Digital Transformation of Insurance: Reconstructing Legal Certainty Through Critical Intercultural Communication in Indonesia’s Economic Law Framework

Digital transformation has reshaped the insurance industry, yet research remains dominated by normative legal perspectives that treat legal certainty primarily as a regulatory matter. Consequently, how legal certainty is constructed and negotiated through communication within digital insurance ecosystems remains underexplored. This gap is particularly evident in Bandung and Pontianak, Indonesia, where regulatory fragmentation, intercultural complexities, and power asymmetries shape digital insurance practices. This study reconstructs legal certainty through Critical Intercultural Communication using Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT). Thirty participants were selected through theoretical sampling: eight regulators and policymakers, eleven insurance and InsurTech professionals, and eleven digital insurance consumers. The analysis generated four categories: Communicating Legal Meaning in Digital Insurance, concerning the negotiation of legal meanings; Negotiating Intercultural Legitimacy and Public Trust, addressing legitimacy and trust across cultural and institutional positions; Constructing Communicative Digital Governance, examining communication, coordination, and accountability; and Reconstructing Legal Certainty through Communicative Power, explaining how power relations shape access to legal meaning and legitimacy. These categories informed the substantive Communicative Legal Certainty Reconstruction Model (CLCRM), conceptualizing legal certainty as an ongoing communicative process shaped by meaning, legitimacy, governance, and power. The study integrates Critical Intercultural Communication and Economic Law, advancing an understanding of legal certainty beyond formal norms toward communicative processes that sustain legitimacy, trust, and compliance. It offers theoretical foundations for more adaptive, inclusive, and equitable digital insurance governance.