In a regulated and complex industry like Insurance, one of the biggest challenges facing speed to market is the complexity in regulations and the state variations. Both the variations and complexities cause the code to become unmanageable and complex with all sorts of conditional statements and business logic creeping into consumer applications, making it extremely hard to manage or develop.
This is where distributed architecture/components shine allowing not only to break down piece into smaller manageable parts but also reducing single point of failures. How to effectively distribute the architecture is where the key lies in whether a system will truly be configurable to allow for speed to market.