Scouting for Growth

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Iain Wilcox, CEO of GWT Insight a tech company focused on making cost-effective commercial building data available to their owners, operators, and advisers.  Iain is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary who successfully started new business operations from scratch balancing strategic planning and practical implementation. Over a period of 30 years, Iain worked with companies including AT&T and Cognizant, and 5 years ago he launched GWT Insight. During the conversation, Sabine and Iain discussed four topics: What is GWT Insight from a company, branding, and team perspective? Why both, property and commercial building IoT, are unique markets around which to build a risk mitigation ecosystem. Benefits that are delivered to the property and insurance markets (including preventative maintenance to prevention). Lessons learned from moving to the entrepreneurial space after years of working for large companies. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been delivering consulting services for 13 years to large corporations and witnessed just how difficult it was for them to marry the need to provide the structure and control around their investments and to ensure that they do not hinder their innovation initiatives. There was recognition by the Tier 1 carriers that they needed to start working with startups. I was working with a large India-based IT company and they recognized that both those organizations needed the agility and speed to market of a startup. This led to the formation of GWT Insight. When we were formed in 2017-2018, it was in the very early days of people understanding that they could save money around how they use and consume energy. Now, with rising utility prices, people are very focused on energy optimization and we see ourselves as not only being able to deliver on the governance part of an ESG model, with the risk management solutions that we develop with our partners, the insurers, and their brokers, but we’re also being able to deliver on commercial property owners’ desire to deliver a better understanding of how their buildings are performing and being able to reduce their costs. Property can account for 20-30% of the overall premium on a portfolio when you’ve got business interruption, public liability, and employee liability. You’ve got an area of the insurance paradigm and the value chain that impacts quite a wide area. We’ve got use cases across a variety of different examples and verticals. We use data in real-time from manufacturing units, offices, hotels, schools, hospitals, and central government departments (MoD and local authorities). Some of the use cases and benefits we’re looking at are picking up fire control data so you know that if there is a problem with the alarm it helps them to proactively go to their clients and warn them. We’ve also been able to identify loss events with our insurance clients and stop them from happening. BEST MOMENTS ‘When buildings are built they have a number of IoT sensors built in already. Even though a standard office will have 5,000-10,000 data points, GWT Insight recognized that there was an opportunity to pick up that data by listening to the existing, in-house building management system. We developed the GWTI Observer to do just this and create a better understanding of risk for our users and customers.’ ‘Risk managers want real-time data because it’s about loss prevention. We’ve still got a little bit of education to go through in the underwriting community, a lot of that community still has a very traditional viewpoint on how to use data and what is out there. With regards to owners, a third of this market is bleeding edge and want to risk manage their properties, a third is interested but not ready for it, and a third does not manage that data and insight proactively.’ ‘I think the "data" topic will change the way insurance is sold, because when you’ve got the data you can make better, informed decisions about how you’re managing your property, the risks impacting your property, and how that impacts the rest of your business.’ ‘In every building in every portfolio, there have been areas where we can help improve the operational efficiency of the building and provide a better customer experience for their own customers, employees, and stakeholders.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Iain Wilcox is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary that has successfully started new business operations from scratch with software, IoT hardware, and services companies in the UK and Europe. Primarily worked in the startup development phase, building a unique customer base and revenue streams from the start.  Iain manages the delicate balance between strategic planning and the practical implementation of market entry, business development, and revenue delivery for new and established operations. Iain set up GWT Insight approximately 5 years ago. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iainwilcox/  GWT Insight is a tech company focused on making cost effective commercial building data available to their owners, operators and advisers. Whether reducing risk, improving quality of customer experience or saving money, access to reliable, real time and relevant data is now underpinning new ways to improve business performance. With origins in the insurance industry GWT Insight has developed technology to provide the answer to complex data capture challenges in commercial buildings. GWTI's device is simple to install, working across open protocols and many of widely used closed protocol systems it is plugged into the building's BMS, once connected it listens to building systems, sensors or business specific equipment without affecting their operation. Unlimited data can be captured, classified, standardised, compressed and protected with advanced security protocols. The data then flows via the cloud to client information systems, dashboards and user interfaces including tablets, desktops and mobile phones in near real time. The unique approach to data management and ability to deliver real time data on what is happening, and critically inform ‘why’ makes GATTI's solution a highly cost-effective platform to drive material benefits for anyone involved in the performance of commercial property. GWT Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gwt-insight/    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 Henri Winand, co-founder and CEO of AkinovA, an electronic marketplace built to ease the transfer and trading of insurance and insurance risks. During the conversation, Sabine and Henry discuss the importance of strong taxonomy when moving into multi-party electronic placements, tangible and intellectual assets, transition risk, cyber risk, NFTs, and driving liquidity in illiquid markets. KEY TAKEAWAYS The whole objective of building our marketplace is to access a larger size of the market. The market is there already and our goal is to help clients or anybody in the value chain feel that we can do a better job of providing transactional transparency. I’ve done that in the world of energy and in the world of transportation. I’m an engineer who likes to solve problems, more to the point, I really love to build teams that can solve big problems in this world. The challenge for FinTechs and InsurTechs is sometimes you can’t always patent things because they fall in the business idea realm. Being able to then keep a trade secret – maybe with some patents around it -- which we are exploring big time by the way on a few of our concepts – is a way to not signal to everyone what you are doing, so that you can keep the trade secret for a while. But equally, there are some pieces that I believe, patent attorneys believe too, can be patented. This is quite important because it gives you the ability to have a discourse with very large organizations if they try to replicate your IP. IP = value. It is not about sticking a licensing reminder where you tell someone they’re infringing on your IP and they owe you money, that’s not the point. The point is you arrive at an asset that can be valued by clients and investors which then allows you to have a value-based conversation with your partners too. The question is: How do we, as an industry, attract the right talent? Our industry has to be exciting. I got into insurance by accident and insurance isn’t the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning unless you have to. What do we need to change to be part of the client's journey? If you break down insurance, you have to start with the risk that needs to be reduced and managed. First, I’ve got to be able to make it simpler for the person we engage with and who’s got a problem we can solve.  Second, they also need to be able to articulate it well to ensure that it is well evaluated. I then need to be able to say what it’s worth and how well or badly it could go based on the information gathered. BEST MOMENTS ‘An idea is a cost center until you make money out of it. Once you start making money, that idea can then become a profit center.’ ‘Time is everything, not money or attending meetings. The only commodity we have as human beings is time. So invest your time wisely.’ ‘I’m hoping things won’t change for the worse when we look at the current economy. Still, I think some clear fundamentals have changed. So let's make the best of what we know for now.’ ‘When you’re coming up with an idea, the cleverest people in the room are the ones that question the idea. So, if you want to look clever in a group, don't come up with an idea, come up with critiques.’   ABOUT THE GUEST Henri Winand is a growth and change-oriented CEO with a passion for scaling up businesses with a broad set of technologies, using different business models and team-based delivery.  Henry now serves as CEO for AkinovA, an insurance technology company that he co-founded with a specialist ILS (insurance-linked securities and related insurance products.) Henry drives also a City of London-based fund manager.  Prior to this, Henry served as CEO of a British tech company listed on the London Stock Exchange Main Market (Intelligent Energy, a $1bn tech IPO) with in excess of $200m raised from a broad range of sources, leading to strong top-line growth, largely from internationally-based customers. Today Henry served on several Boards in the UK, Singapore, India, Japan, and the US in the energy, software services, film content publishing, and automotive sectors.  Henry also served on the Board of an EU-funded €1bn+ PPP.  Those also included several advisory bodies to Ministers, Secretaries of State, and Officials in the new energy, automotive, and materials science sectors in the UK as well as on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Warwick Business School and of the University of Cambridge. Henry owns more than a dozen patents granted and pending and has several papers published in well-known, peer-reviewed, scientific journals, topics including composite materials, neutron diffraction, and processes to improve industrial product development cycles.  Henry is regularly invited to speak at international conferences and spoke in the US Senate and French Senate too. Henry provides advice to selected major global institutional, venture capital, and private equity funds. In addition to meeting several Heads of State, Henry made several appearances on Live-TV and recorded TV and Radio programs (e.g. Live CNBC TV, Live Bloomberg TV, Live BBC Radio 4 “The Today Programme”, recorded BBC and other programs, provided thought leadership and quoted articles in broadsheets, e-newspapers, and The Huffington Post.)  Henry is married to Anne. They both have one child called Alexander. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henriwinand/ AkinovA is building an electronic marketplace for the transfer and trading of (re)insurance risks. By working in collaboration and partnership with the insurance industry, AkinovA helps optimize the risk transfer value chain by providing a capital markets grade, industry-regulated, trading platform, and clearing house. AkinovA provides valuable data and analytics to participants and regulators from the aggregated data that passes through the marketplace. AkinovA grows the overall size of the insurance marketplace by enabling new participants to enter and existing participants to transact more business. There is significant pressure from the Capital Markets wanting an appropriate mechanism to access insurance risks that are de-correlated from the bonds and equity markets. Creating an effective secondary market for (re)insurance risks, to enable these risks to be traded, will dramatically increase the volume of business that is transacted across the marketplace. AkinovA is working with a number of brokers, who act as key channel partners for the existing industry, to kickstart liquidity in the marketplace. AkinovA provides them with a venue to service their clients’ needs in a more efficient and timely manner as well as gives them access to new clients entering the market who would benefit from their advice. AkinovA’s goal is to remain an independent marketplace enabling it to attract and work with all trading parties without undue influence from industry participants. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/akinova-limited/  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 talks to Simon Schneider – founding partner of Neoteq Ventures. They cover three areas: Simon’s path in VC Land, Great minds think alike, and Startup tips to engage with large companies while ensuring they don't get side-lined when the corporation’s strategy changes.  KEY TAKEAWAYS It’s a fortunate coincidence that I entered the VC market in 2001. I’d studied to be a lawyer but decided not to become a lawyer because a friend suggested VCs needed someone like me who knew what contracts should look like and who understood people. From the first day of my VC career, I was fascinated by all these founders and their teams with their great game-changing ideas and technologies. Neoteq invests not just in InsurTechs, we concentrate on early-stage investments which are pre-seed, seed, and Series A. We do not have a specific sector focus, but we look for technology-based startups. The most relevant question for us is which customer problem does the startup solve? It sounds like an easy question, but often when you meet founders and you ask them that very question they have difficulty describing their proposition, and if you can’t describe what the customer’s problem is, why would someone be willing to buy your product? Market, team, and technology, these three key parts, are used constantly to perform our due diligence and decide if the startup is an interesting investment target for us. Not every startup in our business is successful. There are always failures. Of course, investors have expectations and you have to fulfill them as a team when you get the trust of your investors, but not everything can be handled by the team, there are some things your team can handle, and some things in the market that you do not have a handle on. You always have to look at why each case wasn’t successful in the end when it looked promising in the beginning. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that are impacting startups. I expect that access to capital, especially in later-stage financing rounds will be tougher and tougher than in past years which means valuations will go down a little bit. I expect the rounds will get a bit smaller and that has an impact on the M&A market, perhaps exiting will take more time than you’ve been used to, but if you’re an experienced VC you know it takes time (5-7 years or more) until you can exit your companies from your portfolio. The VC scene won’t freeze though. It will continue to find winners to yield high returns. We are financially driven. Each startup, from our point of view, needs to have the potential to pay back our complete fund. If we do not see this potential it’s unlikely we will invest. Strategic returns are often combined with financial returns, at least from my point of view. But of course, CVCs often try to get some kind of extra deals with the teams to get earlier access to the product. This is something I would highly recommend startups not to accept, in the end, it’s always unhelpful, especially when corporations change their strategy – which can happen from one day to another – you are no longer relevant to them and the baseline premise of the engagement is over. Startups that want to cooperate with a CVC need to set up evaluation meetings and workshops where they can really create the goals on which they will want to work on. If you don’t find common grounds then stop the conversations because it won’t be a successful partnership. Alignment is key. BEST MOMENTS ‘Over the last 20 years as a VC, I’ve seen a lot of things. My fascination with the VC business and the chance I have every day to work with special people are still there. I still love my job.’ ‘The fundraising process, especially during Covid was not easy. Meetings are no longer possible and investors have to make choices through Zoom calls as to whether they would want to invest in a venture.’ ‘Companies working on climate tech and sustainability are really interesting and I see a lot of potential in this sector because it’s relevant for all of us and the better the solutions are the more they will help our planet to survive, hopefully.’ ‘Startups that started in previous crises often were more successful than companies that start in normal times. The big question is: Do we have normal times at the moment? I would say, definitely not.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Simon Schneider has more than 15 years of experience as an Investment Professional in sourcing, negotiation, financing, support & sale of technology start-ups in the field of B2B/Cloud-Software, Digital Media, eCommerce, Insurtech & Clean-Tech. Simon has years of M&A experience through trade sales of several portfolio companies. He also serves as a board member for various companies. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sischneider/  Neoteq Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Cologne, Germany, which invests in outstanding teams with exceptional, technology-based companies. Website: https://www.neoteq.de/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neoteq-ventures/  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 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