Ep189 Tom Hoad Howden Ventures: Professionalising Innovation

Innovation is something we all talk about but something that is notoriously hard to do in insurance.

That’s hardly surprising because in our industry we prize and incentivise all the things that are the effective opposite of innovative.

We reward stable and predictable when, at least at the beginning, most innovative ventures are likely to be highly volatile and unpredictable.

And then we wonder why it’s so hard to bring new ideas to fruition in our sector!

To be fair to ourselves, in the past few years insurance has started to invest in people who have the word innovation in their job title and whose performance is measured more on whether they can bring the products of the future to market rather than on their initial loss ratios.

Tom Hoad, of is one of this select but growing band.

He moved to Howden to set up Howden Ventures, which he describes as a vehicle for professionalising innovation.

Here Tom is combining seed and venture funding with distribution and the ability to underwrite through the Howden Group’s DUAL underwriting platform.

In this almost breathless podcast Tom is hugely energised at the prospect of having all the tools at his disposal to remove the main roadblocks in start-up insurance business’s paths.

This is a lively chat with a real expert in innovation and a master of herding the cats of the market behind a common vision.

It’s also an episode that I hope will give you a lot of inspiration and make you feel that the London-based insurance ecosystem is in rude good health and highly likely to be the crucible in which many of the insurance products of the future are going to be forged.

NOTES:

I mentioned I would link to Tom’s first podcast with The Voice of Insurance.

Episode 124 is here: https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep-124-tom-hoad-innovation-is-really-about-doing-stuff/

I also mentioned an episode earlier in the year with DUAL:
https://thevoiceofinsurance.podbean.com/e/ep163-richard-clapham-luis-munoz-rojas-of-dual-group-get-the-ham-not-just-the-bone/

Tom mentions a Julia at Airmic. Airmic is the UK’s Risk Management trade body and Julia is Julia Graham, its CEO.

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