Special Episode: New Trillion dollar markets wherever you look. How insurtech can improve climate resilience with Robert Lumley and Stephen Brittain of The Insurtech Gateway

October 22, 2021

I love catching up with Robert Lumley (Top) and Stephen Brittain (Bottom) from the Insurtech Gateway because whenever we do we always have a really fascinating conversation.

But I found recording today’s podcast not just fascinating but actually inspiring and energising.

First of all a huge amount has been going on since we last spoke and the pace and maturity of insurtech investment is accelerating.

So at the beginning of the podcast we spend a little time catching up with where the regulated Insurtech Gateway Incubator and Venture Capital Fund is with its growing and maturing portfolio of investment companies.

Then in the second part we start to examine insurtech’s role in improving the world’s resilience to natural catastrophe.

We hear a lot of talk about resilience in the sector and much of it is really well meaning but often lacking in effective vision.

For example at any big insurance conference we will hear very senior leaders talking about how we must close the protection gap. That’s something we can all agree on – but we rarely hear any of those same leaders sell their vision of how exactly we are going to do it.

And that’s why I found this podcast so uplifting.

Technology has a lot of the answers to many of the world’s problems and so does insurance. Yet we have often been going about things the wrong way. Instead of solving real problems for real people we have tended to try and find new ways of selling them insurance products.

Today you’ll learn about a new model that is far more customer led.

Ordinary people don’t wake up every day thinking “I must buy more insurance today” but they do worry that if there is a major storm or flood they will go bust.

Insurtech is filling the gap by solving these client problems increasingly cheaply and efficiently and then bringing the insurance in behind, not the other way around.

What’s more, 15 years ago, when the idea of microinsurance was first gaining currency, there was a sense that it wasn’t really supposed to make money for insurers – that it was an extension of Corporate Social Responsibility or international aid budgets.

But of course loss-making businesses are not sustainable and they are definitely not scalable.

These days insurtechs are coming with a sensible profit motive, acknowledging that everyone in the value chain has to get value and has to make money otherwise the protection gap is never going to be filled.

That’s what is so exciting – it’s a much more mature idea and of course one that will help create potentially trillions of dollars in brand new accretive premium for the global insurance market.

Listen on for some inspiring ideas