Innovation for Insurance Brokers
The latest FinTech West event took place on 27th November. The session focused on Insurance and was hosted in partnership with Future Finance, and took place at Deloitte’s stunning new offices in Bristol.
Dave Tansley, Practice Senior Partner, South West & Wales, Deloitte opened the session with some words of welcome from Deloitte, emphasising the firm’s commitment to the South West.
Stuart Harrison, Director at FinTech West, provided a brief overview of the organisation’s work across the South West and its objective to ‘facilitate action to generate impact’, which runs across its activity. In 2024-25 there are five strategic challenge areas: Education, Sustainable Finance, Blockchain, South Coast, and of course InsurTech.
The event was hosted in partnership with Future Finance, an Innovate UK/ERSC funded national accelerator, led by University of Bristol and delivered in partnership with multiple organisations including FinTech West and three other universities. Central to the £2m programme is an accelerator to support the adoption of technology by SME financial services firms, with the insurance sector being a key area of focus. We heard from Jon Beaverstock (Principal Investigator) and Jack Stanbury (Senior Project Manager), who outlined the bespoke activities focused on insurance brokers, and explained that they wanted to hear from the attendees what their key challenges are.
Tom Simcox and Sam Jenkins, from Simcox Brokers, explained their work, including their focus on professional indemnity and cyber insurance. More than half of UK companies experienced a cyber attack in the last year, but cyber insurance is not a mandatory requirement and only about 15% of firms have it. This means it is a growth sector for insurance brokers. Tom and Sam explained that awareness of cyber insurance is low, and businesses don’t tend to have a strong understanding of what is and is not covered by schemes such as Cyber Essentials, which offers a relatively small amount of cover when compared with more specialist policies.
Based on the lively Q&A session which followed, the sector is evolving fast, and insurers are continually adapting their approaches as things like AI and cyber crime become more prominent and complex.
George Wright founder of Bristol based InsurTech, Vounder Analytics, explained their approach to data analytics for insurers having created the BDX View product with the objective of changing data from being a cost into a value add. George reflected that people now have a better understanding of the value of their data, but at the same time there are really powerful data aggregation and analysis tools via the likes of Google and AWS that means that data analysis is now more accessible than ever before. George told the audience that insurance brokers have a great opportunity to leverage their data to enable them to innovate in the way they work.
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