Dutch insurance competes on almost nothing but price. Products in most non-life lines are undifferentiated, a large share of new business runs through comparison platforms, and switching providers takes a few clicks. The digital identity experience is one of the few differentiators left, and most Dutch insurers are not using it as one.
The Identity Maturity Index 2026 measures exactly where insurers stand: not the strength of one login screen, but whether a customer's verified identity travels across onboarding, login, signing and claims, or gets rebuilt at every step.
In April 2026, NIQ surveyed Dutch and Belgian consumers on how their insurers handle identity. For each identity moment, respondents said two things: which method their provider uses today, and what they would expect as a customer. The first became the maturity score, the second the importance score, and the distance between them is the demand insurers are not meeting.
Here are the main findings for Dutch insurance:
Research by Signicat across 14 European markets found 68% of consumers have abandoned an insurance or banking application during onboarding at least once, and 38% of those who abandoned did so for lack of the right identity credentials.
he data in the Identity Maturity Index backs up these claims. In Dutch insurance, signing a new contract is usually the weakest link in the customer journey. Most insurers still rely on click-to-accept or an emailed PDF at this step.
Identity verification is the second gap and it happens after the contract is signed, when the customer has already committed and the insurer has already paid for the acquisition. Until it clears, the policy stays inactive.
Both weak points happen at the same moment: after the insurer has already paid to win the customer. A signature with no verified identity behind it and a verification step that arrives too late do not just add friction, they turn a paid acquisition into a lost one.
Many insurers hold off on an external ID app, assuming customers will not want another app. But the data says otherwise.
It’s also important to note that Dutch insurance does not have one maturity score, it has two. Health insurers are required by law to offer DigiD and so, in the Identity Maturity Index, they cluster near the top of the index. Non-life insurers cannot use DigiD and have to build their own infrastructure (or not), so they scatter from strong to barely-digital while serving the same customers.
That spread is not just an average obscuring one insurer from another. The report breaks the non-health segment down insurer by insurer, and login is where the difference shows up most clearly. One insurer made an external identity scheme its only login method and it scored the highest in maturity at this step. A second offered the same strong option but kept username and password alongside it, and only one in five customers chose the better one, which dragged its score back down.
What separates a high maturity from a low one is not which method an insurer offers. It is whether that method is the default, rather than one option among several that most customers will not pick.
Each point of that gap is a moment where the customer experience falls short and, when aggregated across a whole portfolio, those moments turn into real financial costs.
Start with onboarding. Every customer who drops out during identity verification is a paid acquisition that never converts, despite the marketing spend and comparison-platform fee already spent and gone. Across European insurance and banking, that adds up to an estimated €5.7 billion in missed revenue every year (Signicat, 2022), and in 38% of cases the reason is simple: the customer did not have the right identity credentials on hand at the moment they were asked for them.
Login friction costs less per incident, but it never stops recurring. Forrester puts the total cost of a single password reset at $70. This is a bill an insurer pays every time someone forgets a password, with nothing to show for it afterwards. And a customer who cannot get into their account during renewal season is a retention risk, not just a support ticket.
Weak identity also makes fraud easier to pull off. Dutch insurers detected over 9,000 fraud cases in 2024, a record high and more than 1,000 above the year before. Detection only counts what gets caught: every fraudulent claim that slips through costs on average 3.9 times its direct value once investigation, legal exposure and reputational damage are added in (itsme, 5 Myths About Passwords, 2026).
None of this shows up on a line item labelled “identity.” It shows up in conversion rates, support budgets and fraud provisions instead, which is exactly why it is so easy for insurers to overlook.
By the end of 2026, every EU member state will have to make a digital identity wallet available. That settles whether a strong method will exist. But the wallet does not connect that method across onboarding, login, signing and support—and using it that way is still a choice each insurer makes.
This already runs at national scale in Belgium. Around 8 million people use itsme to prove who they are to their bank, insurer, telecom and energy provider, and government. One verified identity reused everywhere instead of rebuilt each time. itsme launched in the Netherlands in June 2026 at eIDAS Level of Assurance High (the same trust level as DigiD) giving non-health insurers the government-grade option DigiD has never offered them.