InsTech - insurance & innovation with Matthew Grant & Robin Merttens

Robin reflects on DIA. Dan White of Ninety Consulting on innovation and company value (36)

A double bill this week. Matthew talks to Robin about his experience of visiting the DIA Amsterdam conference this year with the highlights, lowlights and his meeting with the rising stars from insurtech in Japan.

Dan White, Managing Partner at Ninety Consulting talks to us about some of the themes emerging from their white paper "Examining the direct relationship between insurance innovation and company value"

We discuss topics such as why do insurers appear to compare so badly with other industries when it comes to innovation spend - is that real or just differences in the data? Which is better, lots of small innovation or a few large projects? And a lot more.

We are pleased to have Ninety Consulting as one of InsTech London's gold sponsors in 2019.

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Sean Ringsted, Chief Digital Officer, Chubb (35)

In this episode Matthew Grant chats to Sean Ringsted about how Chubb is introducing innovation across the company and he gives some tips to help anyone starting up a new business aimed at selling to insurers. 

Sean is Executive Vice President for Chubb Group reporting directly into CEO Evan Greenberg. Sean leads Chubb’s digital efforts aimed at transforming the company into a digitally integrated organization.  Sean has 25 years of experience in the insurance industry.  He was appointed Chief Digital Officer in 2017 and has served as the company’s Chief Risk Officer since 2008, prior to ACE’s acquisition of Chubb in 2016. 

Chubb provides insurance in property and casualty, accident and health, reinsurance, and life insurance. The company has a presence in 54 countries and territories as well as Lloyd's and is the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer. Chubb is a corporate member of Instech London.

Matthew and Sean discuss what it means to innovate in a large company, how Sean keeps up to date with the latest information, the role of Linkedin, and the future of IOT for insurance. 

Check us out at Instech London to see our range of past of future events and get access to a transcript for this interview.

 

Keeping your algorithm safe, legal and morally acceptable (34)

With all the talk of the use of AI and algorithms in insurance innovation we thought we'd better check out some of the potential pitfalls and challenges that need to be considered with using algorithms in financial services. Robin discusses what to do, and what to avoid with Nicholas Berry and Peter McBurney from Norton Fulbright Rose and Wan Heath from Barnett Waddingham. Who'd have thought regulation could be quite so much fun...

Learn more about InsTech London at https://www.instech.london/

33. More algorithms that really work from ChAI, e2Value and We Predict

More fun from our Algorithm and AI event at the Steelyard on 3rd June in this, our selected highlights from the second half of the evening. We covered the first half in episode 31. Now its Robin Merttens turn up on stage talking to three of the leaders from new and growing companies servicing the insurance market telling us how they are making it real in the world of algorithms.

Silvi Wompa, Chief Underwriting Officer,  ChAI (1:30)

ChAI is releasing an insurance product to mitigate price risk for buyers and sellers of commodities by forecasting prices using both traditional and alternative data (including satellite, maritime and political risk data) in combination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.

Todd Rissel, CEO and Founder, e2Value (11:24)

e2Value offers products to assist with property asset valuation. Its tools can be used for collateral asset valuation, risk management, and predictive modeling. e2Value is the SaaS provider delivering valuations for residential, commercial, and farm and ranch properties in the US and Canada.

James Davies, CEO and Founder,  We Predict (18:00)

Munich Re backed We Predict use predictive analytics and its proprietary dataset Deepview to help vehicle
manufacturers make better purchasing and engineering decisions, and to insure their associated risks. 

Learn more about what we are up to at InsTech London, including details of our all our events from last two years and information on our next events at www.instech.london

And if you enjoyed this podcast, we've 32 more already released waiting for you...

32. Inter-operability and catastrophe modelling. Dickie Whitaker CEO of Oasis LMF

Dickie is CEO and co-founder of the open source catastrophe modelling platform Oasis. After a career in reinsurance broking, Dickie has spent the last 8 years creating a way to help insurers get access to emerging, niche and academic data & models. Today Oasis LMF is used by many of the London market re/insurers to price and manage global catastrophe risk. Matthew and Dickie discuss the history of the company, catastrophes and other themes relevant to all data and technology companies such as interoperability, fund raising and recruiting the best people.

Find out more about data, technology, insurtech and much more at www.instech.london

Oasis LMF is at https://oasislmf.org/

31. How humble is your algorithm? Talking to AIG, Cytora, WhenFresh and Polar Capital

This week’s podcast features edited highlights of Matthew chatting on stage with leading figures from AIG, Cytora, WhenFresh and Polar Capital at our live event in The Steelyard.

Everyone’s talking about AI, but what’s really going on? Questions we asked included how far has AI really got in insurance, what are the regulatory issues, how to convince an insurer that the results are validated, how to tell the quality of a company’s AI credentials, where do insurers stand relative to the rest of the world, and a lot more. Our guests talk about the ways they are using AI and Algorithms in their own businesses and how they distinguish reality from hype. Tips for assessing the quality of a company that is claiming to use AI, and thoughts on how to encourage more data scientists to join the industry. What is the Moneyball effect and is your algorithm smart enough and humble enough to admit when it doesn't know? 

The usual buzzing crowd and experts on stage made for another great evening.

Reza Khorshidi, Chief Scientist, Global AIG (1:20)

Hamzah Chaudhary, Director of Deployment, Cytora (10:45)

Mark Cunningham, CEO and Founder, WhenFresh (21:10)

Nick Martin, Fund Manager, Polar Capital (29:00)

 

Both Reza and Nick recommend the book: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal

 

30. Report from New York. Bernard Goyder from Insurance Insider's first impressions of US insurance and tech

The team from Insurance Insider are regular attendees at our InsTech London events. Bernard Goyder, senior reporter for Insurance Insider was previously covering the London insurance technology and insurtech space but since April he has been based in New York. In this episode Matthew talks to Bernard about what he's learning about the difference between writing insurance in the US and the UK, and why this constrains innovation in personal lines.

Despite the regulatory challenges Hartford has developed into a major hub for insurance innovation and Bernard was there recently meeting the insurance commissionaire.

He reviews some of the new companies he likes along with an update on Lemonade and Bernard's own experience of trying to buy renters insurance. 

For more information about InsTech London and our past and future events, find us at www.InsTech.London

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29. The Partners' chat. The latest Lloyd's strategy paper, Insider Tech event and IOT

In this episode Matthew, Robin and Paolo catch up on what they heard whilst attending the recent Insider Tech event hosted by Insurance Insider. Robin talks about his keynote (read it here) and other themes that were emerging on the back of the release of the latest Lloyd's strategy paper. Matthew reviews the presentations by James Slaughter (Liberty) and Laurent Rousseau (SCOR) and Paolo talks about Robert Lumley's (Insurtech Gateway) description on the types of investors in insurtech today. 

For more information, follow us on https://www.instech.london/ and sign up to our weekly newsletter.

28. Talking to Pascal Millaire, CEO of CyberCube about enabling controlled growth for cyber underwriting

In this episode, Matthew Grant discusses the challenges in building a cyber model for insurance pricing and portfolio management with Pascal Millaire, CEO of CyberCube over from the US visiting his UK office.  CyberCube was launched in 2018 as a spin-out from Symantec. Since being launched, CyberCube has signed up major insurers and brokers as clients, including CNA, Chubb, Munich Re, Guy Carpenter and JLT Re.

The issue, according to Pascal, isn't a lack of data. It's just that that data is hard to come by, hard to cleanse and hard to make sense of for someone trying to underwrite a risk, or manage cyber aggregation. He discusses the benefit of having behind-the-firewall data access from partners such as Symantec, and the ability to offer a forward-looking view of risk before trends become claims.

CyberCube were also one of the speakers at the InsTech London Cyber event in October 2018 and full details of the event and videos from the night can be found here.

For more information on the developing cyber market, read Matthew Grant's article Cyber risk: insurance black hole or a massive opportunity? 

To find out what we have coming up for future InsTech London events, and to read what we have to say in our weekly newsletter find us at www.instech.london.

 

 

27. "Insurance is a community, not an industry". Marketing Innovation with Hiscox, Concirrus, Slipcase, The Marketing Eye and Proper LinkedIn.

We're back in this week's episode with highlights from our event on 30th April. Matthew Grant is talking to an insurer, an insurtech and three marketing experts about how to innovate with marketing in insurance and techniques for gaining more exposure in B2C and B2B.

First up is Olivia Hendrick, Director of Marketing at Hiscox UK and Ireland (2:20), describing their record breaking "cyber hack" marketing video, with over 20 million downloads. What it is, how it works and why. See the video here -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgbWBRfNLdc

Andy Yeoman, CEO and Founder of marine analytics platform Concirrus  (6:20) explains how he has been able to become part of the marine underwriting community by understanding the conversations his clients want to be having.

Chris Williams of Proper Linkedin Marketing (13:46) reveals the secrets to getting engagement and coverage on LinkedIn, whether to post on a personal page or a company page and how to optimise the LinkedIn algorithm.

Alex Hearn, CEO and founder of new site and central content platform Slipcase (22:15) describes what insurers are most interested in and how he provides added value to them. Wondering what people read and why? See a snapshot of Slipcase's research here - contact them directly for more details. 

Finally, Neil Edwards of agency Marketing Eye (28:37) explains how technology companies can take advantage of social media and when the best time is to send out news. 

Interested in learning more about insurance, innovation and why people give up their free time to come along to our events? Find out more about the speakers, view photos from the events and register for future events at www.instech.london. Hear more about what we are up to by registering for our newsletter.