InsurTech Symposium - UWE and FinTech West
Hot on the heels of the Future of Payments, we turned our attention to one of our key strategic focuses, InsurTech, with key partner UWE, sponsored by the Insurance Institute of Bristol. Insurance is a huge sector for the South West with many thousands employed and consequently InsurTech is also a vibrant and growing area of activity in the region. UWE are also one of the few universities to run an Insurance MSc helping generate the future captains of industry.
The event itself was introduced and hosted by Sabri Mohammad who heads up the insurance teaching at UWE. We were treated to no less than three quick keynote welcomes from Andrew Simpson, Dean of the Bristol Business School, Paul Bennett, Dean of Partnerships and Nigel Taylor, President of the Insurance Institute of Bristol.
Stuart Harrison provided a brief overview of FinTech West’s strategic plans stating that this was not simply an event but the start of a series of activities around InsurTech including workshops, research and industry engagement to help drive innovation.
Mark McDonald from Altus Consulting then provided an overview of InsurTech as a whole, with a series of interesting stats and facts highlighting the opportunity for InsurTech with the UK insurance sector being the third largest in the world, only behind the US and China employing 300,000 people! There are hundreds of InsurTechs in the UK with over 1/3 of them being outside of London, and we know many of those are in the South West.
Rohit Nair from Assureful took over to tell their story of how they’ve successfully grown in the US and Hong Kong as an InsurTech (not as a broker but underwriter) from a Bristol base after first attempting to launch his business in the UK but being turned down by the FCA for lack of insurance experience. Rohit, already a successful entrepreneur, has turned Assureful into a great success story tackling pay as you go, fair and affordable commercial liability insurance. Hopefully we can benefit from that in the UK soon too!
We then heard from Naresh Kirpalani of PolicyPrecise, a relatively recent startup from two founders directly from the insurance industry looking to deliver fair (and precise) solutions via software for the insurance industry focusing on data driven professional liability insurance. They have already been working on complicated construction industry challenges pulling various sources of data together to provide more accurate and fairer solutions.
The last InsurTech showcase was provided by Ashley Kent of Envelop Risk, one of the largest InsurTechs in the UK and based in Bristol. Envelop Risk draw on a large amount of prior insurance industry experience for cyber risk solutions - their sole focus - bringing considerable skill to risk modelling and data analysis, including, of course, AI. Interesting questions (and solutions) were discussed such as “How do you model something that has never happened?”.
We finished with a panel including the presenters and Ben Cooper from Angel Investors Bristol. Not only have AIB recently invested in a regional InsurTech, Ben has experience working in the sector himself.
AI was mentioned a lot during the presentations as it clearly represents a great avenue of opportunity for the industry. We’ll be hearing a lot more about innovation in insurance over the coming months, including AI.