, qualified or digital electronic signature. It is worth being precise, because online you often find references to a later IVASS measure from 2020 that in fact concerns something else entirely (pre-contractual disclosure and investment products): for the validity of the signature in insurance contracts the basis remains Regulation 8/2015.

There is, however, a limit to be aware of: the same regulation does not cover the case in which the contract is placed entirely remotely, a scenario governed by a distinct set of rules. In practice, a digital signature integrated into the journey works very well when it accompanies and closes a relationship with the intermediary — which is exactly the ROPO scenario we were talking about — whereas a fully remote sale requires a separate framing, to be assessed carefully. We explored the operational advantages of this tool in the article dedicated to brokers and the digital signature.

In the background, the European framework is also in motion: the eIDAS 2 regulation, in force since May 2024, introduces the European digital identity wallet with compliance deadlines set for September 2026. It is one more reason to build signature and identification processes today that are designed to last, rather than stopgap solutions.

A journey, not a series of disconnected forms

The most common mistake is to digitise the individual pieces while leaving them disconnected: a form here, a quote engine there, the signature in a third system, and in between the client forced to re-enter the same data. Onboarding works when the pieces form a single continuous journey, in which the information gathered at one step feeds the next. The client should not notice the seams between the tools; they should just move forward.

One element that helps hold the journey together beyond the signature is the client portal, the place where the relationship continues after the policy is taken out: documents, deadlines, communications. We discussed it in detail in the article on what works and what to avoid in a client portal. The principle, here too, is that onboarding does not end with the signature: it is the beginning of a relationship worth keeping digital and orderly.

In summary

The Italian insurance client behaves consistently: they search and compare online, but they choose to sign through a trusted intermediary, especially when the policy is important. For the agent and the broker, digital is not a threat of disintermediation: it is the tool for not losing that client along the most fragile stretch of the journey, the one that runs from the first click to the signature. Targeted landing pages, progressive data collection, fast quoting and an integrated digital signature shorten that stretch and reduce drop-off, provided they are treated as a single flow and not as disconnected forms.

At A126 we design bespoke digital onboarding journeys for insurance intermediaries, stitching together landing pages, quoting, data collection and signature into a single flow consistent with the agency's procedures. If you want to understand where your journey loses clients and how to recover them, request a free consultation.

A126 Corporate Advisors — we digitise the client relationship, from first contact to signature.