The Leadership in Insurance Podcast - Insurtech & Innovation

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Leadership in Insurance Podcast where this week we are lucky enough to be joined by Ana Zamora CEO of Vitaance, the Madrid-based life insurance start up who are applying artificial intelligence and data science to help their members live a better life.

We had a great conversation this week where we discussed a wide variety of topics such as:

• Encouraging wellness habits and helping people improve their life style
• Translating lifestyle changes into rewards
• Turning death insurance into life insurance
• Was a cultural shift necessary for customers to be comfortable sharing data with their insurers?
• How AI can improve life style
• Making an intangible product more tangible by generating engagement
• Providing more than just peace of mind
• Customers are historically indirect in life insurance and how Vitaance are changing
• Does insurance just serve the broker?
• What does fairness and transparency mean from a practical perspective?
• Removing the complexity for the members benefit
• What does building customer-first products look like from a technology perspective?
• Data science as an evolution of actuarial science
• What is the true nature and purpose of insurance?
• Has insurance culturally lost sight of the customer?
• Does regulation cause or hinder innovation?
• Vitaance’s promise of having a diverse and inclusive team
• Cultural add as opposed to cultural fit
• The different metrics for measuring companies for funding in Spain as opposed to elsewhere
• What does 2022 have in store for Vitaance?

Thank you Ana for your time, it was great to speak to you!

This Podcast was brought to you by FinPro, an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Insurtech space.

Our host in FinPro Director, Alex Bond

Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast

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Ever wondered what the secret sauce is for hiring and growing and a team, especially as an early stage business?

Rebekah Bostan, Director of Operations at FinPro, takes over The Leadership in Insurance Podcast this week turning the tables on me diving into all the questions you've probably wanted to ask as a hiring manager or a founding team member looking to grow your team.

Some highlights from our conversation 👇

💡How do early businesses grow their team sustainability? - know your company personality and direction and really embed shared values to create a company story

💡How to attract pure SaaS talent in a challenging hiring market - accept it is hard but have a proactive plan about your talent pools and focus on enabling all employees to become storytelling advocates

💡How to overcome the barriers to cross industry hiring - a good onboarding process will overcome speed to ramp up concerns

💡How someone leaving is a chance to innovate a role and a team - don't just replace 'like with like' -- look for ways to bring in new diverse talent pools including by restructuring roles

💡What genuinely make people stay or leave a role and a business - focus on living your company values and personality every day and be brave and create challenges to allow employees to grow

📢 And you'll have to listen to the end for my three best pieces of recruiting advice!

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In this week's episode, I was joined by Frank Perkins who is CEO of INARI.IO

INARI.IO is an Instech operating out of Barcelona. They offer a next-generation insurance platform, they digitize and virtualize the different things that happen in the life cycle of risk.

In this episode we discuss

• Startups are not for everyone - creativity is as important as hard work
• How the people that join at inception may not be the people to necessarily take you to completion
• "Is the juice worth the squeeze" Insurance is big enough to have many problems to solve but is it a big enough issue
• Insurers cannot tackle small problems - Instechs can
• Innovation can be any change that creates value
• The insurance culture of the fast follower can inhibit innovation
• Fresh eyes to insurance are important but regulation requires insider knowledge
• We should always be asking how change or innovation impacts the customers
• We need to tackle each point of innovation to make things better in the aggregate for the commercial customer
• Restrictions of regulated businesses and the MVP tech model
• Insurance isn't broken
• Connected technology is key to the future success of insurance
• How connectivity between technologies is key to progress and also how consumers will judge tech
• Buy vs make - the shift of mindset over time - integrate vs make job roles in insurers
• Cost vs Risk with buying or making tech
• Teams are built on skill, luck, and serendipity
• The best definition of Innovation so far - "slightly rounder wheels"

Thanks to Frank for being a great guest - I mention the Star Wars background - you can see this on the YouTube channel so go check it out.

This podcast was brought to you by FinPro​​ an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Instech space

Our host is FinPro Director, Alex Bond. Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of the leadership in Insurance Podcast, we were lucky to be joined by Antonin de Benoist

Antonin is the COO and Co-Founder of Allphins a SaaS analytics and exposure management tool for the insurance industry

In this episode we talked about:

• Antonin's entry into the insurance world from the world of finance
• How do Co-founders decide who takes what role? COO or CEO?
• Station F Paris incubator campus set up
• How important start-up "campus" ecosystems are for new businesses for visibility
• Bootstrapping vs external capital raising - why do it?
• Benefits of running lean How working on Oil and Gas projects gave visibility of how insurers were underutilizing their data
• The importance of Insurance companies knowing what they don't know Impact of theLloyd's lab - the importance of being able to ask the stupid question
• Culture of insurance and how positive it is towards a new start-up
• The importance of natural language processing to enabling AI in insurance
• How AI isn't replacing underwriting its enabling better decisions
• The Lloyd's lab experience and how it isn't your typical incubator - it's much more practical
• What was surprising about Lloyd's as a market to someone who was from outside the market
• The sales cycle challenge for start-ups: long, slow does not help with cash flow
• What they learned in the energy sector and how it might apply to other insurance lines
• Impact of awards on the visibility to investment capital
• The drain on resources of a small when trying to raise investment
• Impact of the pandemic on Allphins growth and development
• The technological debt built by the pandemic and the opportunity for Instech businesses

Thank you so much to Antonin for being a great guest and spending time with me in a very busy year.

Congratulations to Allphins on their success to date and we look forward to seeing what they achieve in 2021.

This podcast was brought to you by FinPro ​ an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Instech space

Our host is FinPro Director, Alex Bond

Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of the Leadership in Insurance podcast

I was lucky to be joined by Paul Prendergast. Paul is the CEO and founder of Blink Parametric.

Blink is a delivery platform that allows insurance industry partners to create parametric solutions.

In this wide-reaching conversation we talked about:

• Why Blink runs towards the "fires" solving solutions
• How parametric solutions reduce the unit cost of insurance
• Embracing technology to give greater visibility of risk
• How starting with the end customer can be the wrong approach - blink start with the underwriter
• Insurance as a social good - we sometimes forget that
• Why the MVP (minimum viable product) cant work in the insurance space
• All businesses as technology companies
• Despite frustration with the speed of change, there is a huge passion, intellectual capacity, and scale in the insurance industry
• The secret sauce in startups - complimentary teams - Tech is key but it must have sales
• Why sales is such a dirty word in the technology space
• How attitudes of successful Instech startups in 2021 are different to 5 years ago - less adversarial Impact of social media on insurance
• Insurance is cool - Insuring Elon Musks' rocket!
• New entrants to insurance don't grow the market unless they solve a new problem or offer a different solution Innovation is about culture, not projects and process
• How the size of the team impacts innovation
• What's to stop insurers from being the AWS of insurance platforms
• Technology first - how incumbents are held back by required regulatory technology changes
• Innovation in insurance comes from unexpected places

and so much more.

Thanks to Paul for being a great guest - I probably had 4 people tell me I had to Paul on the podcast as he is a true innovator and forward-thinking tech and insurance entrepreneur and he didn't disappoint.

This podcast was brought to you by FinPro an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Instech space

Our host is FinPro Director, Alex Bond

Please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.