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Bringing together the best technology and innovation for insurance and risk management together from around the world. Podcast hosted by Matthew Grant.
Episodes
4 hours ago
4 hours ago
In this episode, Robin Merttens sits down with Frank Perkins, CEO and Co-founder of inari, to explore what it really takes to build and scale a modern MGA in 2026.
From founding an insurance business himself to leading a technology company serving specialist MGAs across Europe, Frank brings a rare dual perspective. He understands both the pressure of getting premium through the door and the responsibility of building systems that underwriters actually want to use.
As private equity capital accelerates into the sector and niche, digital-first MGAs proliferate across continental Europe, the conversation turns to speed, integration and the quiet evolution of the underwriting workbench.
In this conversation, Frank shares:
- Why technology literacy is now firmly in the hands of business users, not just IT departments
- How the rise of highly specialised MGAs is reshaping what underwriting platforms need to deliver
- Why “rip and replace” transformation programmes are giving way to orchestration and coexistence
- How AI is materially accelerating integrations and onboarding, cutting rollout times from months to days
- The difference between generic AI tooling and insurance-specific intelligence
- Why speed of execution is becoming a defining competitive advantage
- What a tightening market cycle will mean for operational efficiency
- Why continental Europe may offer the next major growth wave for MGAs
- How culture and domain expertise can matter as much as code in a crowded market
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn.
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Sunday Feb 15, 2026
Sunday Feb 15, 2026
In this episode, we bring you a live panel from InsTech’s May event at CodeNode, exploring how automation is reshaping claims in the Lloyd’s and London market — and why the belief that specialty is too complex to automate no longer stands.
Moderated by Matthew Grant, CEO of InsTech, the panel features Simon White, Chief Claims Officer at Apollo, Aidan O’Neill, Founder and CEO of DOCOsoft, and Zoe Woods, Claims Improvement Manager at Lloyd’s.
Specialty claims have long been viewed as too bespoke, too nuanced and too reliant on human judgement for automation to play a meaningful role. But as underwriting becomes algorithmic and distribution turns digital, claims can no longer lag behind.
This conversation moves beyond theory to evidence. Automation is already embedded in live workflows across the market. The firms adopting early are seeing measurable operational gains.
In this conversation, they share:
- Why the myth that specialty claims cannot be automated is finally breaking down
- How Apollo processed more than 23,000 claims through automated checks, cutting handling times to under a working day
- What happens when you ask claims handlers to map every task they repeat on each file
- Why automation should augment decision-making rather than create black boxes
- How structured data and integrated dashboards unlock meaningful AI use cases
- What Lloyd’s is doing to balance innovation with oversight in a syndicated market
- Why modular, plug-and-play services are replacing large-scale transformation programmes
- What specialty can learn from automation in motor and property lines
- Why starting small with repeatable processes creates fast, tangible wins
- How claims is shifting from cost centre to strategic differentiator
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Feb 08, 2026
Sunday Feb 08, 2026
What actually makes automated and enhanced underwriting work in practice?
In this episode, three early movers in automated underwriting share hard-earned lessons from building digital underwriting propositions that have survived real market cycles. Rather than theory or hype, this conversation digs into where technology genuinely creates advantage, where it does not, and how underwriting judgement remains central even in highly algorithmic models.
Drawing on experience across cyber, US property and digital facilities, the panel explores why complexity, not commoditisation, is often where automation delivers the greatest edge. From AI-driven cyber underwriting to high-cat surplus lines property and digitally distributed specialty products, each speaker explains how they chose their focus and what they learned along the way.
Key themes include the role of data discipline in sustaining AI-led underwriting, why platform design matters more than speed to market, and how underwriters’ roles are shifting from generalists to specialists embedded in algorithmic decision making. The discussion also tackles unstructured data, submission quality and why “no data, no deal” may become a defining principle of future underwriting models.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why complex risks can be better suited to automated and augmented underwriting than simple, commoditised ones
- How AI and machine learning are being applied in live underwriting decisions, not just analytics
- The importance of volume, homogeneity and risk differentiation when building algorithmic models
- Lessons from re-platforming early digital products and avoiding long-term technical debt
- How generative AI is changing data cleaning, exposure management and submission handling
- What enhanced underwriting means for underwriter skills, careers and decision making
Featuring perspectives from Marek Shafer of Vave, Tom Squires of AEGIS London and Jonathan Spry of Envelop Risk, moderated by Matthew Grant of InsTech.
You can also watch the video version of this panel here.
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Feb 01, 2026
Sunday Feb 01, 2026
What happens when AI meets the backbone of the insurance industry - policy administration systems? In this episode, Liselotte Munk, CEO of Fadata, joins Robin Merttens to unpack how artificial intelligence is reshaping the software layer of insurance.
With candid insights into Fadata’s AI strategy, Liselotte reveals how the company is using AI to accelerate software development and reduce implementation costs while improving quality. She tackles the big question: will AI make policy admin systems obsolete? Her answer offers a pragmatic view on cost, complexity, compliance and collaboration.
In this conversation, Liselotte shares:
- How AI is already streamlining configuration, documentation and testing in core systems
- Why the true opportunity lies in faster implementations and reduced transformation costs
- How the role of developers is shifting, and what this means for insurance talent
- Why insurers should invest in AI to enhance - not replace - their core platforms
- What the smartest insurers are doing now to future-proof operations in an AI-first world
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Jan 25, 2026
Sunday Jan 25, 2026
In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Tobi Schneider, Sector Engagement Lead for Financial Services & FinTech at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, to unpack one of the most ambitious research initiatives currently shaping the future of AI risk in insurance. Backed by UKRI and developed in collaboration with AXA Group and three leading universities, the project aims to build a foundational blueprint for how insurers can understand, audit and underwrite emerging AI risks.
Tobi shares why the shift from traditional to generative and agentic AI has outpaced current risk frameworks, leaving insurers exposed to risks that are poorly defined, difficult to monitor and impossible to price using historic loss data. He explains how his team is exploring dynamic underwriting models, parametric solutions and novel assurance techniques like LLM-based judges and automated red teaming, all with the goal of enabling safer, more accountable AI adoption.
Ahead of the Agentic AI Half Day event, hosted in collaboration with AI Risk, Tobi Schneider and Lukasz Szpruch wrote an article The New Frontier: Managing and insuring generative and agentic AI risks, further exploring this topic.
In this conversation, Tobi shares:
- Why AI systems that function “correctly” can still produce harmful or costly outcomes
- How traditional insurance models fail in the face of opacity, model drift and dynamic learning
- What makes AI risk so difficult to price and how parametric triggers can help bridge the gap
- Why better assurance leads to better insurance, and how incentives can drive safer AI deployment
- How continuous monitoring tools are being developed to audit AI models in real time
- What today’s early AI insurance offerings (from the likes of Munich Re and Relm) are actually covering
- The role of non-profit research in supporting commercial innovation without commercial bias
- What insurers can do now to prepare for an AI-driven future even without historical data
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Jan 18, 2026
Sunday Jan 18, 2026
This week we bring you an episode of Bootstrap Confidential featuring InsTech’s very own CEO, Matthew Grant, who joined Charles Green in the latter half of 2025 to reflect on the eight-year journey of building InsTech from the ground up without outside funding, and with an intentional focus on sustainable growth.
Matthew’s route to growing InsTech wasn’t typical. With a background in risk, analytics and around 400 podcast episodes as a host, he brought a deep understanding of the insurance sector and what it takes to build a commercially viable, insight-led business. The result? A thriving community of over 30,000, a high-margin membership model and a successful exit achieved through discipline, focus and clear-eyed decisions.
In this conversation, Matthew shares:
- Why he sees bootstrapping as risk management, not risk taking
- The importance of paying yourself from day one and how that shaped InsTech’s trajectory
- Lessons from testing (and killing) products that didn’t deliver
- Why hiring curious, early-career talent paid off
- What most founders get wrong about option schemes and equity
- How to handle financial stress without losing your team or your sanity
- Why co-founders matter and why investors aren’t a substitute
- The hard truth about building the business your customers want, not just the one you’d love to run
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Jan 11, 2026
Sunday Jan 11, 2026
In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Andy Yeoman, CEO of Concirrus, to unpack how a key player in marine insurance tech has reinvented itself as a core platform provider for the specialty market, and what that transformation says about where the industry is heading.
Andy shares the thinking behind Concirrus’ pivot from ship tracking to full risk lifecycle processing, what it takes to build end-to-end technology in just 18 months, and why underwriters, not just CTOs, are now leading the charge on system change.
In this conversation, Andy shares:
- Why marine was just the beginning and why modern platforms must serve multiple lines with depth, not just breadth
- What today’s insurers really want from core systems: speed, interoperability and business outcomes
- How Concirrus became an AI-first company and what that’s meant for product delivery, talent and culture
- The rise of the tech-fuelled MGA and why they’re now the “risk entrepreneurs” to watch
- How verticalised platforms are winning over underwriters by solving for class-specific nuance
- What the shift from admin-heavy roles to empowered underwriting means for job satisfaction and talent retention
- Why managing change is as important as building tech and what Concirrus learned from its own internal AI adoption
- What’s next for insurance infrastructure as constraints fall away and innovation accelerates
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Jan 04, 2026
Sunday Jan 04, 2026
How can AI weather models improve the accuracy and scale of catastrophe modelling?
Matthew Grant is joined by David Wood, Managing Director at JBA Risk Management, and Jochen Papenbrock, Head of Financial Technology (EMEA) at NVIDIA, to explore how accelerated computing is unlocking new ways to simulate and manage flood risk.
JBA has long been a pioneer in flood modelling, while NVIDIA’s GPU technology has helped drive the recent breakthroughs in AI and generative modelling. Together, they discuss how high-resolution simulations, new ensemble methods and open-source tools are pushing the limits of what’s possible in climate and catastrophe analytics.
Key Talking Points:
- The early bet – how JBA’s adoption of GPU computing over a decade ago made national-scale flood mapping possible
- From gaming to GenAI – how NVIDIA's evolution from graphics to AI led to the development of physics-informed weather models
- Ensemble power – why running 1,000+ simulations helps capture more extremes than the historic record ever could
- Event sets reimagined – how AI models are enabling richer, more diverse flood scenarios for Europe and beyond
- Real-time relevance – the potential to use AI models to simulate how a flood might unfold, as it’s happening
- Making AI usable – how Earth-2 Studio and open-source frameworks are opening up generative models to catastrophe modellers
- Proving value – how NVIDIA and JBA worked together to quantify the benefits of faster, more flexible modelling approaches
- Looking ahead – why cross-sector collaboration will be essential to turn acceleration into real-world impact
If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Dec 28, 2025
Sunday Dec 28, 2025
In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Dr Thomas Kuhnt (HDI Global SE), Ed Ackerman (Qover) and Vincent De Ponthaud (AXA) for a rare C-suite perspective on Agentic AI — what it is, how it's being deployed and why senior leaders are walking a tightrope between bold innovation and operational risk.
Agentic AI promises transformative value, but for decision-makers at the top, it also brings real uncertainty. What do you build vs. buy? How do you prove ROI? And how do you prevent over-trusting agents that are inherently probabilistic?
In this conversation, Thomas, Ed and Vincent share:
- Why Agentic AI is different from past tech trends and why this one feels real
- The cultural and leadership challenge of balancing excitement with governance
- How AXA and HDI are enabling safe experimentation at scale across complex organisations
- How Qover is building 20+ AI agents to automate claims micro-tasks — and when they build vs. buy
- What customers really think about AI agents and why nearly none opt out
- The risks of shadow AI and why IT needs to move faster than ever
- Why “human in the loop” is flawed and how user trust in AI could become a blind spot
- What’s missing: industry standards, agent evaluation tools and new roles like “agent managers”
- The case for cautious iteration, deep collaboration and constant re-evaluation
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.
Sunday Dec 21, 2025
Sunday Dec 21, 2025
In this episode, Claire Souch is joined by Tom Philp, CEO of Maximum Information; James Lay, AVP of Product Management at Verisk; and Stephen Martin, Head of Catastrophe Modelling at Westfield Specialty, for a timely discussion on the future of catastrophe model evaluation, and why it's no longer enough to simply trust what’s in the black box.
As new specialist model vendors emerge and market expectations evolve, the panel unpacks a growing demand for transparency, interoperability and smarter ways to adopt models that fit real-world portfolios. At the heart of the conversation is a shared belief: the industry doesn’t just need more models, it needs better ways to evaluate and use them.
In this conversation, they explore:
- Why traditional model validation no longer meets the needs of modern risk teams
- The shift from 'black box' outputs to meaningful model evaluation that supports business decisions
- How tools from Maximum Information and Verisk’s Model Exchange reduce the burden on small or lean teams
- The role of Oasis as a framework for opening up access across multiple model vendors
- Why standardisation and open data formats are essential for meaningful interoperability
- The growing role of niche vendors in reshaping perceptions of model transparency
- How automation is changing the regulatory and investor reporting game
- Why this is more than a tech upgrade—it's a cultural reset in catastrophe modelling
Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.