Scouting for Growth Nigel Walsh: Making insurance loveable
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nigel Walsh, Managing Director, Insurance at Google. Nigel is on a mission to make Insurance loveable. He spends his days helping insurance carriers unlock the power of Google Cloud and Alphabet, supporting startups, creating communities, building MGAs, writing papers, and much more.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- In the last 15 years, I’ve truly fallen in love with insurance, I think it’s got a huge purpose, it’s massively misunderstood and mis-loved. You only have to step out of our little bubble of friends to your everyday friends – who don’t work in insurance – and ask them their perception or impression of insurance, and it’s not good. My desire is to turn that into something as joyful, delightful, and exciting as an experience of buying something online or engaging digitally in different ways.
- I love that the organization that I work for is so inclusive, beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life. We have nine products that have over a billion active daily users, so you have to be able to manage, understand and design for everyone when you do that. Through an insurance lens, we have some of the smartest people on the planet that are thinking about things and help stretch your imagination in so many different ways.
- The platforms that we’ve got that surround our core technologies and cloud – like being able to look things up on YouTube, not just Google – give us the ability to help educate the world in a very very different way. My ambition is to string those pieces together to not just close the protection gap, but close the education gap, so everyone’s got accessibility and an understanding of what we’re doing going forward.
- Big corporations, and individuals, are physically transferring money into this new world (the Metaverse – which could be a fad like SecondLife and Clubhouse), then you’re also automatically creating risk and that risk could be or should be, protected. The most obvious thing to protect against in the Metaverse is cyber threats, which cost the industry billions year on year. And now we’ve opened up a whole new world and a new level of risk. We should now also spend some time exploring and understanding what these risks mean for customers and insurance carriers alike.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Our ability to enable large insurance carriers, small startups, and everything in-between with what we have, I felt like a stronger opportunity to be a force for good as we go to support consumers, corporates and so much more.’
‘Over the last couple of years, especially in lockdown, I found solace in the InsurTech community, who were sharing their success stories, especially in their exercise schedules. They’re always striving to move forward.’
‘I don’t read as many books as I used to, I love listening to podcasts because you can listen and learn while going about your day. We, as tech providers, service providers, and insurers, have to recognize how people choose to learn more and more today.’
‘Never before have we moved this quick, but never again will we move this slow. People will never want to go back when you think about our access to video conferencing and food delivery online. The question is how do we take more giant steps forward now?’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Nigel Walsh serves as the Managing Director for Insurance and Financial Services within Google Cloud division and the host of the InsurTech Insider podcast. He is on a mission to make insurance lovable.
He worked at Capgemini as Vice President, Head of UK Insurance, where he was responsible for building and developing the UK insurance operation and was a partner at Deloitte.
His interests include: Supporting startups. Creating communities. Building MGAs. Scouting new startups. Writing papers. Creating partnerships. Understanding the future of insurance. Deploying robots. Co-hosting podcasts. Creating propositions. Connecting people. Supporting projects in London, New York and Dublin. Building a global team.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigelwalsh/
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.
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