Scouting for Growth

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kobi Bendelak, a 22 year veteran in insurance. Kobi is the CEO of InsurTech Israel which he established to promote and lead innovation within the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem. Sabine has known Kobi for over 6 years. He mentored the startups in her European Accelerator and has always been the kindest individual for the startups and her team members to talk to for advice and mentorship.   KEY TAKEAWAYS InsurTech Israel has four baseline activities: Investment – We’ve already invested in 10 startups, all of them are Israeli InsurTechs, Consulting – we assist the startups to grow, Media and Events – we hold events and bring big delegation of startups to engage with corporations – Tel Aviv is one of the key capitals for InsurTech startups in the world. Still, there was no accelerator programme in Israel so we started one with great mentors from all over the world helping startups to learn, grow and scale.  To build an ecosystem is very hard, but if you have a success story it makes it easier. We have four unicorns which assist us to build and grow the ecosystem and a base to grow the InsurTech industry here in Israel. For a good ecosystem though you have to have a lot of early stage startups, not unicorns! It’s hard to build that because you have to find the entrepreneurs and they need to find you. Israel is very good with engagement and connections, We have a culture of entrepreneurship here. The insurance world is very orthodox, it’s a long journey for startups to form partnerships with incumbent players. Both B2B startups and investors need to be patient because there is no great success in the beginning, unlike B2C where you can succeed faster. Soon, it will be easier though because the entire industry will be digitised. The insurance industry is a very logical industry: yes/no, cover/no cover, something happened/nothing happened which means that it is a great playground for AI. The Israeli army has seen many successes using AI so the entrepreneurs that are coming up arrive young and with a lot of experience. They start looking for ‘ideas’ and they look for how to use these ideas to solve real market problems. Israelis are the best at solving problems because we live in a very tough neighbourhood. InsurTech is not just technology. Indeed, it is first about solving problems, evaluating options and then implementing technology to make it happen. Entrepreneurs with great skills in AI bring that knowledge to the InsurTech industry via better underwriting for planes, for fraud or in healthcare to share but a few areas.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I retired at 45 years old and after a few months it started to get boring, so I looked around for opportunities and the InsurTech space became very interesting to me.’  ‘Coming into work every day with passion is key.’ ‘You need to have mileage and a little money to succeed.’ ‘Every InsurTech startup must have insurance domain expertise in the team if they want to get into insurance because it’s a very complex industry that requires subject matter expertise.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Kobi Bendelak is the CEO of InsurTech Israel that he established to promote and lead the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem. The company has four areas of activity: investments, consulting, media and acceleration programmes. All those activities make InsurTech Israel the leading and most active accelerator program in the Israeli InsurTech sector.  Previously, Kobi was the founder and CEO of Reshef Insurance Brokers, part of Migdal/ Generali Insurance Group. He has 22 years of experience in the insurance industry and holds a BA in Management and an MA in Law from Bar Ilan University. He also was a Colonel (Reserve) in the IDF. Website: https://insurtechil.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobi-bendelak-a7011230/?originalSubdomain=il    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Farron Blanc, VP, Brokerage Distribution & Strategy at Legal & General America (L&G America) where he works with an amazing team of innovators to drive growth within life insurance by leveraging emerging technologies to accelerate opportunities within the brokerage channels. Farron is an entrepreneur too. He started Gerry, a concierge Service platform that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans to navigate requirements and deliver the right support within the long-term senior care space. Farron and his team sold the company in 2021 which is when he made his move to L&G America.    KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been at Legal & General for about three months. L&G America is the world’s 11th largest asset manager, but in the US it’s a really nimble business. As a corporation, we’ve invested so much in digital. One of the things I’m really passionate about is how to help the underserved get adequate, affordable protection through term life insurance. You have to use technology to reach customers today and empower brokers to do that most effectively. I’m loving it! On the entrepreneurial side, in a venture-backed startup with $4, $10, or $100 million USD, money doesn’t solve anything because – until you’re a big tech like Amazon, Apple, or Google  – that money is an investment in the future and you will have to raise more capital in 12-18 months to scale. So the default mode is death as you’ll run out of money at some point because you won't be profitable. Profit is indeed still the rule of the game. Another thing people don’t understand is that when people give you funding or a specific amount of money, this funding amount comes with expectations. For some a $1 billion USD (Unicorn level) exit isn’t big enough, even if they’re only writing a $2 million USD cheque, they want to be in markets where companies can do $10 billion USD exits (Decacorn level.) If you can understand those metrics, the unit economics, and the expectations then you will do well. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay focused and stay relevant while hitting all the milestones you promised to your investors so that you get there. Within a corporation, the main challenge is actually "speed time to market". You may have distribution, but you may not have innovation because you’re so efficient (e.g., you have processes, best practice committees, procedures, and meetings to ensure that everything that is done gets super efficient.) Tech giants like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google do phenomenally well at attracting talent to be able to attack a problem internally, and then by buying companies externally. At L&G America, we want to cover the largest amount of families with affordable protection. The only way to do that is by using technology to digitize the process and personalize engagements and internal processes (i.e., rates, the experience, the journey that the policyholder goes through) from designing products, underwriting, or ensuring efficient claims. We’re probably the market leader in the application part of the process. Still, we have so much work to do on the back end. You then have to work with partners in distribution to optimize all this. I’d love to be proved otherwise, particularly in the life insurance or mortality coverage spaces. Let's remember that insurance is sold not bought. No one wants to talk about death. The best way to sell it is through independent distribution, reaching out to the customer, and engaging with them in the way they want to engage and met. There’s no one magic bullet.   BEST MOMENTS ‘I’ve always been fascinated by problems and what’s the best way to solve them. Sometimes it’s a clean sheet of paper with no rules and sometimes it’s leveraging a 100-year-old brand with a $40 billion USD balance sheet.’  ‘As long as you’re rapidly learning and re-assessing your challenges and assumptions, that’s the most enriching part.’ ‘Within corporate venturing, you must have a strategic return lens on things. Whereas financial VCs are purely looking at gross IRR or total value paid-in capital and multiples. You have to look beyond the numbers even though they are so important.’ ‘The response to the global financial crisis of 2008 was to print more money to avoid a global depression. I think that worked, but it inflated asset prices and we were at a 0% interest rate environment for essentially two decades meaning long-term contracts started to fall apart. What does the value of money mean now? It’s a debt obligation, but the rapid inflation we’re seeing means it’s going to be really interesting to see how we’re going to ride that out, how does being in an era of superabundant capital impact people’s subscriptions?’   ABOUT THE GUEST Farron Blanc and his team help L&G America drive growth by leveraging technology throughout the broker channel. Prior to that, as co-founder and CEO of Gerry, Farron raised $3.75M of VC funding to start the startup - a concierge service that used data and licensed Social Workers, helping thousands of Americans navigate long-term senior care. Farron told us that he sold the business in the middle of 2021. Farron was named by Digital Insurance as one of the 20 Insurance Innovators to know, as well as one of the top 35 young executives by Intelligent Insurer in 2017.  Farron is a recovering global reinsurer, corporate VC, life insurance carrier President, BCG Strategy Consultant, and insurance Chief Marketing Officer with deep Asian and North American startup and corporate experience. Ensure to reach out to Farron, he is such an amazing expert, influencer and person.  Website: https://www.lgamerica.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farron/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of the Vesuvio Labs – a venture builder dedicated to FinTech startups and the InsurTech space in particular. Vesuvio Labs calls itself the digital rocket fuelling the insurance sector. In this episode, Sabine reviews Kristian’s journey as a FinTech venture builder and how he made the shift from the traditional tech world to the new world of tech.   KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve always been interested in new things, startups and tech. For most of my career, I’ve traveled, lived in different countries, and worked with entrepreneurs. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to turn that into a business and create a lab and ecosystem where we were able to work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas that they have.  As a venture builder what you do is take some degree of risk with the clients and with the projects that you work on. That means someone comes to us very early in their journey and they do not necessarily have a lot of the business there yet, they certainly don’t have the capital, what we try to do at that very early stage is invest in those businesses through our work -- via sweat equity -- until they have launched the very first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses.  We often are working on 15 projects at the same time and there can be a lot of commonalities among those projects. What we try to do though is to develop technology in a way that there is a greater degree of reuse between the different ventures that we work with. We work hard on creating a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, therefore reducing the risk of getting it wrong as well as the time to market. Because we are blessed with working with so many entrepreneurs and businesses we also see a lot of situations where some great people have come together but haven’t invested the effort into figuring out the right framework to help their business get to the destination they set for themselves or how they’re going to work with others. What happens is that it often doesn’t quite work out. There are a lot of things that every business must put effort into thinking about. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t work out the way they should.    BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technological expertise to execute on those ideas and see if we can partner with them and create great companies together.’  ‘Insurance and financial services know something about their value chain and they know how they want to change/ improve/ disrupt. We actually can help build the technology infrastructure around that through our technology and the partners we engage with.’ ‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings, we provide the base of the pizza and they decide whether they want to put pepperoni or whatever on top.’ ‘You have to be quite conscious about what companies you select to work with. It would be natural to pick a lot of companies that look a lot like each other, but it does not work like this. The ones that benefit from tech services are those companies that have a strong technology fit, but more importantly, they can cover different aspects of the insurance value chain.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Led by Kristian, the Vesuvio Labs team wants to change the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible industry. And their focus is clearly on technical execution. Website: www.vesuvio.io  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristian-feldborg-a78222/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

In this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler – managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne. Before moving to the other side of the coin (meaning becoming an InsurTech startup enabler), Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary company of MunichRe. He also has a background in IT strategy, he is a board member and a digital lab development expert.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Within our industry, there has been a great mind shift within the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the Ergo Lab in Berlin, in the beginning it was hard to talk with the procurement department to create a contract between a startup and an incumbent. The insurance industry was coming at it from an IT background that was focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software like Microsoft, and SAP, and finally, then they were open to working and collaborating with startups. It’s great to have seen the volume of InsurTech startups increase steadily over the past few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: 1) The willingness and acceptance to support startups and corporate management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. 2) The ability to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to major problems in a very short time period, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create a lot of win-win situations and success stories where we could demonstrate that a startup solution could help to overcome, for example, the bottleneck of internal IT capacity. Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: To build a strong and reliable network for all parties, including enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalization. From the beginning the design of the initiative was that we needed to bring together insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities, all with different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation. By setting up the InsureNXT Conference, our goal was clear. We wanted to ensure that the focus was not only on insurance, startups, and tech companies. We also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical if you want to develop innovation and digitalization for insurance in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see how cross-industry partners are joining companies as networks like Garmin, Volvo, and Lufthansa Systems, all collaborating with our startups!   BEST MOMENTS ‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’ ‘During the past six months, we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow. We’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our insurance and expert networks. Those connections helped develop over 40 projects. And some are already up and running as products on the market.’ ‘Corporations want to innovate but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’ ‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers besides the member network that we have created and our partner network.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Sebastian Pitzler is Managing Director of InsurLab Germany, and this since March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pitzler/  Website: https://insurlab-germany.com/en/insurlab/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Matt Connolly, entrepreneur and platform builder to the insurance sector. He’s also the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. On this episode Matt talks about himself, his idea to build the Sønr platform.   KEY TAKEAWAYS I always knew I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t know what it was going to be or what I wanted to invent. The only relevant professional experience I had was working for a digital agency but my friend and I set up a web design company in 2003 that was going to deliver strategy, creative and tech for the web. Five years later the business was very successful and became the number one digital agency in the UK. It was a very unusual position to be in as a 20-something. I always wanted to push, push and push again. I’m never satisfied. They are terrible traits in somebody, but they are also great traits for an entrepreneur. I hope I’m able to do that with a level of empathy for those around me. Staff retention supports my belief that I’m able to create a good culture and be a good leader within my organisation. And, those traits really do drive me forward.  Having control of the DNA of a company and setting culture is a great responsibility and one of the most important things to achieve as a successful founder. Once you have that right the rest of the business will flow. Fun has to be a large part of that. As a founder you start off with your feet firmly under the desk. You are involved in shaping the operation of the business, KPIs, growth metrics and all those kinds of things and you can forget about having fun, that’s where my co-founder, Matt Ferguson, is great at continuously reminding me and us, to remember the fun part of work. He makes sure we are going out, we talk and connect. You need to set a vision and have a purpose within that vision and ensure that vision is brought into, and possibly even co-created, by people within the team. If you have that and everybody buys into it and you set a clear pathway to achieving that – whether you’re ahead of it or behind it – then everybody will rally and do their best to make that happen. I’ve always felt it should be somewhat of a democracy in the culture of a business. Rather than employ people to fulfil specific roles, I’d rather employ exceptional talent, understand where they are best deployed and allow them to function with that intent. That allows them to do the thing they love the best, and invariably they’re the best at, to create the right resourcing landscape to achieve our vision.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Employ people that are more talented than yourself.’  ‘You will always overestimate what you can or will achieve in one year, but you will always underestimate what you can achieve in 10. I need to remind myself of that, I’m an incredibly impatient man.’ ‘Always check in with each other and have those “high five” moments and check in and look after yourself en route.’ ‘I am much better at encouraging others to have fun than doing it myself. But if you’re not having fun and living another life outside of work you become a one-dimensional person and that’s never going to be healthy for you.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Matt is the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. Sønr is a subscription-based platform that houses the world’s most comprehensive source of innovation intelligence, designed specifically for the insurance innovator.  It is used by some of the best-known insurance companies globally including Allianz, Bupa, Generali, Munich Re, Tokio Marine. Sønr connects its clients to innovation globally – the latest market trends, startups, and scaleups reshaping the insurance market. It provides insight into competitors’ innovation activities too... The critical intelligence needed to compete in today’s changing world. It also has an in-built collaboration toolset that enables teams to work smarter, faster and be more connected. This results in less duplicated effort and ensures everyone is really on the same page. Website: https://sonr.global/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wearematt/  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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Mark Dennis, a seasoned insurance executive with strong expertise in software platforms. Mark was the Global COO and Europe CEO for MunichRe Digital Partners, one of the most renowned InsurTech ecosystem builders which has now been re-integrated within the core business of the MunichRe group. Today, Mark works with various young ventures and helps them with their scaling strategy.   KEY TAKEAWAYS In my time we’ve partnered with 25-30 InsurTechs and we’ve invested in less than half, so we’re quite selective about where the capital has gone. The examples where we’ve got it really right are where we’ve blended out products well.  In the early years we were probably more invested in technology and our assertion at the time was to offer the full tech stack of policy admin. In the middle of that five years period, we looked at the market and realized there were people out there who could do it a lot better than us, there were hundreds of policy administration vendors. You could pick whether you chose to buy rather than build. So we pivoted that model away from building everything to having a network of best-in-class providers that we could connect to our InsurTech customers. Later, we focussed more on data infrastructure and collaborating with our InsurTech partners to leverage a data advantage. It’s folly to seek perfect alignment, it’s better to seek out what everybody gets from the partnership, and it’ll vary and move around over time, but as long as everybody gets some kind of upside then that’s being in a good shape. Seeking perfection is nonsense really. Insurance has always been data-driven, even 4,000 years ago with the Phoenician traders. They’re always figuring stuff out based on data points (e.g. When’s the safest time to sail across that ocean to deliver goods?) Now we have the benefit of technology that allows us to process a lot more data and everybody’s trying to capture data points and gain a data advantage, though sometimes I think we don’t always know what we’re doing, we’re capturing data without necessarily a clear purpose. It’s much more around risk prevention and prediction rather than the cure. It’s more a force for good now though I don’t think insurance gets the credit it deserves. In a way, it certainly needs its own PR campaign!   BEST MOMENTS ‘The key for me is wanting to be a partnership business and we try to treat all our InsurTech relationships as partnerships, rather than too transactional.’  ‘Without knowing it – because there wasn’t that much competition in the early days – we built the first InsurTech ecosystems, it wasn’t by design, it was just how it worked.’ ‘It boils down to a few key questions: Is the team the right team? Are they balanced? Do they know the industry or are they being deliberately disruptive? Are they being positive with their disruption?’ ‘You have to respect your insurance partner, they need to get something out of this and create value.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Mark Dennis says: In 2016, I co-founded and built out MunichRe's Digital Partners business from scratch to what is now a large, global operation employing more than 100 brilliant people. With our insurtech and disruptive partners, we have helped build more than 20 insurance businesses. As part of my role, I introduced a flexible working model with employee wellbeing and care at the heart of what we do. For more than 5 years we have operated a flexible model with meeting free and wellbeing days, extended breaks, flexibility for working parents, and so on. I am proud to say that some of these ideas have now been adopted more widely in the other MunichRe businesses. I am also passionate about giving people a chance. DP recruits people of all backgrounds and with diversity in thinking. I was also an executive sponsor on Munich Re UK's inclusion and diversity programme and for the Re:Connect charitable foundation. I now lead an independent consulting business with a focus on insurtech scaling, operational resilience and change management. We also aim to work with more established insurance businesses in developing and executing their innovation ambition. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-dennis-07908313/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Jean-Charles Velge, one of the co-founders of Qover after spending part of his career in the private equity industry – half of his time in Europe and the other half in Hong Kong – he decided to become an entrepreneur. Jean-Charles started as a consultant at Bain & Company, then joined the largest Benelux fund, NPM Capital, before moving to Redhorse in Hong Kong. Jean-Charles says that he runs the world's first Insurance-As-A-Service platform.   KEY TAKEAWAYS There are many different business models and how you can attack the value chain in insurance. Where we tried to be really innovative was on the business model itself and how you transform the insurance industry thanks to technology. Not just how to distribute a product, or how to use part of the technology stack to enhance the processes of an insurance company, but how to change the industry by applying technology. The model is more valid today than it ever was. Along the way insurance lost itself. What really makes insurance special is that it will protect you at the moment when you’re most vulnerable. That’s what we need to rebuild and make it possible. Technology is extremely well placed to make it happen at scale and in a pinpointed way.  Tech is not a vertical anymore, tech is a horizontal that goes through all the verticals of the economy. When you look at all the winners on the tech horizontal, all those companies need insurance, either embedded to enhance their products, to cross-sell insurance or up-sell insurance. It needs to be digital and it needs to be cross-border. What we’ve done is create a platform that is basically a digital native company without the balance sheet that can build any non-life insurance product for any of those verticals in any different country. The complexity of tech companies working with incumbents, especially in the insurance industry is double. Firstly, insurance companies are not really digital so it’s difficult for them to build the right tools, the right stack. Secondly they’re very much local, traditional insurance companies would have a branch in the UK, France, Brussels but they don’t really talk to each other. A company that wants to do cross-border insurance has to rebuild block by block. What we try to do  is marry tech and insurance so we’re as much a tech company as we are a legal and insurance company to be a single point of contact for your customer to be able to provide insurance digitally and cross-border and keep all the complexities at cover to make it simple for the customer.   BEST MOMENTS ‘When we started the company we asked “How can we hack insurance to make it as efficient and smart as possible?” It’s in the DNA of Qover.’  ‘Our philosophy is to build the best policies possible with the best coverage possible with the best service possible. That’s what the industry needs to build to gain the confidence of the consumers back that may have been lost along the way.’ ‘Well done insurance can be extremely valuable across the whole value chain of many different industries.’ ‘We’ll be the biggest e-bike insurers in the Western world in the next few years because we’ve built a compelling product for all countries.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Jean-Charles Velge co-founded Qover in 2016 with Quentin Colmant. He spent his entire career in the private equity industry – half of his time in Europe and the other half in Hong Kong. Jean-Charles started as a consultant at Bain & Company, then joined the largest Benelux fund, NPM Capital, before moving to Redhorse in Hong Kong. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration, a master’s in finance and an MBA. Jean Charles calls Qover, the world's first Insurance-As-A-Service. Website: https://www.qover.com/  LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jean-charles-velge-4345131/    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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sebastien Gaudin, co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, an embedded HealthTech InsurTech platform that has gown fast to become a leader in their category across Asia through their platform the CareVoiceOS open platform which delivers a modern insurance infrastructure solution to connect and manage multiple health services providers to shape bespoke health engagement journey for micro-customer segments. Sebastien’s mission is to reinvent the healthcare and insurance spaces. Merging the two to deliver tailored experiences for users and payers. Sabine and Sebastien talk about the recent category paper they wrote ‘Embedded Health: The next growth frontier for insurance’,  discussing why embedded health is such an important topic for the health and insurance markets today? What are the winning business models we have seen emerge in recent years? What are the top capabilities needed to build a digital health ecosystem?   KEY TAKEAWAYS I value patient-centred care, looking at the patient from a board perspective with multiple stakeholders. From my experience working in China's digital ecosystem, customer-centred, service-oriented approaches are everywhere and you can create more value and relevance if you aggregate services for people. We opened new distribution channels, new ways for insurers to commercialise products. All our experiences have led us to the category of embedded health. It’s about being able to provide targeted customers a range of relevant digital healthcare services together with insurance in one single integrated customer experience.  Insurers are really making the move to embed health services with their insurance offering and then prevent or influence positively what may happen before a claim. Think about health players who can embed insurance and likely complimentary health insurance services to bring more value and protection to their customers but also all at once with a monetisation interest model for what they offer as a service. Lastly, noon-insurance, non-health players can also think about embedding health and insurance services as complimentary product offerings and revenues. We’ve been looking at how embedded health can really help to acquire customers. We see micro-insurance in the health space could be interesting because you start to see a number of players embedding micro-insurance and this gives new customers access to insurance that they couldn’t access before.    BEST MOMENTS ‘Working with insurers, we helped them to go beyond being a passive payer of claims and take a more proactive role, helping their customers navigate and find the right medical services at the right time.’  ‘With a digital customer journey you can support the individual along the way with easy access to treatments and healthcare professionals.’ ‘The opportunities that have opened up with this wealth of technologies that can impact people’s health. It’s true that digital natives are more suited to embrace this and most of the incumbents have been struggling because of their lack of digital capabilities.’ ‘The past two years have seen a solid acceleration. It’s still difficult to see which model will win, we may have new models emerging, it’s likely there will be multiple winners within different sub-categories. The most important thing is that the needs from both consumers and all stakeholders are strong and the value creation by transforming insurance and improving health is limitless.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Sebastien’s career has been dedicated to healthcare. He is the co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, a leading Asian Health InsurTech expanding globally and dedicated to making insurance more humane, with health at its core. With an academic background in pharmaceuticals and business, Sebastien worked in Corporate Development, Marketing, and as a business leader in multiple therapeutic and geographic markets in the pharma industry. Since his young age, he has been involved in creating and growing several new ventures. Sebastien is also the co-founder and non-executive Chairman of the Board of blüüm, a Chinese tech-driven insurtech MGA that was spun off from CareVoice after graduating from PingAn’s Accelerator program. Sebastien and CareVoice received multiple awards and recognitions, including the Top Insurtech Leader 2021 in the category “Digital Business Ecosystem Builders” by ACORD, a non-profit industry-owned organisation to enable the success of the global insurance industry.   Website: https://www.thecarevoice.com/    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, and 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 and 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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Simon Torrance who is well known across the FinTech and insurance sectors as Mr. Embedded Finance.  In December 2020 Simon wrote a very well-known article ‘Embedded Insurance, A $3 Trillion Market Opportunity That Could Also Help Close The Protection Gap’. He works with leaders, executives, and board members to create and implement new growth strategies based on corporate venturing techniques focused on the Platform economy and Digital Ecosystems to help large enterprises transform the business of today to me the needs of tomorrow. KEY TAKEAWAYS The main problem is that digitization, which is happening across every sector, tends to shrink and contract traditional profit pools because you get new competitors, new entrants, new regulations, and customer expectations. So companies must spend more money to keep up with those emerging expectations. The old models that were absolutely fine in the analog world are coming under increasing pressure. Traditional players are increasingly feeling that pressure and need to do something different. When I was working in telecommunications, I started to think about the why. Why are those digital companies (Google, Facebook) so successful, and what could TelCos learn about them? TelCos have a lot of power in the market but they tend to focus on what they know best – creating the infrastructure – not so good though at creating services or new types of digital business models. In 2005-6 it was clear that the companies that were succeeding most in a digital world were those that were running ‘platform-based’ business models, they weren’t necessarily creating the end customer products themselves, but they were acting as an intermediary between the customer and the third party that had the solutions. That still is the most powerful business model in the digital world. I wasn’t interested in financial services, I hadn’t done a lot of work in it until about 3 years ago, but it seemed to me that it’s so important for the world, it underpins all our commercial and social activity – we can’t operate without financial services – yet there was something fundamentally broken with that industry and the gap between what people need and what they were being given was incredibly wide – there are so many people who are unprotected and have no insurance around the world – it’s so important for a small business to get a loan. The type of experience I have with my old bank is lightyears away from the new banks that are popping up now and no one’s really making solutions that look after my financial wellness, to help me understand how I need to save, borrow, plan for the future, I’m just left to access a few quite basic solutions from the incumbents. So, I thought, with these huge gaps and numbers of people excluded or badly served by the industry, there’s got to be some change needed. Embedded finance cuts across all the different business models and says: why don’t we enable other organizations that are much closer to the end-users, that interact with them more frequently than we do? We should do so in order to sell financial services because they have more regular interactions or touch points with the end-users, they’re often more trusted in certain contexts too. Why don’t we help them not only sell solutions but also embed them – use components that we’ve got to create new types of experiences that make their propositions more attractive. Digital technology has become much more sophisticated now, all those capabilities (products, data, underwriting capabilities) that were locked away within traditional companies are now able to be modularised and extracted into software technologies developed by tech companies. They are configured in ways that suit the customer better or more conveniently through unique experiences for the end-users.   BEST MOMENTS 'The business model is the most fundamental way that a company creates and delivers value for customers, captures value for itself, and increasingly shares value with others. It’s the most fundamental aspect of innovation and most companies find it very difficult to execute on their business model innovation promise because well-crafted business models address so much than what is often delivered right now.’ ‘Digital companies have taught us that you do not need to create a platform yourself, you can co-opt developers and third parties to create solutions for your customers, as Apple does with the App Store. In so doing, you drive demand for your core business, in Apple’s case their phones.’ ‘Over 50% of the big publicly traded financial companies were making zero or negative economic profit. There’s something wrong here, the customers aren’t getting what they need and the majority of those who are supplying financial products aren’t making any profit either. That suggests there is a fundamental business model problem in finance which is so important for everybody to live, work and enjoy the company of others.’ ‘99% of a financial institution’s resources and money goes on digitizing, making more efficient and optimizing the existing business model. It is necessary but insufficient if that business model is going to deliver profits and economic returns to shareholders.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Helping companies transform their business models with digital platforms, ecosystems, and ventures, Simon Torrance works with leaders, executive teams, and boards to create and implement new growth strategies and ventures based on the new disciplines of ‘Platform Strategy’, ‘Digital Ecosystem Management’ and ‘Corporate Venture Building’. Simon is the author/presenter of the New Growth Playbook (www.newgrowthplaybook.com) and co-author of a new book called 'Fightback' (how traditional corporates can win in the digital economy with platforms, ventures, and entrepreneurs): https://amzn.to/2RGZcAY As we enter more deeply into what many are calling the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – enabled by a fusion of emerging technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds – Simon believes that organizations in every sector need to radically re-think their role in the world and how they create and capture value. Working in collaboration with a global network of subject matter experts and tech entrepreneurs he supports organizations with this transition via a mix of services: Advisory: helping clients develop and implement new strategies that transform their business models into faster-growing, more valuable platform-based models. Digital Ventures: helping incumbent organizations create portfolios of impactful new businesses. Executive Education: training leaders and teams on the topics of 'New Growth Strategies in the Digital Economy', 'Platform Strategy', 'Digital Ventures'. Simon's online course is at www.newgrowthplaybook.com Simon collaborates with many leading institutions including World Economic Forum, MIT, London Business School, and Singularity University among others. Website: www.simon-torrance.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simontorrance/ 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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews FinTech and Blockchain Advisor Efi Pylarinou about why sustainable investing is so important, her view on the state of FinTech (and what the insurance industry can learn from it), sustainability in the context of Digital Transformation, what the emerging risks are and more.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Switzerland is one of the biggest hubs in Blockchain for Finance, which comes out of Crypto Valley. It’s an example of how an ecosystem works: You need the regulator, the private sector, the capital and an international outreach for the recipe to work, and that’s what has happened in the crypto sector but it hasn’t happened in FinTech. Having said that, the crypto sector in Switzerland is more in the RegTech sub-vertical, which is related to data analytics and so on. That’s the high level at which Switzerland stands. There’s something that worries me that’s an indicator that we’re early with the insurance industry being interested in climate, the carbon footprint and how companies and individuals can reduce their carbon footprint. But we’re seeing a lot of businesses and startups offering services to trade credits. We need to get over that. A company can get a high ESG ranking on the climate front, but that might be completely negated because they’re doing something on another front in terms of labour practices for example. The ball has started rolling in the public markets, Black Rock is leading and making big announcements. But in the public markets this has to start from the seed, when the company is born: Is the company thinking sustainably and what does it mean? How do you treat your team? Is your mission completely segregated from society and nature? No, it isn’t, but we don’t think like that yet. Going forward we’re going to see more incumbent banks partnering with sustainable FinTechs so they can integrate it in their lending practices, corporate finances and commercial business banking processes, for example.   BEST MOMENTS ‘Innovation gets adopted, but before that happens, there needs to be a shift in the narrative. This is what is currently happening with sustainability. Still, we’re early in the journey.’ ‘In December 2020 ESG net inflows surpassed £ 1 billion, a record number.’ ‘Corporates still operate and make decisions in silos. Think about your borrowing needs, they are still separate from your investing needs. We haven’t put the whole picture together. Yet, centralized financing has to be part of the new culture, which is why it needs to start from the startups.’ ‘We’re seeing a trend where digital banking and finance apps take advantage of the lifestyle appeals, whether they’re giving rewards to people or gamifying their offerings due to the fact people care more about the environment.’   ABOUT THE GUEST No.1 independent Global Woman Influencer in Finance & Data, a seasoned Wall Street professional with a Ph.D. in Finance with over 200,000 followers across channels.  Work at the intersections of Business Development, Marketing, and PR for Brands involved in Digital transformation in various industries. Thought leadership campaigns through strategic collaboration, are one of my sweet spots as a B2B domain expert influencer with a passion for innovation.  Domain expertise in financial services; Blockchain and Artificial intelligence are two main disruptive technologies that I focus on.    Efi's global audience (c. 200,000 across all platforms) values her multimedia daily curation. I am a prolific writer, a host of weekly audio-video content, a creator of weekly visual content, and a passionate speaker.    Efi's passion is creating content that supports her clients in their strategic business goals. You can connect with Efi on the platforms below   Medium: https://efipm.medium.com/  YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/EfiPylarinou  Twitter: https://twitter.com/efipm  Website: https://efipylarinou.com/     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.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.com