Scouting for Growth

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Tunde Salako, an active entrepreneur within the Africa FinTech, HealthTech, and InsurTech scene. Tunde wants to connect the dots between inclusion, insurance and technology In Africa. Tunde co-founded HealthTech startup, Hadiel, to drive more health inclusion in Africa and is also the managing partner of the Africa InsurTech Lab, a platform aggregating InsurTech entrepreneurs, startups, corporates, enthusiasts, investors sharing trends on how technology is reverse engineering insurance on the continent and between continents. Investment in the African startup ecosystem accelerated over the past two years with over $3 billion when investment opportunities fell for startups across Europe for instance. During their discussion, Sabine and Tunde dive into 1) FinTech and InsurTech in Africa, 2) opportunities and challenges faced by the local market, and 3) drivers behind the $3 billion of investment made within the African market over the past two years. KEY TAKEAWAYS My background was as a medic, I trained as a physician, and for the past 16-17 years I’ve been on the insurance side of the fence despite the fact I remained within the healthcare system as well. In 2019, I started to go deeper into the insurance ecosystem after more interest was being taken in Africa, but there was no documentation or platform pulling it all together. So, we decided to showcase this to the world and build confidence in relevant areas, so Africa is not left behind. 10-15 years ago, if you wanted to build a website, you had to pay a high cost. By 2017 that changed. Now, building a website is something that’s a walk in the park for everyone, and there is a surge of technology hubs around the whole of Africa (over 700 today), which are very bullish on teaching, coding, programming, and building local talent. The international ecosystem is now looking into what is happening in Africa, particularly regarding FinTech. Despite the fact there was a slowdown globally, it took until quarter 3 of the year before we started to see that kind of slowing down in Africa because the investors and VC ecosystem are bullish about putting out investments into the local ecosystem. That translated financially into by the end of 2021, the total funding in Africa was about $4 billion, out of which about 55% of those funds were to the FinTech ecosystem, and in 2022 that figure rose to $4.8 billion, still with about 55% to FinTech. When you look at the next 3-7 years, we can churn out stellar innovation because of the technology that is now available in the insurance ecosystem. One of the things that is very clear is that now, with the major players in the industry and InsurTechs that are coming up with innovations, there are going to be more opportunities for partnerships and collaborations either by mergers and/or acquisitions. BEST MOMENTS ‘Africa needs to be heard. There's a lot of things going on down here.’ ‘We want to put a spotlight on the growth and the capabilities that have been developed year-on-year in terms of technology on the continent of Africa.’ ‘We now have local talent that can build solutions that are amenable to our environment and the key problems affecting the African ecosystem.’ ‘Incumbents want to focus on how they reduce risk and how to provide value to the customer, while at the same time leaving the technology to the startups.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Tunde Salako is the CEO of Hadiel, manages Africa InsurTech Lab, and is an advisory council member of Founders Factory Africa. You can find out more about Tunde below. If you want to know more, make sure to reach out to Tunde at Africa InsurTech Rising ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Pablo Duarte and Hilario Itriago, founders of The LATAM InsurTech, a fast-growing insurance technology accelerator for startups wanting to enter the Latam market via Miami. Both Pablo and Hilario have been leading insurance innovation in LATAM for years. They both come from industry, and you will discover during our discussion that we are all in the fractional world of tech, where we split our time across those projects that matter most to us. For instance, alongside supporting The LATAM InsurTech, Pablo is also the director of client engagement at Bain and Company, and Hilario is also the president at BOXX Insurance, a leading cybersecurity provider. During the podcast, they discuss the InsurTech ecosystem in LATAM, how they support the incumbent, broker, and startup worlds, InsurTech LATAM in numbers, and their InsurTech portfolio and opportunities across the LATAM market. KEY TAKEAWAYS The insurance space, as we know it, has a phenomenal opportunity with the transformation technology brings. There's clearly a before-and-after technology that came into our world. That technology is now in consumers' hands, and we believe that is a massive change. One of the critical things we want to ensure in our markets is that more people get insurance. We're convinced that the more people get insurance coverage, the better their social and economic development will be. InsurTech can bring insurance products closer to everyday individuals who can benefit from insurance coverage, and do so straightforwardly and efficiently. This opportunity must be leveraged by both incumbents and InsurTechs alike – and they both can do so. As collaborative as insurance has been over the centuries, the opportunities of InsurTech are no different. We believe that incumbents and InsurTechs can collaborate across the entire value chain, and that we can promote and influence this more and more, the better everybody's going to be, from industry insiders to consumers. The InsurTech sector in Latin America remains very active. Unlike what we’ve seen in other markets where valuations plummeted, we haven't seen an effect in the LATAM market. There are over 400 InsurTechs in LATAM. The growth rate is about 20% year-on-year, and about 6% of companies die each year (just like any venture ecosystem). Some of the fastest-growing markets are in Colombia and Brazil, with one-third of the market in Brazil. We saw the early days of InsurTechs focusing on personal distribution, that type of disruption, which typically is the sexy aspect of where people want to go. But over the years, we’ve seen more and more companies tackling the commercial space – whether it's small commercial or more traditional, larger-scale commercial. There's a great deal of opportunity in the sustainability space of commercial insurance. We're starting to see more opportunities there and, therefore, more InsurTechs. That's one of the angles that will drive many of the region's economies to see more solutions and innovations in that space, which could also be taken to other markets. BEST MOMENTS ‘I've been on this InsurTech journey since 2016. Back then, InsurTech was just starting in Latin America, so there wasn’t much activity going on, and sometimes we even wondered if we made the right choice to get into InsurTech then!’ ‘Through InsurTech, we see greater customization and personalization of value propositions. That is key because traditionally, insurance has been very structured and hard to tailor to customers' specific needs.’ ‘Argentina is a country that has been known for innovation way before FinTech and InsurTech, it's a very entrepreneurial country, and precisely because of the economic circumstances, they have a robust pipeline of solutions created and grown in Argentina, but want to go elsewhere for growth.’ ‘In terms of smaller markets that punch above their weight, our first InsurTech unicorn comes from Chile. It's a great balance between large pipelines of InsurTechs coming from big markets and smaller quantities but tremendous quality coming from smaller markets.' ABOUT THE GUESTS Find out about our guest using those links. Pablo Duarte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duartepablo/ Hilario Itriago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hitriago/ InsurLab LATAM: https://www.latam-insurtech.com/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter,

It’s not easy for small and medium-sized businesses to find the right protection, even though many more small business opportunities have emerged since the pandemic. Today, Sabine taps into the knowledge of two industry veterans: Jeff Shi of InsurTech Groups and Tim Lovett, formerly at The Hartford, now at Three Insurance, and asks them to understand the current situation with small commercials in the US market. KEY TAKEAWAYS The size of the small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market varies widely by region and industry. Globally, SMEs account for a significant share of the economy, employ a large share of the workforce, and generate substantial economic activity. Estimates suggest that SMEs make up over 90% of businesses in many countries and are often considered the backbone of the economy. However, due to their diversity and dispersed nature, it can be challenging to estimate the exact size of the SME market. Insurers may have pulled back from small commercial coverage over the past two years for various reasons, including changes in regulations, declining profitability, and increased competition, as well as new regulations on data and ethics. The small commercial lines market can present several challenges for insurers, including higher risk, increased competition, complex coverage, limited data availability, and pricing pressures. These challenges can make it difficult for insurers to operate effectively in the small commercial lines market, leading some companies to pull back from this segment. However, despite these challenges, there is still significant demand for insurance coverage among small businesses, and many insurers are finding ways to overcome these challenges and offer competitive products. The products, services, and business opportunities that insurers evaluate today within the small commercial insurance market include technology-enabled solutions, specialized coverage, customized products, bundled products, alternative distribution channels, and risk management services. These products, services, and business opportunities aim to improve the customer experience, increase profitability, and differentiate from the competition in the small commercial insurance market. However, insurers must carefully evaluate each opportunity's viability and potential, as success will depend on factors such as market demand, competition, and the overall regulatory environment. BEST MOMENTS ‘Small businesses often face a higher level of risk than larger businesses, and insurers may have decided that the risk associated with insuring small businesses was too high.' ‘Small businesses often face a higher level of risk than larger businesses, making it more difficult for insurers to assess and price risk accurately.’ ‘Small business owners are often price-sensitive, and insurers may face pressure to offer competitive pricing, which can impact profitability.’ ‘Insurers are exploring alternative distribution channels, such as insurtech start-ups, to reach small businesses and offer more convenient and accessible insurance solutions.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Jeff Shi is the founder of InsurTech Groups, where he connects consumers with top industry partners by leveraging advanced processes and innovative technology. Jeff helps consumers better understand their policies to meet their unique needs. Website: https://www.insurtechgroups.com/ Tim Lovett was at The Hartford Insurance Group when recording this podcast for six years. Tim helps small and medium-sized companies make better choices. He has a background in claims management and distribution, which enables him to educate and assist agents in growing their small commercial portfolios. Website: https://ir.thehartford.com/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Aaron Jones, an award-winning entrepreneur working in Artificial Intelligence. Aaron co-founded Yepic AI, a company in the generative AI space, whose flagship product, “vidvoice.ai,” is a state-of-the-art video translation technology that lip-syncs your video in real time. Think about your Star Trek moments when Kirk says, "Scotty, beam us up!" in any language. KEY TAKEAWAYS Before I was an entrepreneur, I was a cameraman at K Productions, producing a TV show for Sky. I was also an assistant vision mixer, adjusting camera lighting. I thought a career in acting was for me when I was younger, but I later realized I wanted to make a difference in the world. Everything I've done since then has been about what I spend my time on. I want it to make an impact and change people's lives. At university, I started an ethical fashion brand, which got me into e-commerce. I don't care much about fashion, but I do care about people. There was a great story about people producing a sustainable, recycled product locally, and I started a foundation in Cambodia to fund education. The idea was that every time you bought a product, you'd fund a child's education, helping parents earn more and children learn to break the cycle of poverty. I did that for several years, was honored by the Queen for my work, and received numerous awards. Like all great ideas, it evolved, and we realized that if we wanted to make an even bigger impact, we needed to create a place for other designers to grow their brands and sell more products, so we could build more schools. That’s how the business evolved into a company called See Fashion, which was a terrible idea. Never work with fashion designers if you want to make money. We pivoted away from fashion to technology, enabling eCommerce brands with a product and a business to sell more. We did this by connecting all the stores as an intelligence web, using visual search as a hook to encourage users to show us what they were interested in buying by uploading photos to the app/store. It soon became an API business, and we sold APIs to companies like Yves Saint Laurent and huge corporations. The most valuable part of the business was the visual search. We did not own the IP, and because GDPR came in, our sharing network had to shut down, as I had not sold the company when I had the opportunity to be acquired. That journey led me to meet with the Founders Factory team more than three years ago. It started consulting on an e-commerce enablement project using Generative AI to enhance and generate imagery. It blew my mind that researchers generated images from nothing, and I became obsessed. We've probably created the first ‘stable diffusion’ before research papers made the subject popular. Still, ours wasn't very stable and required an extensive dataset to generate the images. This means that, for an e-commerce brand, it wasn’t that feasible. After this, we got into video and formed Yepic AI. BEST MOMENTS ‘Entrepreneurs are a bit of everything. Starting a business in a new and exciting space Is exciting, but it also requires you to wear many hats at the beginning.’ ‘Don’t work with designers, exit and take acquisition offers, do something meaningful.’ ‘A problem that a lot of Generative AI companies are facing is when the hype burns away, to sell it to businesses as a click-through enhancement/ increase to drive more sales, you need to prove that your image drove the sale. So you certainly more than imagery!’ ‘There’s been loads going on in the background for a long time, but the public has suddenly become aware of it, and they’ve realized that Generative AI isn’t just deep fakes, among others. You can create stuff. You can generate images in Canva now. You can edit people out of your photos using AI. The creative possibilities in the eyes of the public have opened up massively.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Aaron Jones is an award-winning entrepreneur working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Aaron co-founded Yepic AI, a company in the generative AI space, whose flagship product, “vidvoice.ai,” is a state-of-the-art video translation technology that lip-syncs your video in real time. Vid Voice is being used in business meetings, telehealth, live events, and film dubbing. It's the first and only service of its kind, available via Zoom. Aaron was recognized in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, making him the youngest person to receive a British Empire Medal for services to Industry. He was also awarded the Alumni of the Year 2018 by Essex University and was shortlisted for the Forbes 30 Under 30. Check out the Yepic platform here Learn about Aaron here ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Tristan Pelloux, an expert who is passionate about FinTech and Innovation. After several years in Corporate Strategy and Finance at Virgin Money, Tristan decided to launch Strategwhy, an independent management consultancy. He is also the Chief Pencil Officer at Fintech Review, an online media on the Fintech industry. KEY TAKEAWAYS I was producing lots of insights for Virgin Money (where I worked in corporate finance), trying to figure out what was going on in that world, the trends, innovations. I thought it was a shame that the audience within the company was so small, so I set up the media site in 2020 to share my thoughts on what was going on. It’s evolved from a personal site where I wrote blogs to a platform where others share FinTech insights and interviews with business leaders and entrepreneurs in the field. This is my passion work, and I do consulting, which is how I pay the rent, where I work with companies across Europe and help them with their strategy, and help them to scale to reach a new level. I am Mr Organisation, I like to make lists, do tests, I like plans. I tell my clients we’re going to meet twice a week, this is the agenda of the meeting, this is what we’re going to do this week, this is what we’re going to do next week. It’s about maintaining order. This doesn’t mean you can’t be inventive or innovative; you just need to channel things and do it in a very planned way, otherwise your energy is going in too many directions, and you’re losing time. If everybody is aligned, they know what’s going on, there is a clear plan, and you divide the tasks between people, then you achieve much more. Things move faster and can evolve faster in a startup than in a corporate business, where you’ve got access to a lot of experts and resources. It’s super interesting to see how you can do the same project in two different environments; you need much more adaptability in a startup, and the goals are much more about growth, with corporates, there are more structures and restraints where everybody needs to be on the page before you can move forward. One of the challenges in FinTech is that there are too many companies competing for the same customers, and there’s not enough money to be made from retail customers. It’s not enough to make money from interchange. This can be great for the customer to have so much choice, but it’s also confusing because there are so many players and it’s fragmented. Lots of FinTechs are battling to become the ‘super app’, and we’ll see which emerges. Still, so many of them don’t have good business models and are loss-making, so it will be challenging for them with less funding available. But there are opportunities in the B2B space. BEST MOMENTS ‘The environment is very different now than it was two years ago. It wasn’t easy to sell, but funding was easier, and scaling was easier. The challenges are the same for everybody, from startups to big businesses.’ ‘What’s important for businesses right now is strategic focus and execution – instead of going in many directions at the same time, do one thing very well. That’s how I’m helping businesses.’ ‘The next two years are going to be difficult for FinTechs because rounds will be down, and some others will get no funding at all. There may be consolidation, so FinTechs in a good position will be able to scale faster through inorganic growth.’ ‘Some services that were not economically viable to provide to the mass market now are through the use of technology. So, at which point are you going to provide some sort of personalised service when you can do it cheaply?’ ABOUT THE GUEST After over five years in corporate strategy and finance at Virgin Money UK in London, Tristan Pelloux launched Strategwhy, an independent management consulting company, to provide guidance and advice to business leaders and founders of startup and scale-up companies worldwide. https://fintechreview.net/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Michael Doyle, a brand and capital-raising guru who founded Brand Iron 20 years ago. Michael combines his branding and market-making experience with his investment reporting analyst strengths to shape a company dedicated to creating congruent brands supported by strong financial and investment stories. With this approach, Michael helped the companies he supported raise over $5 billion in capital. KEY TAKEAWAYS Most people think of branding as how they present themselves and their company. I take branding beyond simply the message into something that produces tangible results. By integrating branding into all areas of the business – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance…- you can create a dynamic value proposition that comes alive, generates leads, and drives revenue. We work with companies to identify what’s unique about their brand, how we successfully package and communicate that, and how we put together and take them to market to drive real results and help them achieve their outcomes, whether that’s driving revenue, driving growth, expanding a new product or service into the marketplace, or expanding into new geographies. The formula for raising $5 billion is really about understanding your niche, how and why you’re better, and how to package that into a clear, concise message. That’s the brand story. What most companies really struggle with is telling a compelling financial story. When I start out with most companies, they give me financials and spreadsheets, and my job is to extract that information. The other side is communicating, highlighting, and showcasing the team and their experience to effectively execute this plan and make investors feel comfortable that they know what they’re doing and confident that they’ll deliver and make this a reality. In order to make ‘x’ revenue, we have to get so many people to make buying decisions. To make those buying decisions, we have to drive so much traffic and convert interested visitors into buyers by getting them to click an ad, blog post, or video. It’s a mathematical formula. We need to understand what it’s going to take, what our message needs to be, which mediums are most effective, and what the timing is. All these ingredients have to come together to deliver the results we want. BEST MOMENTS ‘You need to understand what your ‘holistic brand’ is. It’s not just logos and websites – which are important – you've got to have a good culture and have the team that's going to deliver, communicate, and convey the claims on your website and brand materials.’ 'We don't want our companies to be vaporware. We want them to be real and to do what they say they will do. By doing this, you can produce some great results.’ 'Whether you're a startup, SMB, or a large enterprise, you should always start with the end in mind. What are the end goals you want to achieve?’ ‘Nothing ever works perfectly. The key is starting with assumptions and then adjusting, optimizing, and fine-tuning it to where it's producing your desired outcome and results you're trying to achieve.' ABOUT THE GUEST CEO & Brand Champion of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine talks to Axel Thibon, founder of Wizest, the next generation of investment trading platforms. With his team, Axel aims to make personal investing more accessible, engaging, and aligned with today's digital platforms and changing consumer behavior. Today, people think that investing is complicated and intimidating. What if there were a platform to pair novice investors with financial experts? Before Wizest, Alex worked in banking for over six years. He led and guided 4 M&A/integration projects for banks ranging from $300M to $15B, and led strategy and transformation initiatives at Renault Nissan Mitsubishi for 9 years and at Sabadell United Bank for 5 years. He has brought all that expertise to Wizest for the last 4 years. Axel has managed and launched a brand new digital bank from scratch. Sabine and Axel discuss why we need to make investing simple, the challenges with current mass-market wealth management platforms, how Wizest works, and the target market and sources of success. KEY TAKEAWAYS Wizest democratizes access to the stock market through technology so everyone can invest just like the top 1%. A Wizest client has access to a team of financial experts who invest on their behalf, and the client can choose which expert to add to their team with a single click, instantly copying that expert's portfolio. Axel had an interesting path before doing Wizest. He was a mechanical engineer for the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi group, in charge of developing components for electric vehicles. When attempting to invest for the future, Axel found the process complicated and unsupportive, which inspired him to enter the banking world, gaining experience launching a digital bank from scratch and eventually dedicating his efforts to making investment simpler with Wizest. Wizest solves the problems that limited capital investors face, with minimum investment barriers set by banks, the investor’s lack of experience and knowledge of the stock market, and the reluctance to invest due to the lack of inclusion and transparency on earlier platforms. When you use Wizest for the first time, you see people. It is very welcoming and personal, with the financial investors sharing their personal profiles first, so you can get to know them before you see their recommended portfolios and understand their investment styles. Wizest is working to form partnerships with corporations to increase their reach by offering Wizest memberships to their employees. This kind of service is to offer a service in between savings and wealth management or private investment. There is global potential for this kind of financial accessibility solution. Axel recommends approaching investing as a personal experience. Rather than just approaching a bank and taking the standard route to retirement-type investments, take some time to fully consider your current financial situation and your goals. Stick to your plan and avoid reacting to every financial crisis. BEST MOMENTS ‘This is a journey that is shared by many of us. When we want to start investing with limited capital, we tend to go with cheap or even free solutions. If you don't have any finance background and don't know what to buy and what to sell, it's tough.’ ‘It's not about the service itself, which is about being able to invest or trade, but how the investing happens. So that's what we decided to change with Wizest, which is different from the others because it's not only making it more convenient and accessible, but it is also changing how it is happening.' ‘From there, the user can choose one or several investors they like to build a team. They can build a team that will work for them. When I say that when you have $2,000, $5,000, and $10,000 to work with in Wizest, you then work with your team. Your experts help you build your real portfolio. The way you manage your portfolio is not by managing your underlying holdings but by managing your team.’ ‘It’s not like setting up a lemonade stand. To be able to launch Wizest, we have to be able to make sure we have a secure solution that is compliant with regulations and that we have the right sort of technical integrations.’ ‘When you put the plan in motion, the most important thing most people forget is sticking to the plan. Don't be affected by what is happening today or tomorrow in the market, or overreact and be scared, because when we look historically over the last hundred years, the markets are always up and down.' ABOUT THE GUEST With his team, Axel aims to make personal investing more accessible, engaging, and aligned with today's digital platforms and changing consumer behavior. Today, people think that investing is complicated and intimidating. What if there were a platform to pair novice investors with financial experts? Before Wizest, Alex worked in banking for over six years. Led and guided4 M&A/integration projects for banks ranging from $300M to $15B Led strategy/ transf

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Dennis Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results from direct mailing activity, and connects such campaigns to CRM and marketing automation systems to accelerate the way online marketing connects with offline marketing. With expertise in building VC-backed and self-financed businesses, Dennis is a 6-time entrepreneur. He exited 4 of these businesses to larger corporations. Postalytics has grown rapidly with no VC investment, and today is scaling in the US and Canada, with aspirations to expand into Europe. During the podcast, the pair cover 1) Dennis’ lessons on building VC-backed and self-financed businesses, 2) what PLG (Product-led growth) means, 3) why every business needs to learn a little bit about PLG, and 4) Postalytics’ proposition and roadmap to success. KEY TAKEAWAYS I grew up on a farm where my family and I worked very hard and were entrepreneurial in trying to make extra money. I’d reach out to neighbors and community members to offer my services and help with whatever needed to be done. Some of those lessons apply today, such as... not being afraid to knock on someone's door and tell them what you're doing and how you can help them. Postalytics is a direct mail automation software tool designed to solve three big problems with the direct mail marketing workflow. This legacy marketing channel has been around for many years and remains very useful and successful, but it hasn't received much technological investment. We've taken some of the best practices from digital marketing and combined them into a software tool that enables marketers to deploy direct mail campaigns in minutes rather than weeks. We connect direct mail – a physical channel where a printed piece of paper is sent through the postal service – to the marketing tech stack (CRM, CDP), which drives and accumulates knowledge of what happens in a direct mail marketing campaign through Postalytics. Similar to how all digital marketing channels are driven from central locations. We've created a method of assigning a unique QR code to each recipient of a piece of mail. The opportunity is to use that physical piece of paper that offers you something while holding it, and drive them to your website through the QR code, which everybody is comfortable with now. BEST MOMENTS ‘Each time you participate in the design and launch of a startup, there's always tremendous learning you can take away from that experience.’ ‘One of the challenges with any offline marketing channel is measuring what is successful and who is/isn't responding. We've created some proprietary methods of measuring both the delivery of the mail and who’s responding and where they are going on your website.’ ‘It's impossible for the QR codes to be manipulated by a third party because each one is unique and fully encrypted.’ ‘The cost of creating a highly scalable, high-performance platform in the cloud has plummeted. You can do so without spending a huge amount of money. Our business model allows us to capture customers without a tremendous capital outlay. We didn't need to raise much money to get this business off the ground. Once the business got going, it became self-sustaining.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Denis Kelly is CEO of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results, and connects it to CRM/Marketing Automation. Postalytics evolved from Boingnet, a software tool used by direct mail service providers and agencies to create landing pages and email campaigns that complement personalized direct mail. I was a co-owner of Wireless City, a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores based in Florida, Massachusetts, and Georgia. The company was acquired by Go Wireless in October 2011. Before Wireless City, I was CEO at Adesso Systems, an enterprise mobility software company. Previously, I was the CEO and Co-Founder of Adjoin Solutions, Inc., an early leader in the Web Services Management market. Adjoin was acquired by Computer Associates in July 2003. Before founding Adjoin, I was VP of Web Services at Palm (PALM), leading the Palm.net wireless business, the MyPalm web and mobile portals, and other Palm web properties. Previously, I was COO & Co-Founder of AnyDay.com (sold to Palm) and headed sales at Achieve Healthcare, the largest provider of enterprise software and services to the post-acute healthcare industry. And COO at Genesis Business Systems (sold to Achieve). Dennis holds a BA in economics from Colgate University. I build companies, typically in the technology space. My role typically spans product development, sales, marketing, finance, and HR. I started life as a sales guy, spent time building products and running data centers, have been CEO of venture-backed startups, and have built self-financed businesses. ABOUT POSTALYTICS With automated direct mail marketing,

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to James Marshall, managing director of Spinning Fox, a product-led design agency focused on helping large and small businesses solve problems more creatively. James has 11 years of delivery experience and a proven ability to manage super large global accounts, having worked for companies including HSBC, Nike, Unilever, PepsiCo, Adidas, Dyson, Samsung, Barclays, and Ford. He is passionate about creating tech and operational solutions to solve business and consumer problems and drive opportunities much faster than traditional approaches. On the podcast, the pair discuss: 1) James’ journey into the design thinking and user experience world, 2) why operational efficiency is so hot right now, 3) the power of taking an outside-in perspective, and 4) good problem solving requires us all to take calculated risks. KEY TAKEAWAYS I wasn't that good at school; it didn't suit me very well, but things clicked when I went to university to study graphic design. I worked in my early career as a designer, but I had ambitions to own my own company and quickly spotted that I needed to develop more business skills. I moved to London to work in digital agencies and took a sideways step into programme leadership, where I worked with incredible clients. That's where I found I was passionate about delivering digital product solutions. Spinning Fox was created after we witnessed digital product teams trying to deliver digital products and platforms and failing, which was quite common, and through those failures, we learned. We wanted to build a company to create products and use our learnings to solve problems and develop solutions for clients. Underlying that is a love for design and tech and using it to solve problems. At a high level, the approach we try to take is firstly around discovery, immersing ourselves in our client's world. We can fast-track that process by doing some mini-workshops, meeting with stakeholders, and meeting the user, ideally, to understand the opportunity as quickly as possible and then defining things, identifying the user’s needs, pain points, and starting to work out the solution. Then we move into rapid prototyping and a cycle of testing and iteration, getting user feedback as quickly as possible before moving into implementation. We have full end-to-end delivery capabilities with our team of engineers, and QA is baked into our process. We've had instances where the best solution for the client is something we can't do, but we'll work with them as a partner and find a third party to help deliver it. We're not afraid to say that. We won’t always engineer things to force them into the areas where we have significant expertise and prior knowledge. It’s about being honest and transparent with a client. BEST MOMENTS ‘I learned early that if I wanted something, I had to work for it.’ 'Spinning Fox is a collective of technologists, innovators, strategists, and designers, all with one shared passion: Solving problems. That's how we deliver value to our clients.’ ‘Everything we do puts the customer at the heart of everything throughout the process to validate that we're on the right track.’ ‘There's no time to stand still as a digital product agency. If you do, then you’ll become a dinosaur in five minutes. You have to be very aware of what's happening in the future. Being able to adapt your business model quite quickly is key.’ ABOUT THE GUEST James Marshall is a delivery specialist passionate about creating tech and operational solutions to business and consumer problems or opportunities. He is motivated by working in an environment with like-minded, multidisciplinary teams. With 11 years of delivery experience, James has a proven ability to manage projects with values over £1m for global accounts, including HSBC, Nike, Unilever, PepsiCo, Adidas, Dyson, Samsung, Barclays, and Ford. Programme management of projects including product and service design, experiential, interactive retail, digital within visitor attractions, large-scale web/app builds, end-to-end customer experience strategy, and business transformation. Experience implementing process and operational improvements and training teams to run projects using Agile delivery techniques. Fully certified ScrumMaster and DSDM AgilePM with strong and agile experience. Strong client servicing skills through working as the main client contact across many projects and accounts. Strategic thinker and problem solver with the ability to use knowledge and experience to generate new business opportunities and deliver against client goals for programmes of work. Email: [email protected] ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Guillaume Bonnissent, CEO and co-founder of Quotech, a data provider and technology platform that aims to give access to the very best data to insurance practitioners - from executive decision-makers, brokers, underwriters, actuaries, and even data scientists. Guillaume has 20 years of insurance experience as both an underwriter and a senior executive. Throughout his career, Guillaume encountered one constant issue: the poor quality of data available to decision-makers at all levels, mainly due to legacy constraints. During the podcast, Sabine and Guillaume cover: 1) leveraging 13 years of underwriting expertise to build Quotech, 2) delivering underwriting excellence in the 21st century, 3) growing and scaling Quotech, and finally 4) Guillaume’s roadmap to success. KEY TAKEAWAYS Insurance companies must become better underwriters to remain competitive in the marketplace. Underwriting excellence is essential for an insurer to understand, price, and manage a customer's risk to minimise losses from potential insurance claims. Achieving this balance between insurer profitability and adequate protection for the insured is becoming increasingly difficult due to the complexity of engagements spreading across the insurance market. Our brokers provide clients with quick, insightful risk management advice while helping them complete their application forms. Our underwriters have access to better, richer, and more consistent data and analysis to apply their underwriting judgment. Our actuaries and underwriting managers analyse and review the underwriting judgement, along with all the data and analyses reviewed by the underwriter. Our process includes automated collection and analysis of each business class's most relevant data points, a complete audit trail of the data and decisions made against it, and management of the different authority levels, risk appetites, and rating models. Underwriting excellence in insurance is the process of assessing, pricing, and managing a customer's risk to achieve an optimal balance between the insurer's profitability and the insured's adequate level of protection. The goal is to deliver a product that meets the expectations and needs of both parties while mitigating any potential losses from an insurance claim. BEST MOMENTS ‘Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Digital Insurance Platform, estimated at $102.2 billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of $169.2bn by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 9% over the analysis period.’ ‘Insurance companies must become better underwriters to remain competitive.’ ‘Achieving the balance between profitability for the insurer and adequate protection for the insured is becoming increasingly difficult due to the complexity of the insurance market.’ ‘Underwriting excellence involves multiple steps, such as analysing customer data and risk factors, assessing potential losses, and deciding on a fair price for coverage. Experienced underwriters must be able to review relevant information efficiently and accurately make sound decisions about each risk. Building strong relationships with customers is also important.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Guillaume has 20 years of insurance experience as both an underwriter and senior executive. Throughout his career, Guillaume encountered one constant issue: the poor quality of data available to decision-makers at all levels, mainly due to legacy systems. I've held various positions in Underwriting and Operations, both in the Lloyd's and Company markets, and have underwritten other lines of business, including Credit Risk Insurance and Property Reinsurance. I am very interested in Data Science with proficiency in R and Artificial Intelligence. ABOUT QUOTECH Quotech is a data provider and technology platform that aims to give access to the best data to all insurance industry practitioners - from brokers, underwriters, actuaries, and data scientists to claims adjusters and business developers, all the way up to the Board of Directors. Quotech wants to help everyone in the insurance distribution chain to make better decisions based on accurate, material, and relevant information. Quotech creates beneficial insurance technology applications, making data-fuelled processes dramatically more efficient for commercial underwriters and brokers. Our founder, Guillaume, is our difference. We're also led by an experienced syndicate builder and MGA underwriter who's also a programmer. His first-hand understanding of re/insurance processes allows Quotech to deliver practical, efficient solutions that enhance and streamline workflows. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sara Simeone, CEO and Co-Founder of Niftyz (formerly Digital Oracles), as well as of her recent initiative, the NoCodeLab, and Co-Chair of Start-up Working Group, Crypto Valley. Sara is a strategist with a commercial mind. She was one of the first to publish a paper in 2018 on how machine learning and blockchain will impact the future of digital marketing. Sara worked with a portfolio of leading global accelerators, incubators, and VC professionals to tackle company maturity and co-develop programmes that both nurture potential and offer innovative capabilities to early-stage ventures. During the course of their discussions, both ladies discussed 1) the Metaverse, NFTs, and Web 3.0, 3) why Sara launched and developed NFTs, 3) where the market for NFTs is going, and 4) what the investment challenges and opportunities are to deliver for the immersive internet in the right way. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been at the forefront of new technologies and developments on the web since the beginning of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. That’s what brought me to where we are today. I researched how machine learning and blockchain will impact the future of data, and in 2017, I got in touch with the Crypto Valley Environment and began building a network in Italy and the UK. Web 2.0, the world we live in now, is dominated by platforms we use to share content and information online. Sometimes, unbeknownst to us, our information is sold online. It’s a business model that Facebook (Meta), Twitter, and many other publishers use to generate revenue. Web 3.0 is a container of new terminology. We’re looking at it as a decentralized web where we decide how our information is used and who we share it with, though there are still significant technical limitations and a significant knowledge gap. Metaverse and NFTs are closely connected. Niftyz sees NFTs as keys that unlock specific content stored either on-chain or off-chain, revealing a wealth of information, data, tools, features, badges, and exciting new things in the metaverse. If we don’t understand NFTs and how to use these new tools, it will be challenging to access the metaverse. We’ve been trained by the web and society to monetize the outputs we create. With Web 3.0 I see another angle, what I call ‘the input economy’ where I can start monetizing at every single step that goes into creating that output. From this perspective, we can see NFTs as empowering the monetization of this value-creation process. For instance, if my brand creates mock-ups of my fashion items, I could create an NFT version of each mock-up and ask my community to vote by purchasing the one they like best. This market research can be used in the future to create a physical item that people want. From here, AMAs with the designer, virtual fashion events for users only, etc. BEST MOMENTS ‘Niftyz is basically a platform that wants to enable businesses and brands of all sizes and industries that want to get into this new world of NFTs.’ ‘Everybody’s trying to get into the Metaverse, and brands are building teams with competencies around this, but it’s more of a PR/marketing play at the moment, whereas in the future, it will give some returns.’ ‘NFTs have a bad reputation. In every phase of the internet, cowboys are trying to get rich quickly. Now, NFTs have begun to be adopted by artists because they’ve found a way to get in touch with a different type of audience.’ ‘Web 3.0 is creating a new value for our know-how. That’s the ethos behind Niftyz, empowering people, businesses, and brands to monetize their know-how in a brand new way.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sara Simeone is CEO and Co-Founder of Niftyz (formerly Digital Oracles), the NoCodeLab, and Co-Chair of Start-up Working Group of the Crypto Valley. She is also a technology industry mentor, strategist, and growth management specialist with particular strengths in the optimization and commercial development of early-stage, rapid-development tech businesses. Her ability to predict commercial and technical challenges far ahead of critical milestones is proven. As a respected strategist, she works with a portfolio of leading global Accelerators, Incubators, and VC professionals, tracking companies’ progress and maturity and co-developing programs that both nurture potential and offer 360-degree support to innovative early-stage ventures. With an ability to decipher complex business concepts and technologies, she creates data and KPI-based go-to-market strategies that really work. Practical experience includes managing and mentoring senior teams, negotiating multi-million-pound contracts, and guiding companies to achieve maximum results without compromising team morale and P&L management. In 2018, Sara Simeone published her master's thesis on how machine learning and blockchain will impact the future of digital marketing. She was one of the first marketers in the world to publish a piece on the topic. This

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Dr. Avi Baruch, co-founder and COO of Previsico, and Jonathan Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Previsico. Previsico is a specialist in surface water flood forecasting, enabling people and organisations to minimise the impact of flooding. Flooding cost the global economy more than $82 billion in 2021, accounting for nearly a third of all losses from natural catastrophes, according to a 2022 study by the Swiss Re Institute. Estimates from Statista show that 29 million people were affected by Flooding in 2021. Flooding is the second-largest weather-related peril after droughts. During the course of the podcast, Avi, Jonathan, and Sabine discuss: 1) Flooding and the difference between natural hazards and man-made disasters, 2) Previsico’s four step-method to reduce flood risk, 3) build back better and why we ought to protect the small and medium-sized business from flooding, 4) protect, predict, prevent and 5) top tips to reduce the risk of flood. KEY TAKEAWAYS During my PhD, I realized academia wasn’t for me, but I saw so much potential in the technology we were building to monitor floodwater in real time and issue early warnings. I felt the only way to really get it to be used effectively on the ground was to spin out the company. We explored quite a few markets to find which would be best served by it, and that’s where I met Johnathan. To reduce flood risk, we recommend four main steps: Step 1 – Understand your risk. There are a lot of really good risk-monitoring products already out there on the market. Step 2 – Invest in the right risk measures, such as flood defences or non-return valves. Step 3 – Have a flood action plan: know what to do when you’re expecting a flood, move stock, turn off electricity, and identify who’s responsible for the response. Step 4 – Use an early warning system. This is the final part of the jigsaw when building flood resistance. If you take all those steps, you can substantially reduce the risk and hopefully prevent a disaster from ever occurring. Resilience measures are often really simple things, like turning off the gas, electricity, and water. That alone can save a huge amount. Moving your car to a safer place is really simple stuff that makes a huge difference. People in communities like Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, for example, where back in 2015 they were closed down for months after a flood, are not reopening after three days; it’s a massive change because they understand what to do. Other communities that are not used to floods are more challenging because you’ve got to know what to do with the warning you’ve been given. COP26 made a big play around the fact that the UK government cannot defend the country against floods, the country has to learn to adapt to floods, and adaptation means starting to take responsibility for flood plans and resilience measures. That’s being backed up by the insurance industry making really important moves in terms of ‘build back better’, where a property has been hit by flood, that homeowner will be given up to £10,000 additional funding by a number of insurers to help them put in flood resilience measures to protect against flood going forward. BEST MOMENTS ‘Flood risk is rising, there’s more extreme weather, the weather is more volatile, climate change is causing heavier downpours – particularly in the summer – and longer, wetter winters.’ ‘There’s no such thing as a natural disaster. There are natural hazards and human disasters. If you know where the hazard is going to be and you are able to prepare for it effectively, it doesn’t need to be a disaster.’ ‘If people are used to having to cope with floods, they tend to know what to do. Our solution is a great value-add that we can bring to that situation.’ ‘We shouldn’t be building new developments on floodplains, especially when we haven’t fully addressed the impact that flooding will have on those properties.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Avi Baruch Jonathan Jackson ABOUT PREVISICO Previsico is a surface water flood forecasting specialist enabling people and organisations to minimise the impact of flooding. Backed by Foresight Group and underpinned by two decades of research at Loughborough University, Previsico’s world-leading solution is used by insurers, businesses, and the government to reduce losses. Our mission is to be the leading global provider of cutting-edge flood prediction that saves lives and livelihoods while significantly reducing the cost of flooding. Having launched in January 2019, we have a growing team of ~25 people with offices in Loughborough and London. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for as

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Jeff Williams, former Managing Director for Kayrros USA, a technology-focused earth observation analytics company using unconventional geospatial data to bring new insights to the world’s biggest industries, including energy, commodity, and insurance. Jeff has an incredible background in top-5 consultancy and M&A, acquired in the energy sector. He uses these skills every day as he deep dives into the challenge posed by methane's impact on environmental change. During the course of our conversation, the pair discussed: 1) Kayrros as a series C scaleup focused on delivering solutions using unconventional geospatial data, 2) Kayrros - Off the shelf platform… with white box data analytics and scoring mechanisms to meet the need of today’s underwriters and regulators, and 3) Kayrros, the long-term geospatial partner for the insurance sector looking at solving wildfire and other connected catastrophic events. KEY TAKEAWAYS I got my start, like many Texans who want to get into technology, I started working for a large consulting company at the tip of the spear of energy tech. There, I started working with large energy companies on data and realized that all their data is spatially related. They have assets all over the country, a sensor network that they weren’t leveraging, but more importantly, we were solving problems that were facing challenges of where to go and where not to go. I then started working with geospatial startups and realized there’s a lot of data out there that companies aren’t leveraging effectively. Six months ago, I started working at Kayrros, where they’ve generated real profits in the commodities and energy markets. I fundamentally believe I can leverage the foundation they built to work with the insurance industry and expand it from the commodities and energy industry into insurance. We’ve built our insights to include asset monitoring for energy companies to track climate data and detect emissions. We’ve evolved from just an insights company to a climate data company. We see the cause of methane emissions, and now we want to start tracking the effects, which include wildfires and floods, and the industries that are really going to be affected by those issues are insurance and banking, which is why we’re really starting to focus on those as the following industries to work with. We track pre-risk, we have a risk score, and we’re using several different geospatial datasets – weather and landslide risk. We also provide live monitoring, using satellite data to detect fires with rapid updates we can share with our clients. Also, post-fire, we provide a damage assessment. What we’re focussing on is not one specific thing. We’re affecting several parts of the insurance company, including underwriting, customer communication, and claims. A challenge we see with geospatial data is insufficient refreshes, poor granularity, and a lack of transparency. The lack of transparency has really hurt the geospatial industry over the past couple of years. We don’t view ourselves as a black-box solution. Many of our potential customers just get handed a solution by other companies. What we want to do is work with our customers and provide a white-box solution where they know exactly what all the data inputs are, and we do that together. BEST MOMENTS ‘Companies like Kayrros really want to provide the right insights, and geospatial data really provides those insights for them.’ ‘Kayrros got its name using satellite data to detect global crude tank levels. We used radar to detect how much crude oil was in tanks.’ ‘Track climate data using satellites, drones, AI, and cell phone data.’ ‘We’re fighting the geospatial fatigue in industries. We’re doing that by positioning Kayrros as a true geospatial partner, not a vendor.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Jeff Williams is the Managing Director of Sales & Business Development for Kayrros, where he is responsible for driving the Kayrros North American growth strategy. Jeff's roots run deep in Houston, as demonstrated by his love for the Astros. Last but not least, his greatest accomplishment is his family, which includes his wife, Lucy, and their two kids, Jake and Lucy Williams. ABOUT KAYRROS: Kayrros is a technology-focused earth observation analytics firm using unconventional data to bring new insights to the world’s biggest industries. By harnessing the power of satellite imagery, natural language processing, machine learning, and advanced mathematics, the team at Kayrros delivers actionable intelligence on virtually any asset worldwide, in near real-time, to support better decision-making. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Federico Spagnoli, at the time President and Head of Emerging Markets Ecosystems for Prudential Financial LATAM, now Vice President of International Total Wellness Solutions. Federico is well known for his work launching Vitality in South America and providing health services to over 1.5 million South Americans, who can today download an App from their mobile device to get access to a multitude of health services. During this podcast, Sabine and Federico evaluate 1) Federico’s vision about enhancing people’s physical, mental, and financial wellness, 2) where the world of health insurance is going regarding protection and prevention, 3) relevant strategic distribution approaches by augmenting the broker channel, and 3) tips for those interested in monetization models. KEY TAKEAWAYS I joined Prudential 6 years ago doing an executive program with SAID within Oxford University focusing on disruption and innovation. Part of the theme of my paper was related to disruption in the insurance industry because we haven’t seen this in the industry in many years. When I started focusing on the critical driver affecting our customers. I realized there were a lot of opportunities there for us to start thinking very differently about how we approach business today. These past six years have been the first time I’ve worked in the life insurance industry. I was asked why life and health insurance companies aren’t doing more to prevent conditions and situations that eventually will become a claim, like high cholesterol, which – in some instances – include a pill that can reduce mortality rates by 50%. That led me to look at the aging population, which, along with global warming, is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing as a society. We need to look at the ability to retire comfortably and the ability to afford rising healthcare costs. This made me think about a lot of new technologies and data capabilities that are coming to market that life insurers could use to start preventing, anticipating, and mitigating bad conditions. Mortality risk is not top of mind for customers because today, we live longer. The problem we face today concerns aging populations and how to reduce the risk of being unhealthy through behavior change. Physical, mental, and financial wellness is the ability to understand your emotions around money and develop healthy feelings and a personal literacy around money and wellness. Physical, mental, and financial wellness topics also encompass the tools and strategies that help you feel secure and in control of your personal life. The insurer can engage directly with the customer through the SuperApp, where behavioral economics and gamification allow for the insurer to influence the customer’s behavior by providing annual physical checks and rewards through coins, integrated into a marketplace with choices for rewards, and continuously bringing fresh and exciting content to the viewer. BEST MOMENTS ‘If you follow a customer-centric approach, you can't view customers with one lens. Not being able to afford healthcare services could result in mental health issues because one has anxieties, which also affect one's physical health -- all generated by limited financial means. We have to look at them all together and provide a single integrated solution.’ ‘We’re now shifting from life insurance protection to lifetime protection.’ ‘New generations are thinking more about global warming, social impact, financial inclusion, and a more balanced lifestyle. In insurance, we are already connecting with these customer groups over a long period of time because of the nature of the insurance that we sell. We can start introducing several solutions as part of a platform that can address and be much more relevant to our customer’s needs and behaviors and influence them.’ ‘Customers that are using the Prudential platform provide a Net Promoter score that is twice higher than those customers that don’t use the platform. The highest level of satisfaction has a direct impact on renewal rates, and platinum customers show higher life expectancy and lower claims ratios.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Federico Spagnoli is passionate about Ecosystem/Strategy and Innovation. General and Life Insurance professional with international experience. Expertise in re-underwriting insurance portfolios, strategic planning, M&A, and business development. Over six years in Prudential Financial. PII Regional President of Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Peru (through the JV with ILC/Habitat AFP). Direct responsibility for Prudential Seguros Argentina and Prudential Seguros México. Responsible for managing the PII's relationship with AFP Habitat and acting as Europe - Latin America head of strategic business development. Member of the Board of Directors of Prudential Seguros Mexico and AFP Habitat About Prudential Financial: Prudential Financial (NYSE:PRU) was founded on the belief that

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Alexis Cierra Vaughn, the Senior Director of Agency Marketing at Cowbell and the producer and host of the Cowbell Factor, a podcast ranked at the top of its category across several key international markets. Alexis is an outstanding professional and mum, with a passion for business and for enabling the success of others. Alexis has been in the insurance sector for 13 years and has built a strong expertise in explaining, in simple terms, what Cyber security means AND why one needs to protect oneself against cyber risk. During the course of the podcast, they discuss three main topics: 1) Alexis has been in insurance for 13 years. SO Let’s discover a millennial’s path into insurance, 2) Cowbell's journey to becoming a cyber security risk prevention leader, 3) How the product works and why it is essential to educate the user and... 4) the Cowbell Factor! KEY TAKEAWAYS I started my 13-year career in insurance as an agent, and within my first three years, I made a significant impact by being great at relationship-building. My background was in retail sales. I was asked to get into the insurance industry several times, but I thought it would be boring. I took a leap of faith and studied for a license to see if it interested me… I immediately fell in love with it. It was perfect for me. I then thought: “How do I help other single moms do this?” I didn’t want to keep all the diamonds and jewels to myself. I wanted to ensure I shared the wealth. So, I went independent and started my own agency with 26 single moms, teaching them everything there is to know about success in the insurance industry. I focus on creative approaches and ways to get the message out about the importance of cyber insurance, specifically to the small-and-medium-sized business market – anyone from $0 to $1 billion in revenue. Cyber includes phishing emails, phishing text messages, and how people use QR codes and swap them. In a post-pandemic world, we are all connected to the internet in some type of way. We’re literally in an interconnected environment where we’re always on our phones, iPads, laptops and moving so quickly that we’ll miss tiny things like one letter change in the domain – for example, websites with .co instead of .com. That’s so important. Your first line of defense is always your employees. You want to make sure you have multi-factor authentication in place. It might take an extra 5 minutes to log in, but I’m telling you, it’s so much better to spend that extra 5 minutes rather than fork out $5 million because you’re a victim of a ransomware attack. BEST MOMENTS ‘I took a networking approach, and within the first two years of having my agency, I grew my business from 25 to 1,165 clients off pure networking and building relationships in the community.’ ‘I break everything all the way down and make such a complex product topic, like cyber insurance, become digestible for agents, brokers, and policyholders.’ ‘I believe that the direction cyber insurance is going in should be the life insurance for a small business. If they don’t have cyber insurance and they are a victim of a cyber attack, it could put them out of business.’ ‘As a millennial, our biggest thing is we want to make an impact on our community and globally. We’re constant learners, and the insurance industry really creates a space where there’s always something new on the horizon, every product is ever-changing, and the cyber landscape changes on a daily, if not hourly, basis.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Alexis is a 13-year Award-Winning Insurance Expert and Senior Director of Agency Marketing at leading InsurTech Cowbell, where she oversees all agency engagement efforts for 18,000 producers appointed with Cowbell. Alexis is also the Host & Producer of "The Cowbell Factors" Podcast she created to bridge the gap between the Cybersecurity and Cyber Insurance industries. The show is ranked #28 in the US, #16 in India, #35 in the UK, #20 in Israel, and #100 in Australia on Apple Podcast Business News. The show is now available on iHeartRadio for national distribution after only five months on air and can be found on Spotify and all other streaming platforms. She is also a highly sought-after Cyber Educator in the agency community. Cowbell is a pioneer of Adaptive Cyber Insurance, a leader in providing coverage for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that adapts to today’s and tomorrow’s threats and provides advanced warning of cyber risk exposures. Alexis was recently named by "Insurance Business America" as one of the top 85 trailblazing Elite Women in Insurance for 2022 and, in 2022, as a top "Influencer" on the "Top 100 Insurance Innovators" list. Alexis has over 16 years of experience spearheading sales, fundraising, recruiting, and marketing for companies in the midst of transition uplifts. Alexis has a very diverse background in Insurance, Cloud-based Technology, Benefits & Human Resource Cons

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Xavier Gomez, a Fintech Thought Leader and specialist in Investment Banking and Wealth Management with solid expertise in Fintech, Digital Assets, and Private Equity. Xavier writes and speaks about emerging trends in our digital economy, with a sharp lens on what is disrupting finance: financial inclusion and regtech. Xavier is also the co-chief editor of Invyo Insights, a Global Fintech Intelligence platform powered by Invyo. Xavier and his team partner with the best experts and entrepreneurs in the region to cover the latest trends across Digital Banking, Payments, InsurTech, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Financial Inclusion, and Financial Literacy. Over the course of their discussion, the pair dives into the Digital Economy, FinTech, and WealthTech trends that affect the world of finance today and in the future. KEY TAKEAWAYS I started my career as an investment banker in equity capital, moving between top management positions and trading algorithmic and self-derivatives. I then moved into wealth management, so I have a good understanding of the banking and finance sector, particularly in digitalization. Invyo is a data-driven startup that uses machine learning to help private equity firms and VCs to take investment opportunities to compare the data of the different kinds of investments they can do, and also to detect what is wrong in terms of competition. We provide a solution for everyone, from VCs, principals, and partners, to be driven and empowered by the data, so they don’t waste time collecting the data themselves, as they have all the elements possible. We have had so many opportunities in the last five years with the explosion of startups, business models, etc. It’s a lot of work for investment actors – especially as they’re all a little bit old-fashioned – they invest in technology. Still, they don’t apply the technology to enable it to be augmented by data, as investors and private equity actors do. Being an influencer, or the term "influencing," doesn’t matter. Why? I started by following others who were all very kind to me, gave me advice, and pushed me to publish more. I just want to share my insights and knowledge to educate people about financial literacy. By chance, a lot of people like what I publish. AI will be an up trend for the next ten years. With this kind of upward trend, it is clearly a big top trend for the coming years. AI will also augment nearly every job across industries. It will be used to manage and automate the complex inventory management processes that happen behind the scenes. It’s impressive in terms of customer experience because AI/machine learning can improve their experiences, and more or less, with FinTech solutions, you can have a priceless experience. BEST MOMENTS ‘We use a machine learning element to adapt solutions to the investment cases. Each is a little bit different. The philosophies of the two partners will differ. This is the beauty of machine learning with data.’ ‘I spent many years in London, and I know the French accent is very successful with women 😊 !!’ ‘Artificial intelligence will become real in organizations and enable any business to leverage its power to create more intelligent products and services. We saw this recently with the birth of OpenAI. This is the start. I didn’t expect it to come so far so early.’ ‘The metaverse is a concrete application in the GameFi (gaming finance) industry, where we see a lot of big developments. It's a $300 billion market with a lot of payment activity. I don’t care for the term “metaverse,” but it’s become a shorthand for a more immersive internet. It’s expected to add $5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and we will see by the end of 2023 an indication of what kind of direction the metaverse will take for the next decade.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Xavier Gomez is a Fintech Thought Leader and specialist in Investment Banking and Wealth Management with solid expertise in Fintech, Digital Assets, and Private Equity. Xavier writes and speaks about emerging trends in our digital economy, with a sharp lens on what is disrupting finance: financial inclusion and regtech. Xavier is also the co-chief editor of Invyo Insights, a Global Fintech Intelligence platform powered by Invyo. Xavier and his team partner with the best experts and entrepreneurs in the region to cover the latest trends across Digital Banking, Payments, InsurTech, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Financial Inclusion, and Financial Literacy. ABOUT INVYO INVYO is a leading technology solution provider specializing in data processing and analysis. Venture Capital looking for a new data-driven approach? Discover INVYO's newest solution designed for VC ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies f

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Meeri Savolainen, CEO and co-founder of Inzmo, a fast-growing European financial services provider that makes renting a home affordable for everyone. Inzmo is considered the fourth runner-up in creating a new standard for how people rent their homes. With more than 70,000 customers and over 400% growth in 2022, Inzmo has acquired recognition and investments from several insurers in Europe As an entrepreneur by trade, Meeri is passionate about breaking new ground to lead social change. She shares that the core innovation lies in understanding customer needs, struggles, and their values. "At Inzmo, we design our services around this purpose - this is what makes us authentic. We put the customer first.” During their discussion, they cover what makes Inzmo a leader in its category across Europe’s rental and cash deposit markets, Meeri’s interest in communication, relationships, and psychology, and Inzmo’s innovation journey across Europe… Opportunities and challenges, and Team Inzmo: What is next to scale? KEY TAKEAWAYS I was a corporate and tax lawyer for quite a few years at Ernst & Young, and I started thinking that I wanted to grow more, take more risks, and become an entrepreneur. When I began Inzmo with my co-founder, we wanted to create a digital disruption in the insurance industry because it was lagging behind in technology. As things progressed, we wanted to build a strong brand in the insurance sector. We wanted to mediate our own products. We didn’t just want to be an IT company or an enabler for insurance companies. Since 2016, we’ve become more consumer-focused. We’re driving innovation in the insurance industry by automating underwriting processes and, first and foremost, the customer experience. We believe future success for insurance companies and InsurTechs relies on customer success and experience. We understand that the majority of our customers are also vendors, and 80% of those customers are living paycheque to paycheque. This means they have a daily financial burden, and 40% of their income goes toward rent, utilities, etc. These are the people we want to help with our different financial and digital solutions. Insurance is a very male-dominated industry, though it is getting better. I’m proud to say that at Inzmo, 50% of the employees are women, and 60% of the C-level/ management staff are female. Being a woman gives us many more opportunities to stand out. It’s also good for PR – especially for a small company like Inzmo, which doesn’t have an unlimited budget – to gain visibility. It does, of course, have its downsides as well. Women struggle more to secure VC funding because they need to prove their success more than men do. After all, there’s still a strong bias, even though the data proves otherwise. BEST MOMENTS ‘We’re always trying to find our niche. We don’t want to be another traditional insurance company or fight with the bigger companies.’ 'Renting rather than home ownership is a growing trend globally because people want a flexible lifestyle. We want to be an enabler in this new lifestyle.’ ‘Inzmo means “insurance” and “mobile,” insurance that is always accessible – it’s instant, it’s always there, and very easy to follow.’ ‘We’ve been focused on the German market so that we could prove we’d done well in one very significant market, but in the next 12-24 months, we’re ready to expand to other European rental markets, the most interesting to us are Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Meeri, also known as Mrs InsurTech, is strongly driven by innovation, focusing on the development of new products, services, and processes in a forward-thinking world. She specialized in developing innovative, creative, and visionary products and services for the insurance sector. A serial entrepreneur with a passion for breaking new ground to lead social change, with management experience and the ability to lead and build high-performing teams. She is interested in communication and relationship psychology, and is currently also developing her knowledge of Strategic Intervention (also known as SI). SI is dedicated to extracting the most practical and effective forms of strategic action and communication from various disciplines: Ericksonian therapy, Human Needs Psychology, organizational psychology, neurolinguistics, psychology of influence, strategic studies, traditions of diplomacy and negotiation, and others. A practical method for acting strategically to get things done is to fulfill and elevate human needs. ABOUT INZMO Inzmo is a fast-growing financial services provider in Europe, making renting a home affordable for everyone. The team’s aim is to become #1 provider of zero-deposit solutions for EU renters. We believe the core innovation lies in understanding customer needs, struggles, and their values. Inzmo designs services around this purpose - this is what makes the team truly authentic. Inzmo pu

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL shares some timely insights from the team at IBM. One of these findings relates to one of IBM’s 2023 strategic themes and to IBM’s new partner program. KEY TAKEAWAYS Autonomous vehicles are expected to account for about 12% of car registrations, and global car sales of autonomous vehicles are expected to reach some 101 million units by 2030. Autonomous vehicles or companies that are working on self-driving technologies include perception, mapping, and localisation solutions, as well as cybersecurity risk prevention, testing, and fleet management solutions, are doing very well. The autonomous vehicle market raised over $51 billion across 500+ companies, meaning each company received an average of $102 million in funding. Many devices use embedded intelligent systems today, besides car functionalities, like Point-of-Sale terminals, smart TVs, smart metres, video surveillance equipment, traffic light controls, digital signs, and aviation controls. This means we need to understand how embedded intelligence systems operate and how they enable breakthroughs for established and new market players. For years, IBM Research and Centres of Excellence have invested in developing AI capabilities that are embedded in IBM software offerings. IBM's partnership strategy is combined into a single organisation, where all the pieces of the IBM Partner Ecosystem within the sales and distribution organisation operate. It is also consolidated under one single leadership and direction. IBM is making the same capabilities available to its IBMers and to its ecosystem of partners, providing them with a more straightforward path to create AI-powered solutions and access engagement materials to ensure that each ecosystem partner can create bulletproof propositions aligned with IBM’s high standards. BEST MOMENTS ‘Embedded intelligence 'is a term used for a system or program that can analyse and monitor their own operations and then adapt and optimise, consequently, in real-time, its routines with limited human intervention. They enable companies to get more innovative in the way they deploy and use technology, identify market opportunities, and target new markets.’ ‘The global embedded intelligence market is projected to reach a market value of $ 86 billion US dollars in 2032, increasing from $ 25.5 billion dollars in 2022 and expanding at a CAGR of 13% between 2022 and 2032.’ ‘Today, the lack of expertise and skills in Artificial Intelligence remains the biggest barrier to adopting advanced programming techniques by businesses, large and small, while limiting biases and ethical issues.’ ‘It is indeed crucial for data scientists, developers, sellers, and experts, among other types of users, to gain access to cutting-edge capabilities to learn new business development techniques and technological skills regardless of their level of expertise.’ ABOUT THE IBM PARTNER ECOSYSTEM PROGRAM: IBM has worked throughout 2022 to enhance its approach and systems to deliver a unique partner experience, giving partners access to the same capabilities available to IBMers. To find out more, use the two links provided below: Embeddable AI IBM PartnerWorld ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Elizabeth Lumley, an all-around FinTech expert who is currently the deputy Editor at The Banker, a company from the FT. Elizabeth received the State Street UK Press Award for Journalist of the Year in Technology and Digital Finance in 2022. For 20+ years, Elizabeth has been a global specialist commentator on regulations, risk, data, and technology in investment, retail, and global transaction banking. She is recognized internationally as one of the leading voices in FinTech and banking technology innovation, as well as a well-established global conference speaker and conference organizer. During this discussion, Sabine and Elizabeth dive into the trends affecting FinTech in the upcoming year. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been in this industry for about 28 years – kind of by accident. I wanted to be a journalist, specializing in politics. Still, most of what I’ve done in this space has been as a reporter or editor covering how banks and financial insurance firms use data and technology. Now, I’m deputy editor of The Banker magazine as part of the Financial Times. It’s been an exciting journey through this vast and varied industry of banking and financial services. I got on Twitter when it was first starting, and my voice became amplified. I’m full of opinions, and I can’t keep them silent, so I write blogs, do interviews with people, webcasts, and events, and I started posting on Twitter, and people really responded to that. Social media has been perfect for me and my career. This was also when smaller FinTech companies started emerging; it was a perfect storm. A lot of people are talking about where financial services are headed with the metaverse and Web 3.0, and how payments and services will be embedded in that world in the future. That’s an interesting conversation, but right now, it’s very innovative theatre-y, something to talk about on stage, and nothing is actually happening. What’s actually happening right now is that we’ve had so much growth over the years – not just in startups but in banks as well – there is a focus on efficiency, cost-cutting, saving money, and talent retention. It’s not a sexy topic to talk about, but I guarantee you it's what every bank is working on right now. Insurance is one of those sectors where the sexiest part of it is that you don’t know it’s there. We’ve had insurance embedded into things for a very long time, when you buy a car, for example. You only know it’s there when you need it. I think that having that service available to customers when they need it is harder to achieve than people realize. I think the idea of owning the customer so you can sell them more stuff is the mindset of a lot of people in the industry, instead of acknowledging the customer so you can serve them better, which I think would actually make them more profitable customers, actually, in the long run. But that’s not the mindset many people have. BEST MOMENTS ‘Pick your investors wisely.’ ‘Journalism has changed a lot in the past 30 years. I wanted to be a magazine editor, and I’m glad I didn’t go into that world because I probably wouldn’t have a job. You’ve got to pay for quality, which is why the FT and The Banker are behind paywalls.’ ‘Social media puts you in charge of what you’re putting out into the world and the narrative you’re putting out into the world.’ ‘To me, FinTech is any way of using technology to improve banking and other financial services.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Elizabeth Lumley is an all-around FinTech expert who is currently deputy editor at The Banker, a company from the FT. For 20+ years, she has been a global specialist commentator on services, regulations, risk, data, and technology in investment, retail, and global transaction banking Elizabeth is internationally recognised as one of the leading voices in FinTech and banking technology innovation, and is a well-established global conference speaker and organiser. Her expertise includes: technology installations and market data usage at global investment banks, retail banks, institutions, and exchanges, as well as the emerging FinTech ecosystem of new entrants and startups. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Steve Abel, a dedicated, results-oriented executive with a proven, hands-on track record and a superior ability to build highly effective teams that deliver success at all levels of an organization. When recording this podcast, Steve was at EPAM, which is one of the best-kept secrets, voted one of the world's leading and fastest-growing information technology companies. EPAM today leads the charge in global digital and physical transformation and digital platform engineering services. The company has over 61,000 employees across 6 continents and 50 countries. In this episode, Sabine and Steve cover three main topics: Changes in the way innovation is delivered today, repairing broken processes with the right engineering mindset, and the requirements for building the business of tomorrow. KEY TAKEAWAYS The way technology solves problems today is through point solutions to point solutions. This is a flawed approach to solving the technology problem and building highly effective business models. Imagine if there were tools that had 95% of what a business needs to operate. You would only buy items available as part of the packages. As an insurer, you would be able to gain benefits as you would need fewer specialists to determine whether to buy, build, or partner. Pull widgets that could be your integration engine. Could be cheaper than what is available, and you could rebuild in a bespoke, unique way. I was in a stable job at KPMG. When the pandemic hit, I worked on a project with no real choice but to deliver tech assets quickly. Then I decided to investigate and discovered EPAM. They loved my idea and then thought about new technology in new ways to solve the client’s problem with purpose. EPAM is multi-sectors, and I sit within the insurance business unit. How do startups grow? One option is to use cloud-based tools that make it easier to create reusable assets. This is a profound change in how people think about technology and business; cloud-based tooling, data mash-up, etc. We can unlock the power of these tools and bring them together as a unified landscape. Insurance carriers are struggling with geospatial data (for instance) because of their legacy systems and the way each carrier integrates data into its systems. Each carrier wants to know if they are getting unique information from you, but they don’t need the dashboard or data very often. They want to process an algorithm that gives them an answer. BEST MOMENTS ‘A lot of commercialized software is not fit for purpose. Still, businesses operate thousands of spreadsheets. This is not right for the employees and gives poor customer service.’ ‘I love to wake up and ensure that customers do every day what they do best with others.’ ‘If you have not thought of how to do so. Hire an expert to think through the problem in a new way for you. You will get to the optimum outcome faster and likely cheaper too.’ ‘Get the right tools and get the approach right. I can assure you, you will be impressed by them.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Steve Abel is a transformation executive with a dedicated, results-oriented executive, a proven hands-on track record, and superior ability to build highly effective teams to deliver success within all levels of an organisation. Specialties: Program Management, Insurance, Operations, Shared Services, Enabling Technologies (Oracle, SAP, Workday, PeopleSoft, HFM, etc.), Business Process Reengineering, Finance Leading Practices (e.g., Procure to Pay, Record to Report), Insurance products and data, actuarial platforms (AXIS, Prophet, MG-Alfa, PolySystems, etc.), digital enablement, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud solutions, business, and technical architecture. Steve worked with large companies such as Capco, EY, and KPMG, EPAM and today Oliver Wyman. EPAM: Since 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has leveraged its advanced software engineering heritage to become the foremost global digital transformation services provider – leading the industry in digital and physical product development and digital platform engineering services. Through its innovative strategy, integrated advisory, consulting, and design capabilities, and unique 'Engineering DNA,' EPAM's globally deployed hybrid teams help make the future real for clients and communities around the world by powering better enterprise, education, and health platforms that connect people, optimise experiences, and improve people's lives. In 2021, EPAM was added to the S&P 500 and included in the Forbes Global 2000 list. Selected by Newsweek as a 2021 and 2022 Most Loved Workplace, EPAM's global multi-disciplinary teams serve customers in more than 50 countries across six continents. As a recognized leader, EPAM is listed among the top 15 companies in Information Technology Services on the Fortune 1000 and has been ranked four times as the top IT services company on Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Compani

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yann Barbarroux, CEO and co-founder of OTONOMI, an InsurTech startup dedicated to mitigating supply chain risk. Yann shares insights into himself, his successes, and the recent USD $3.4 million fundraising round he and his team finalized during very uncertain times. KEY TAKEAWAYS Around 2003 – the onset of the internet bubble in the tech industry – I redirected myself toward financial services. I moved to the US and got a job on Wall Street in New York, and I never left. I’ve spent my entire career in the capital market, risk management, and technology at several financial institutions and brokerage firms. From 2013-2020, I joined CitiGroup in downtown Manhattan doing risk management for structured credits and emerging markets, but more interestingly, in 2017, with the ramp-up of the digital asset era that we encountered, I got involved with emerging tech, deep tech, and blockchain within Citi Ventures' innovation arm and I got incubated as a startup within their innovation lab. I’m not the earliest adopter of blockchain, but 5-6 years of experience in this space feels like decades compared to other industries. Transitioning into entrepreneurship, what became very visible is that a lot of the operations, pricing models, and pricing procedures and processes within financial services became very obsolete and very heavy-handed in terms of regulation, and there was a need for new, fresh products in the space. I was working on those items while I was in the innovation lab at Citigroup Ventures. While I was working there, I also came across deals in InsurTech and FinTech, which were very exciting for me. That’s where I came across the fascinating space of parametric insurance – the equivalent of financial derivatives or other binary products in financial markets, but in the insurance space. What we bring with OTONOMI is a binary event contract for the supply chain space. We fundraised in 2021 for our pre-seed or the first tranche of our seed round. This raise was pre-product, pre-revenue. This year, we expected to struggle tremendously given the market circumstances: rampant inflation, the political climate between Ukraine and Russia, and the East side of the globe. You would expect an early-stage startup to be struggling to raise funding, but our fundraising campaign turned out to be more productive this year, and we managed to close it in 3-4 months. £3.4million raised, and we’re very, very grateful for it. The starting point for us in 2021 was the rippling effect of the global supply chain breaking down. But for us, a few months beforehand, there were two events that were very critical and instrumental. The first was the snowstorm in Texas, a 1-in-100-year event with many climate and weather components that ripple down into transportation. That created such traumatic volatility in the market that it became clear that cargo players, freight, and logistics, while at the forefront of trying to operate as quickly as possible, were constrained by huge financial liabilities they couldn’t recoup under traditional insurance contracts. The second event was a few weeks later in the Suez Canal. Everybody saw it and talked about it. Again, the supply chain couldn’t function properly, and insurance and financial contracts weren't transparent enough to serve those players in a timely manner. What was interesting for us was not just the parametric aspects but also the binary delay of potential supply chain interruptions (which we cover) and the facilitation of operations and payments. BEST MOMENTS ‘I’m a nerd at heart but a financial engineer by trade.’ ‘The turning point for us was when we actually visited Austin, Texas, in person. We were in touch with several VC teams virtually, but the mere fact that we actually went to this conference, handshaking, having coffee, and having in-person chemistry actually created much more interest for our raise, and the VCs sent us a terms sheet two weeks after. This was a tremendous difference from the previous two years during the pandemic.’ ‘The Insurance sector wants to take the leap of faith now with several projects in the space, us included.’ ‘We believe that if we have the right infrastructure to collect premiums, manage collateral, and settle compensation payments within this very much ring-fenced and consistent infrastructure for digital payments, then essentially we can be creating very streamlined processes.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Yann Barbarroux is CEO and co-founder of OTONOMI, an InsurTech focused on transforming the transportation and cargo insurance industry. He was born and raised in Marseille (France), went to grad school (graduated with an MS in Computer Engineering) in Paris, found his first job on Wall Street back in 2003, and never left NY. He wants OTONOMI to become the one-stop shop for the operating layer of parametric insurance policies (data-activated insurance smart contracts), with applications

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast. Sabine talks to Paul Roetzer. Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. He is the author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence, The Marketing Performance Blueprint, and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and the creator of the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON). In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine and Paul discuss how Artificial Intelligence will evolve marketing practices. Drawing comparisons to how we use AI in our daily lives through social media and marketing. KEY MOMENTS 'What Does Paul Mean by Traditional Marketing Is All Human?' 'What Are the Obstacles to Artificial Intelligence Adoption' 'How Did the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute Come About?' 'Paul Talks About the Revolutionization of the Market Today.' 'What Trends Should One Look Out For In Artificial Intelligence Marketing Technology' 'How To Make Artificial Intelligence A Part Of Our Daily Lives.' 'What Is The Gap Between The Business School And Learning Artificial Intelligence' 'What The Next Generation Needs To Have to Lead Them To Success 10.' 'What Are The Metrics We Need To Look At In Artificial Intelligence Marketing?' 'Advantages and Disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence.' 'Five Steps To Implement Artificial Intelligence In The Marketing Environment' 'Tips on Tools To Use For Artificial Intelligence' 'Words Of Wisdom From Paul. ABOUT THE GUEST Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute. He is the author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence (Matt Holt Books, 2022), The Marketing Performance Blueprint (Wiley, 2014), and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley, 2012); and the creator of the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON). The Marketing Institute - https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Annap Derebail, IBM’s Global Insurance Industry CTO within IBM’s Global Business Services Unit, now in IBM's payment center. Annap’s focus has always been on delivering impactful business outcomes by re-imagining user experiences. Today, Annap provides trusted advice to drive revenue growth for IBM’s clients by leveraging architectural leadership to transform their businesses through technology innovation. In this conversation, they cover the future of insurance and its implications for operations, how technology is a key enabler of growth today, and how insurers can simplify operations to build resilient business models. KEY TAKEAWAYS There are many market forces disrupting traditional insurance models. Firstly, around customer expectations. Customers are increasingly looking towards an Amazon- or Google-like experience when dealing with their insurance. The implications for insurers include creating personalised offerings and providing high levels of service and responsiveness. There are two key advantages that incumbent insurers have over new entrants to the market. Certainly, new entrants are developing new business models and approaches to attracting and engaging customers. But I think the advantages for incumbents are their huge existing customer base – keeping a customer is six times easier than acquiring a new one. Secondly, by virtue of having been in business for so long, they are sitting on tons of data and have knowledge of customer transactions/interactions. That’s a rich oasis that can help them develop a better understanding of their customers and what they need. Insurers really need to reinvent how they think about risk and what sort of relationship they want with their customers. Reinventing that risk partnership and helping insurers with new risk experiences that offer personalised advice, and demonstrating a new risk partnership between the insurer and the customer. Being able to harvest the data can be done by taking a fresh look at historically operating processes in the enterprise, critical processes such as underwriting claims, but also all of the support processes like billing, customer support, policy maintenance, etc. Just by paying attention to driving intelligence into those processes using data, we’ve reduced customer churn by 15% by implementing a churn detection model. At the infrastructure level, I see many incumbent insurers still operating legacy IT systems and infrastructure. The immediate opportunity there is to migrate those onto a cloud-based platform. This brings inherent benefits, such as flexibility in scaling up and down in response to demand and market needs. You can access cloud-based services from anywhere in the world. BEST MOMENTS ‘The insurance industry needs to adapt and respond to new disruptors, and this response has to be driven by data and new technologies, and using them to gain a business advantage in the market.’ ‘Less than 10% of insurers have actually been able to meet what we call ‘the data dividend’, effective use of data in order to achieve competitive advantage because of a lack of knowledge of how to access data, how the data is siloed within the infrastructure of the business.’ ‘We can help drive a step change in the core productivity of incumbent insurers. About 60% of their costs go into legacy IT systems. Modernising by having multiple core systems in place and moving to a SaaS model reduces issues.’ ‘The typical underwriting or claims process tends to have heavy human involvement and requires a large number of steps in order to make decisions. The scope there is to effectively use the mountain of data that insurers are sitting on to present the right data to the right decision-makers at the right time – not just raw data, but insights drawn from it. – to improve the process and categorise incoming cases that can either be automated or need human intervention.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Annap Derebail has 20+ years of professional experience in systems and integration architecture, design, development, and management of complex industry solutions. In his current role, he works with insurance customers worldwide to create innovative solutions for business problems, leveraging microservices and API-driven architecture, distributed, multi-tier systems, application integration architecture, AI/ML, blockchain, IoT, cloud computing, and service-oriented architecture. In the last five years, he has worked with worldwide financial services clients to provide trusted advice on their digital transformation initiatives, while serving as the leader of the global IBM insurance industry architect community. His work with clients has spanned several application areas: Modernization architectures for insurance and banking, Blockchain applications in insurance, Enterprise architecture for aircraft systems health, Supply chain collaboration in automotive and retail, RFID-based track-and-trace solut

On this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Christie Downs Wood. A self-made entrepreneur and problem-solver who founded handdii with her co-founder, Kathryn Wood. After working as an executive in the construction industry, building deep experience and broad industry relationships, Christie saw an opportunity to use technology to improve how customers connect with contractors when making property insurance claims. This is how Handdii was born as a three-way digital platform that combines insurance, construction, and contractors, enabling contractors to easily connect, engage, and promote their businesses. KEY TAKEAWAYS I am a high-energy business leader who loves solving problems and creating exciting solutions that transform people's lives. After working as an executive in the construction industry, building deep experience and broad industry relationships, I saw an opportunity to use technology to improve how customers connect with contractors when making property insurance claims, making it quicker, faster, and cheaper for insurers, clients, and tradespeople. We’re just at the starting line; there’s so much opportunity ahead. I think the early innovation in our sector has been pretty straightforward. How do we buy faster, make things convenient, streamline processes, and save cost? Quite a lot of separate practical solutions. For example, right now, there are many inspection tools and solutions an insurance company would use – virtual inspections, drones, AI, and they might actually use various tools all at once. Our vision is to make small property claims amazing. The industry has a cumbersome process for property claims, involving multiple people and approvals, designed for large losses. This process is not designed to fast-track small claims, and, moreover, the major suppliers to the insurance industry would prefer not to handle them. So, my Co-Founder and I set out to change that! Handdii is a really practical solution to a common problem. Any Claims leader can see the opportunity in their portfolio to improve how small claims are managed. We’re really focused on our niche, and when we partner with an insurer, we make it easy to work with us. Our team has a solid property claims background, reflected in the product and program we have built. This makes it easy for the insurer to work with us because we speak their language and understand their challenges, while having the speed and the money to be an innovative partner, creating solutions for them. BEST MOMENTS ‘My experience also includes being Executive of Carlton Football Club as the General Manager of Business Development, introducing unique revenue streams, the creation of Carlton Respects program against family violence, and Blue Skies program supporting diversity and inclusion in the inaugural year of AFLW.’ ‘I think the future of innovation will become more and more integrated into our lives, activities, and systems. Bringing all of these different solutions together, then once that efficiency is achieved, we’ll look to bring innovation to achieve more purposeful outcomes around sustainability, inclusion, and prosperity.’ ‘COVID has made some things much easier and others more challenging. For example, onboarding contractors via video rather than in person has streamlined how quickly we have expanded our contractor network across multiple states this year. Whereas meeting new insurance companies is more challenging, we are certainly happy that the in-person conferences are kicking off again now.’ ‘When working with large enterprises, be patient, be persistent, be astute commercially – if you’re bringing great value, hold your line on your cost.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Christie (Downs) Wood: I am a high-energy business leader who loves solving problems and creating exciting solutions that transform people's lives and work. After working as an executive in the construction industry, building deep experience and broad industry relationships, I saw an opportunity to use technology to improve how customers connect with contractors when making property insurance claims, making it quicker, faster, and cheaper for insurers, clients, and tradespeople. I made the leap to entrepreneurship in 2018, starting Handdii with Kathryn Wood. Handdii is a three-way platform where contractors can easily connect, engage, and promote their businesses, insurers experience reduced cost, and customers find their property insurance repairs are easier and cheaper to organize with better results. My core career experience of 10 years was as group sales director and board member of the national construction company, Johns Lyng Group, ASX-listed as JLG. I played a lead role in the national expansion and exponential revenue growth of the group, from $12 million in 2004 to $350 million in 2015. During this experience, I saw firsthand the problems people had getting repairs done, often after stressful situations, and I met fantastic contractors who ran great businesse

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Mark McLaughlin, a respected figure in IBM and its insurance division, to discuss the future of customer experience within a fast-evolving world. Today he is leading AI, hybrid cloud, and risk innovation engagements with insurance CxOs worldwide for IBM. KEY TAKEAWAYS You must improve how you engage with your customers, whether through distribution channels (e.g., brokers or affinity partnerships) or directly. Your customers are demanding digital frictionless engagements and experiences. They are seeking transparency and optimal convenience in how they access insurance products and services. They also want transparency into how their data is being used. In the end, this is the way you earn customer trust. When data, intelligence, automation, and insights are combined, they augment decision-making among stakeholders but also require changes in skills, processes, technology, and culture. Think about the “reconfiguration” of the internal fabric of the enterprise to deliver the required personalized experiences. InsurTechs are doing well. Over $47 billion has been invested in InsurTechs. Over 30 have become unicorns, and more are expected to become unicorns in the years to come. Today, to realize such a vision and upgrade legacy systems and global delivery presence, IBM works with the top 100 carriers worldwide, bringing capabilities such as blockchain, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and cloud for flexibility and innovation, as well as industry expertise to deliver unique capabilities able to yield differentiated experiences. BEST MOMENT ‘To elevate customer experiences and achieve customer-centricity and unlock new growth opportunities, insurers must identify innovative opportunities internally and through external partnerships to reinvent the core of their business.’ ‘We are in the days of “Risk experiences”.’ ‘If insurers think about repackaging old format analog processes into digitised options, they are going to fail. Customers are asking for more. They want products and services aligned with their needs.’ ‘We know that insurers are better placed at focusing on “risk” (e.g., algorithmic underwriting) while InsurTechs are great at building unique customer experiences (e.g., Lemonade, Hippo, etc.).’ ABOUT THE GUEST Mark McLaughlin is leading AI, hybrid cloud, and risk innovation engagements with insurance CxOs worldwide for IBM. Mark’s teams analyse trends in insurance and technology, develop strategies for insurers, and build IBM insurance solutions to meet insurer needs. He also shares IBM’s point-of-view on insurance with business leaders, regulators, and conference audiences worldwide. Mark is a 25-year veteran of the insurance industry. He has previously led business units in insurance distribution and analytics, technology infrastructure, CRM, and insurance business process. Mark has personally led implementations in strategy, program management, analytics, data warehousing, expert systems, commercial claims, and underwriting for multiple top 20 US insurers. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to two renowned FinTech Influencers and respected voices in finance and insurance, Danielle Guzman – head of social media at Mercer who is an expert at activating employees and creating business impact on social media, and Theodora Lau - Founder at Unconventional Ventures, author, podcast host and public speaker who advises many startup ventures. KEY TAKEAWAYS Danielle - The future of work is something I’m passionate about, both personally and professionally, and the journey over the past years has been about reinventing myself and how to stay relevant in a world that is changing so radically. The pandemic has only accelerated that journey, not just for me but for everyone to be thinking about this a lot more, using social media channels to connect and make a difference. Theo – I spent the bulk of my career in telecom, not finance and banking, don’t hold that against me! What’s interesting is, when you look at high-tech, telecom, financial service industry, and FinTech and InsurTech startups, a lot of what we do inherently at the end of the day is about people. Technology is a means to an end and allows us to communicate and exchange ideas. As a broader society, we’re starting to realize that self-care isn't self-indulgence. The conversations around mental health and well-being are now becoming what they should be. Health is embedded in every aspect of our lives, but mental health and taking time to invest in our own well-being have always been secondary things. It’s critical that, now, through organizations and leaders, it becomes a very real, daily conversation at the table. I grew up in a generation where you had a career, and now we’re part of a generation where you’re having career experiences. There’s so much that needs to be done for that to become accessible to everyone; there doesn’t seem to be an answer to that right now, but organizations are trying to figure that out. That’s going to be a watershed moment for the future of work and one of the biggest changes that we will probably see in our lifetime and we’re at the beginning of that journey. At the crux of that is the concept of trust. BEST MOMENTS ‘I like to look at everything as not making big changes all at once, but how we can make small, incremental changes that have a compound return over time.’ ‘The past 18 months have shown that we might be in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat. We have been very aware of a lot of the challenges and inequalities that exist in our society, but I hope we take away the learning from recent months that there’s a lot we still need to do.’ ‘Longevity is a challenge, but it’s actually an opportunity. Since the early 1900s, we’ve all gained an extra 30 healthy years of life. Living longer allows us to try different things in our careers.’ ‘Are new solutions being created to mimic what we’ve always had in the past, or are they being created to support these new opportunities? Are there enough solutions out there to support small business owners and gig workers? I would say we need more.’ ABOUT THE GUEST As the VP of Social and Distributed Content at Mercer and now Marsh, Danielle uses data to assess the viability of risky campaigns and predict the future of digital content consumption. Since diving headfirst into insights-driven marketing and leadership, Danielle has seen data transform the careers of dozens of marketers—including her own. Theodora (Theo) Lau is a public speaker, writer, and startup advisor, whose work seeks to spark innovation to improve consumer financial well-being. As founder of Unconventional Ventures, she focuses on developing and growing an ecosystem of financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to better address the unmet needs of consumers (e.g., older adults and gig economy workers), with keen interests in women and minority founders. As part of her work, she regularly mentors and advises FinTech startups. She is recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Economy and Finance, No. 1 Women in Finance by Onalytica, and Top FinTech influencer by various publications, including Onalytica, Retail Banker International, and FinTech Finance. She co-hosts Rhetoriq, a podcast on longevity and fintech innovations, and runs a weekly blog on Irish Tech News. She is also a regular contributor to top industry events, publications, and podcasts, including Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, Money20/20, Finovate, RISE, American Banker, Breaking Banks, Financial Brand, Financial Revolutionist, Irish Tech News, Mercer, and INV Filter. She provides strategic advisory services to a broad set of corporations; she also advises startups and mentors entrepreneurs from different accelerators and incubators across the country. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusion – and frequently writes and speaks about the need for diversity across gender, ethnicity, age, education, and more. Her end goal is to

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Scott Gunther, General Partner at Firemark Ventures, the corporate venture capital fund of IAG, based in Australia. Scott has been at IAG for over 10 years and has been running the Venture fund for over 6 years. With strong expertise in marketing customer experience, among others, Scott wanted to bring something new to the group by opening his doors to the external world to ensure its resilience and relevance for the very long term. During this podcast, the pair discusses Scott’s path to CVC Land, and what IAG Firemark Ventures does to remain on top of its game. They also cover the topic of talent, talent, and talent, and what remote working means for Scott and his team. Finally, they discuss best practices for startups, scaleups, corporate innovators, and investors wanting to build their corporate venturing arm. KEY TAKEAWAYS Everything we hear, see, and experience in the startup world today is not new; it happened way back during the dot-com boom. That’s where I started, and I couldn’t ask for a more impressive grounding, working for one of Australia’s largest companies and trying to set something up – 90-day sprints to try to launch businesses, products, and services, and thinking about the World Wide Web before it became the World Wide Web, eCommerce, and the like. At the time, as a young man coming out of university, I probably had no idea what the future held for me. A fundamental part of why we do what we do is to bring the outside world into our own enterprise and transform how we deliver insurance. That means every day is different because you’re starting to look at global macro trends, different markets to see what’s working, and different parts of the customer journey. We’re working today with business-to-consumer businesses, Agritech, or AI businesses; there are no two days that are the same. The more that you can experience, whether it’s industry or role, function or geography, it really sets you apart from the rest to have this flexibility. Successful CVCs across the world are made up of teams that have really diverse skill sets. CVCs succeed or fail depending on their recognition that they’re part of something bigger and that the corporate HQ sets the primary direction and purpose. At IAG our purpose is to make your world a safer place, we’re there to insure customers, their assets, businesses, livelihoods, and a whole heap of other different risks. But also, if an incident or a claim happened, to be there to help them to recover. Working for an organization that is very purpose-driven gives you something to work backward from and something to aim for, like the North Star. Any CVC has to make sure that they’re not just a little adjunct of a corporation; they’re a really integral part of the business, and as a consequence, you really have to know your business inside and out. When we put our investment thesis together, we had to get razor-sharp on the things that you can and can’t do. You might want to invest in every market, look at startups at different stages, and invest different amounts. When you first get going you need to give yourself guardrails, like not investing in series c stage scaleups for instance. For instance, our CVC does not lead investment rounds. We do not invest in certain markets. As we evolve, we will adjust, refine, and expand our investment thesis, which will improve over time. BEST MOMENTS ‘I’ve always been a believer in breadth and depth of experiences, and my journey took me to different parts of the business world, but also into very relevant adjacent verticals too.’ ‘Insurance is something you fall into, and if you fall into it, you stay there.’ ‘Those CVCs who are really intrinsically in tune with understanding changing business models, but also the relationships across businesses and our industry, are the ones that are probably more successful.’ ‘Innovation is something that anyone in an organization should aspire to do. If you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still, and if you’re standing still, realistically, you’re going backward.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Scott Gunther is a corporate venture capitalist (CVC) & startup enthusiast. Scott partners with business leaders every day to help them identify and understand strategic opportunities to achieve digital transformation and customer growth. With years of experience designing future state digital-first businesses and delivering transformation programs across multiple industries, Scott possesses the unique skills and experience of both strategy and execution - a differentiator at the board table for both blue chip and emerging businesses. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestselle

On this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Henrique Volpi, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Kakau, one of the very first InsurTechs in Latin America. Kakau is an InsurTech and tech platform that delivers digital experiences while improving insurance operations and easing the delivery of complex financial services. Kakau's SaaS model is powered by machine learning and robotic process automation. Henrique is a co-author of the InsurTech book and the co-founder and board member of the InsurTech Association of Brazil. During the conversation, Sabine and Henrique discuss InsurTech in Latam and Brazil, selling insurance via the phone, Brazil's regulator approving subscription transaction models, NFT policies, and the future of tech-led business models. KEY TAKEAWAYS Back in the day, people would question whether it was possible to sell insurance digitally. Insurance sales were only done by phone. Indeed, you could start a business via Google Ads and similar platforms. Still, a fully digital experience wasn’t delivered back then. So, we did the contrarian thing and designed a digital-first platform, since we knew this was a global trend. The first thing we did was to discuss the project with a very large legal forum in Brazil and ask for their help, because insurance is a regulated industry, and we knew the importance of having a legal team. We designed one of the first digital MGAs in Brazil. From the beginning, we have spoken to the regulator. This approach was very different from other startups that were afraid to go to Rio and speak to them. We just shot straight and said: “We want to do this. Is that legally OK? Can we move forward?” We took a different approach from the other startups. Over time, the regulator told us that we could not engage with them that much. So, we went back to our legal partner and set up the first Brazilian InsurTech Association to help technology startups gain the insights they needed to build their InsurTech right. We started with 4-5 companies, and now we have more than 20 members. The first thing I believe we need to educate others on is finance and, therefore, insurance, especially in Brazil. This should be the same in South-East Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a whole. Individuals must learn how to make money and take care of their money because many people do not know how. They have to learn how to lend money, how to manage that money, and, hopefully, how to save a little bit. Only later will they think about insurance. Typically, you start with lending and credit cards, then move up the value chain to investments, and finally to insurance. Insurance and InsurTech are probably 5-6 years less mature compared to FinTech in Brazil, which is going very strong. Don’t be afraid to pivot your business model; you’re going to pivot many, many times along the way, and you have to be aggressive with technology. We’ve seen many, many companies around the world that don’t really have a good tech stack; it’s just a front-end. What’s interesting, though, and I’m excited about this too, is that when a market player realizes it doesn't need to own everything, it can consider licensing. When you license the best capabilities available, you gain a different perspective on how you serve your customers and users. BEST MOMENTS ‘Even though it was very hard and there was a lot of work to do to prove the content, we proved that one can sell insurance policies digitally. Now it’s something that’s growing very fast in Brazil.’ ‘We may be going through a crisis. Still, what’s happening now is very volatile. So, when growth opportunities return, the launch of digital-first businesses may return faster than a lot of people think.’ ‘I’m very interested in the ramifications of cyber risk within our digital world. I think another trend we need to pay attention to is the monetization of value-added services. Some big carriers in Brazil are setting up services companies that will prevent risks from happening, especially around commercial lines.’ ‘Go for it. The world needs people who have the courage to become entrepreneurs.’ ABOUT THE GUEST is known for having a positive attitude, execution focus, and servant leadership. Committed to making a positive impact, Henrique Volpi is the co-founder of Kakau, one of the first InsurTech startups in Latin America. A technologist for the past 25 years, working in leading tech companies such as ServiceNow, EMC/Dell, and BMC Software. Henrique co-founded and became the president of the Brazilian Insurtech Association. He is a co-author of the Insurtech Book. Kakau Technologies simplifies financial services and insurance operations by leveraging AI. By leveraging ML and RPA Kakau Tech delivers seamless SaaS solutions in Risk Model Management, NLP Claims Management, NFT Policy Management, and Churn Prediction. Kakau's technologies provides a digital platform that uses artificial intelligence technology to deliver more accurate results in the insuranc

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Dylan Bourguignon, who was, at the time, the CEO of SO-SURE, which he has since sold. He is on a mission to restore customer trust in insurance. He has set up his digital insurance platform with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance. In this conversation, the pair discusses Dylan's journey setting up SO-SURE, why he moved into insurance, and how useful sales strategies and skills have been to scale the business. KEY TAKEAWAYS Having been an engineer twice over, I went into strategy consulting and then private equity for 10 years, and acquired an MBA on the way. In the latter part of my time in private equity, I focused on insurance and came to understand the entire value chain and the chasm between the consumer experience and the margins the industry was making. As an investor, I was looking for businesses that were addressing the issue; sadly, there weren’t any, so I decided to do it myself. Whenever you try to change the equation for consumers, if you just try to focus on a single element that matters to them, whether it’s distribution, policy admin, or claims, as individual segments of the value chain, you’re only optimizing a sub-optimal point. If you really want a step change in customer experience, you have to take control of the entire value chain and redesign it. That’s what we’ve done. Our platform delivers a risk pooling model and a network model. Think about it as Mutual 3.0 (the next stage of the John Lewis Partnership model). The idea is that I buy a policy, I’m covered, I can then connect to my friends and family who I trust, and every time I connect to them, I and my friends each get £10 added to each of our reward pots. We can all connect to as many people as we want until my reward pot is worth 80% of the value of my premium. At the end of the year, if I and my friends have not claimed, the money in my pot is paid out to me. My pot is not dependent on my friends' connections, only on those networks of people I connect directly with. Embedded insurance is a bit like "the emperor's new clothes." I feel that it is just like dressing up something that’s been around for a long time. "Dixons" was already selling insurance with laptops in the 90s. The only difference is now the ability to make it part of the consumer experience when you purchase a product, as distribution partners you can also build a better understanding of their customers and you can use some of that information to provide a more relevant and bespoke solution for the customers in terms of the insurance. There are all sorts of charges that the industry needs to be mindful of. Think about the issue of over-insurance. If you insure for loss/ theft/ damage for every single item that you own – a couch for example – is that not covered by your home and content insurance already? The solution that we’re creating for consumers needs to be relevant and we also need to be delivering through an impeccable moment of truth -- a superb claim experience -- that needs to be as seamless as the purchase itself. BEST MOMENTS ‘For us at SO-SURE, we needed to gain control of the customer experience from purchase to claim. What you quickly realize is that there’s no way of fundamentally changing the paradigm for consumers unless you have control over the entire value chain – policy admin, claims, distribution.’ 'Consumers don’t trust the promise that when things go wrong, their back is going to be covered. Unfortunately, this is broken. Nobody has the consumer’s best interests at the heart of what they do. We’ve addressed all those issues in our redesign of the consumer experience. It’s so critical to focus on what the customer’s experience is going to be when they claim, and how it can be a good experience.’ ‘Win-win means amazing if you need us. Our insurance products are incredibly competitive, up to 40% cheaper than our competition, it’s very clear and written for consumers, and when you claim we fulfill the claims within 24-72 hours, 10 times faster than the competition. If you do not claim, you get rewards (95% of people don’t claim on insurance) If so you can get up to 80% of your money back if you and your friends in your pool don’t claim. What’s not to love?' ‘Be yourself and don’t stop believing.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Dylan Bourguignon is on a mission to restore consumer trust in insurance. He has developed a digital Insurer with a unique model that delivers win-win insurance through a social business model that rewards customers for good behavior. With 10 years of private equity investing and business development experience across a broad spectrum of industries (i.e., consumer, media, industrial, and financial services). With special expertise in business growth, drawing on sales, strategy, negotiation, M&A, financing, and leadership, Dylan has a lens for what makes sense for consumers. Dylan gained analytical and financial skill sets through an MBA and Chartered Engineer

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Janthana Kaenprakhamroy, co-founder and CEO of Tapoly, an on-demand gig-economy worker InsurTech startup based in the UK. In this interview, Sabine and Janthana discuss business model innovation, target market and customer segmentation, and what building a lifestyle brand in insurance means. They finally cover company culture, talent acquisition, and business founding. KEY TAKEAWAYS Tapoly came about because I was so surprised by how backward we were in offering insurance and in the end-to-end process for gig economy workers and micro-businesses. This was an industry in which I thought I could add value. Tapoly is a timely and much-needed platform because we can operate at a micro-premium level that some traditional players may not be interested in or capable of delivering. Our fully automated process, which uses technology to drive pricing and underwriting, makes it easier for us to achieve economies of scale and save costs, even if the transaction is much smaller than a traditional player would be willing to underwrite. This is needed because someone needs to serve these customers. We differentiate ourselves from our peers through our product differentiation and our approach, which is from the customer angle, looking at their profile and asking ourselves what we need to do to get the relevant insurance to cover our clients’ flexible lifestyles. To cover this, you need to expand your product range and carrier list, which is time-consuming and costly. The next stage is to grow our business. Gig workers could work three jobs, each job with a very different risk profile, so it’s very hard to buy coverage to cover all three risks. Offering an on-demand, usage-based solution relevant to a variety of activities will help the insured and us understand the risks we are taking, rather than getting a surprise when the client claims for something that is obviously not covered by the policy. BEST MOMENT ‘What’s needed in the insurance space is a joined-up system that tracks every single transaction from every single source. That’s why Tapoly has gone from being a reach-out player offering micro-insurances to moving up the chain.’ ‘Our gig workers include either micro-business, sole traders or freelancers that are difficult to make a profit from but need insurance to cover core products like employer liabilities for businesses that everyone must have. There are also professional indemnity, public liability, and other add-ons that may be relevant to their business activity and risk profile.’ ‘I’m a first-time founder as well as being a female, and on top of that, I didn’t have much insurance experience when I started, and the profit margins are small on microinsurance products. A lot of investors would prefer to invest in a company with larger margins and at a more mature stage of development, still, we are hopeful that we can prove to them that we are one of the valuable platforms that they should invest in.’ ‘I chose my co-founder, Sam, based on three aspects: Skill to add value, work ethic, and his ability to financially support the business when needed. We both chose our team based on the talent that we know we needed, and individuals that we could coach and teach so they don’t pick up any bad habits. The experience was not necessary for us. An interest in the business and high work ethics were key.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Janthana Kaenprakhamroy is one of the Top 10 Insurtech Female Influencers as ranked by The Insurance Institute. Founder of Tapoly, the first on-demand insurance platform for the gig economy in Europe, as seen in the Top 100 European Fintech Awards 2017. Chartered accountant and former investment banking professional. Janathana was also one of the co-authors of the InsurTECH Book. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode of the Scouting for Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Mike Minett, CEO or Chief Ideas Guy at Portabl. Portable is a platform and community that provides insurance, benefits, and savings products for freelance and self-employed professionals. In this podcast, Mike and Sabine cover: Why Mike decided to move from consulting to building an InsurTech focused on the future of work, what Portabl’s focus and core proposition are, what is required to build a gig economy-focused startup, and a little bit of ESG and the Future of Tech. KEY TAKEAWAYS We exploded out of the gate and got some opportunities in the US, which was probably too big for us for where we were at in our journey. So, we decided to come back and technically build and launch again out of London. Then we got a bit of Covid interruption when we were due to close our first round of funding in March 2020, and things fell apart at that point, but interestingly, Portabl and our proposition to serve and support the independent, freelance, and gig world of work continued to be interesting, and Covid accelerated everything. So, on the one hand, we lost time, but actually, I think the timing will work out even better for us as we prepare to finally launch into the market. It’s been a journey! We want to create a portable structure that wraps around the individual and follows them with whatever they’ve got going on, whatever pieces of work they might have on the go, for whichever client they might have on the books, and ultimately, across any geographies that they might be traveling to and working through. The old model no longer fits the way people are choosing to live and work. Building an insurance business has its challenges, especially given regulatory constraints and risk-profiling requirements, which is our secret sauce – ‘frisk’, our freelancer risk. People’s underwriting score and credit score both drop simply because they’ve become independent, yet this is the same person with the same network, the same skills, and experiences, and potentially the same career trajectory. Why should they face biases and penalties just because they are independent? The only reason is that the models are built for the old world. At Portabl, we’re trying to tackle risk profiling through data and analytics, gaining a better understanding of these individuals to present that story back to our insurance and credit partners on their behalf, so they get a better, fairer deal. We try to free up a lot of time and stress for our customers so they can concentrate on their work. Insurance for good is a good thing, but people don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I wish I had more insurance.” They don’t even know what they have, what they don’t have, what they should probably have, and that it’s a lot more affordable than they probably think. A lot of our insurance plans come with really nice features, like access to a virtual GP, counseling and mental health support, physio, etc. BEST MOMENTS ‘The fear of startups and the whole concept is that you need to be doing more faster and you’re constantly watching the clock.’ ‘By 2023, 50% of the world’s workforce is going to be working independently in some shape or form. Who’s looking after this new 50%? While there are few today, they will become a major part of the working population tomorrow. That was the genesis for the idea of Portabl.’ ‘As an independent, it’s precarious if you lose your health. Your health impacts your ability to earn. And if you lose your ability to earn, this also impacts your health. We really concentrate on the health and well-being piece by trying to keep our members happy, healthy, and productive.’ ‘The laptop and the mobile phone are the most critical business tool for many of us, do you have them insured? You really should, because all your data, your IP address, and your knowledge are likely to be on your phone or laptop. Independent workers don’t have the company to replace the phone or laptop.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Mike Minett is the CEO and founder of PORTABL. co, an all-in-one, data-driven platform providing portable insurance, benefits, and savings products to the world's freelancers and gig economies – nicely wrapped up in a single monthly membership bundle. PORTABL.co does the heavy lifting for these new and typically underserved markets, saving members’ time, money, and stress with easy-to-understand and use risk and financial products. Mike is no stranger to disrupting the market with unique perspectives on the twenty-first-century workplace – driven by a rich understanding of the impact of demographics. After a 20-year consulting and management career across fintech, insurance, and risk management for global investment banks, Mike launched The Positive Ageing Company, a SaaS-based data business focused on addressing the challenges and opportunities of the global aging workforce. That start-up was acquired by MMC Inc. (Mercer) in 2016. PORTABL.co is empowering the world's independe

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Naby Mariyam, CEO of Coverhero, an insurance platform that provides coverage for all types of gig-economy hustle. The first product delivered by Coverhero, Hustlecover.com was recently launched to fill the gap of financial insecurity for the growing gig economy and self-employed generation. KEY TAKEAWAYS Before setting up Coverhero, my last two startups were in the gig economy and supply chain, so I have some experience building marketplaces and gig-economy platforms. I launched Australia’s first ride-share platform, Ridehero, and a last-mile delivery platform, ZipMate. Before transitioning into tech, I was a social scientist in academia for about 15 years. It’s very humbling to go into a whole different industry where you don’t know how it’s done after being an expert in academia. In my area, I was at the top, and then to go to a completely different industry and start from the bottom was deeply humbling. This is core to my existence, to who I am; I have to fight through these barriers pretty much every single day. I left the Maldives to move to another country and started over. I then decided to get into tech, tick all of the diversity boxes, and fight those biases. And building what we have at Coverhero is a huge accomplishment. There’s no other way for us but to build a customer-centric business. This was truly weird when I first started talking to insurance industry executives who design products around actuaries or loss/expense ratios; it’s very product-centered rather than customer-centric. I then learned how broken the insurance supply chain is, and that got me really excited because I love solving non-sexy, complex supply chain problems. I wanted to find out how we build a product that customers actually want, and how we acquire and retain customers at a lower cost. Our philosophy is to build a truly valuable piece of software that connects insurers to distribution. A couple of factors led us to take this direction. When we first started, we wanted to go direct to consumers and acquire customers that way, but along the way, we realized that to build a company that can dominate a category, you need to find a gap, then define, refine, and refine it again. The category that we define is "work integrated life cover", which is for someone who has finished university and who decided to go into the workforce as a self-employed. BEST MOMENT ‘I wasn’t really interested in insurance, but I had a life-changing experience where I got really sick, and we had an insurance claim rejected. That process led me to be curious enough to think, “Why is this so difficult? Why can’t it be as simple as booking an Uber?”’ ‘To leave academia to jump into the startup world was an existential crisis, I think.’ ‘I’ve always been passionate about creating equity and opportunity for people that don’t have access to networks, this is something the world needs to do a lot more of.’ ‘The last four years I’ve been in the space, I’ve seen a lot of money being invested into ideas that may or may not work, and the bar that’s being set by the insurance industry is very different from the bar that is set for a startup that is not from the InsurTech industry.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Naby Mariyam says: Graduating with a Master of Philosophy in Management at the age of 22, I have had 18 years of experience in a wide range of industries across senior-level positions spanning Academia (Business studies, Research Methodology and Design), Management Consulting, Documentary production, Travel & Destination Marketing, and Technology. Naby's Research background is in social science, where she deeply studied human behavior in her Academic career. Naby is currently taking a break from her PhD to focus on building technology-driven solutions that solve community problems. Naby shares that she is not a new face in the Australian startup scene, having launched several of her own startups and Business ventures, working closely with founders and catalysts of innovation in the Australian Startup Ecosystem over the last 8 years. Naby advised the United Nations Development Project on building start-up ecosystems and designed accelerator programs to drive innovation in developing Nations. Naby was an Australian delegate at the G20 Young Entrepreneurs conference in Berlin in 2017. Naby is a Keynote speaker, commentator, thought leader, and advocate for diversity of thought in the financial services and technology sector. She loves salsa dancing, poetry, and InsurTech (in that order). When Naby is not exploring her side hustles, she runs Coverhero, an embedded InsurTech startup focusing on revolutionizing insurance services, focusing on the needs of Millennials and Gen Z. Coverhero launched its first product www.hustlecover.com to fill the gap of financial insecurity for the growing Gig Economy and self-employed generation, and its smart home insurance API www.lucci.io in 2021. Website: www.hustlecover

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Iain Wilcox, CEO of GWT Insight, a tech company focused on making cost-effective commercial building data available to their owners, operators, and advisers. Iain is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary who successfully launched new businesses from scratch, balancing strategic planning with practical implementation. Over a 30-year period, Iain worked with companies including AT&T and Cognizant, and 5 years ago, he launched GWT Insight. During the conversation, Sabine and Iain discussed four topics: What is GWT Insight from a company, branding, and team perspective? Why both, property and commercial building IoT, are unique markets around which to build a risk mitigation ecosystem. Benefits that are delivered to the property and insurance markets (including preventative maintenance). Lessons learned from moving to the entrepreneurial space after years of working for large companies. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been delivering consulting services to large corporations for 13 years and have witnessed just how difficult it is for them to balance the need to provide structure and control over their investments with ensuring they do not hinder their innovation initiatives. The Tier 1 carriers recognized they needed to start working with startups. I was working with a large India-based IT company, and they recognized that both organizations needed the agility and speed-to-market of a startup. This led to the formation of GWT Insight. When we were formed in 2017-2018, it was in the very early days of people realizing they could save money by how they use and consume energy. Now, with rising utility prices, people are very focused on energy optimization and we see ourselves as not only being able to deliver on the governance part of an ESG model, with the risk management solutions that we develop with our partners, the insurers, and their brokers, but we’re also being able to deliver on commercial property owners’ desire to deliver a better understanding of how their buildings are performing and being able to reduce their costs. Property can account for 20-30% of the overall premium on a portfolio when you’ve got business interruption, public liability, and employee liability. You’ve got an area of the insurance paradigm and the value chain that impacts quite a wide area. We’ve got use cases across a variety of different examples and verticals. We use real-time data from manufacturing units, offices, hotels, schools, hospitals, and central government departments (MoD and local authorities). Some of the use cases and benefits we’re looking at are picking up fire control data, so you know that if there is a problem with the alarm, it helps them to proactively go to their clients and warn them. We’ve also been able to identify loss events with our insurance clients and stop them from happening. BEST MOMENTS ‘When buildings are built, they have a number of IoT sensors built in already. Even though a standard office will have 5,000-10,000 data points, GWT Insight recognized an opportunity to capture that data by listening to the existing in-house building management system. We developed the GWTI Observer to do just this and create a better understanding of risk for our users and customers.’ ‘Risk managers want real-time data because it’s about loss prevention. We’ve still got a little bit of education to go through in the underwriting community; a lot of that community still has a very traditional viewpoint on how to use data and what is out there. With regards to owners, a third of this market is bleeding edge and wants to risk manage their properties, a third is interested but not ready for it, and a third does not manage that data and insight proactively.’ ‘I think the "data" topic will change the way insurance is sold, because when you’ve got the data, you can make better, informed decisions about how you’re managing your property, the risks impacting your property, and how that impacts the rest of your business.’ ‘In every building in every portfolio, there have been areas where we can help improve the operational efficiency of the building and provide a better customer experience for their own customers, employees, and stakeholders.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Iain Wilcox is an entrepreneur, leader, and visionary who has successfully launched new businesses from scratch, including software, IoT hardware, and services companies in the UK and Europe. Primarily worked in the startup development phase, building a unique customer base and revenue streams from the start. Iain manages the delicate balance between strategic planning and the practical implementation of market entry, business development, and revenue delivery for new and established operations. Iain set up GWT Insight approximately 5 years ago. GWT Insight is a tech company focused on making cost-effective commercial building data available to its owners, operators, and advisers. Whether reducing risk, improving

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Henri Winand, co-founder and CEO of AkinovA, an electronic marketplace built to ease the transfer and trading of insurance and insurance risks. During the conversation, Sabine and Henry discuss the importance of strong taxonomy when moving into multi-party electronic placements, tangible and intellectual assets, transition risk, cyber risk, NFTs, and driving liquidity in illiquid markets. KEY TAKEAWAYS The whole objective of building our marketplace is to access a larger portion of the market. The market is there already, and our goal is to help clients or anybody in the value chain feel that we can do a better job of providing transactional transparency. I’ve done that in the world of energy and in the world of transportation. I’m an engineer who likes to solve problems; more to the point, I really love to build teams that can solve big problems in this world. The challenge for FinTechs and InsurTechs is that sometimes you can’t patent things because they fall in the business idea realm. Being able to then keep a trade secret – maybe with some patents around it -- which we are exploring big time by the way for a few of our concepts – is a way to not signal to everyone what you are doing, so you can keep the trade secret for a while. But equally, there are some pieces that I believe, patent attorneys believe too, can be patented. This is quite important because it gives you the ability to have a discourse with very large organizations if they try to replicate your IP. IP = value. It is not about sticking a licensing reminder that tells someone they’re infringing on your IP and that they owe you money; that’s not the point. The point is you arrive at an asset that can be valued by clients and investors, which then allows you to have a value-based conversation with your partners, too. The question is: How do we, as an industry, attract the right talent? Our industry has to be exciting. I got into insurance by accident, and insurance isn’t the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning unless you have to. What do we need to change to be part of the client's journey? If you break down insurance, you have to start with the risk that needs to be reduced and managed. First, I’ve got to make it easier for the person we engage with and who has a problem we can solve. Second, they need to be able to articulate it clearly to ensure it is well evaluated. I then need to be able to say what it’s worth and how well or badly it could go based on the information gathered. BEST MOMENTS ‘An idea is a cost center until you make money out of it. Once you start making money, that idea can then become a profit center.’ ‘Time is everything, not money or attending meetings. The only commodity we have as human beings is time. So invest your time wisely.’ ‘I’m hoping things won’t change for the worse when we look at the current economy. Still, I think some clear fundamentals have changed. So let's make the best of what we know for now.’ ‘When you’re coming up with an idea, the cleverest people in the room are the ones who question the idea. So, if you want to look clever in a group, don't come up with an idea, come up with critiques.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Henri Winand is a growth- and change-oriented CEO with a passion for scaling businesses across a broad set of technologies, using diverse business models and team-based delivery. Henry now serves as CEO for AkinovA, an insurance technology company that he co-founded with a specialist in ILS (insurance-linked securities and related insurance products). He is also a City of London-based fund manager. Prior to this, Henry served as CEO of a British tech company listed on the London Stock Exchange Main Market (Intelligent Energy, a $1bn tech IPO) with in excess of $200m raised from a broad range of sources, leading to strong top-line growth, largely from internationally-based customers. Today, Henry serves on several Boards in the UK, Singapore, India, Japan, and the US in the energy, software services, film content publishing, and automotive sectors. Henry also served on the Board of an EU-funded PPP valued at €1bn+. Those also included several advisory bodies to Ministers, Secretaries of State, and Officials in the new energy, automotive, and materials science sectors in the UK, as well as on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Warwick Business School and of the University of Cambridge. Henry owns more than a dozen granted and pending patents and has several papers published in well-known, peer-reviewed scientific journals, covering topics including composite materials, neutron diffraction, and processes to improve industrial product development cycles. Henry is regularly invited to speak at international conferences and has spoken in the US and French Senates, too. Henry provides advice to selected major global institutional, venture capital, and private equity funds. In addition to meeting several Heads of State, He

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Simon Schneider, founding partner of Neoteq Ventures. They cover three areas: Simon’s path in VC Land, Great minds think alike, and Startup tips to engage with large companies while ensuring they don't get side-lined when the corporation’s strategy changes. KEY TAKEAWAYS It’s a fortunate coincidence that I entered the VC market in 2001. I’d studied to be a lawyer but decided not to become a lawyer because a friend suggested VCs needed someone like me who knew what contracts should look like and who understood people. From the first day of my VC career, I was fascinated by all these founders and their teams with their great game-changing ideas and technologies. Neoteq invests not just in InsurTechs, we concentrate on early-stage investments which are pre-seed, seed, and Series A. We do not have a specific sector focus, but we look for technology-based startups. The most relevant question for us is which customer problem does the startup solve? It sounds like an easy question, but often when you meet founders and you ask them that very question they have difficulty describing their proposition, and if you can’t describe what the customer’s problem is, why would someone be willing to buy your product? Market, team, and technology, these three key parts, are used constantly to perform our due diligence and decide if the startup is an interesting investment target for us. Not every startup in our business is successful. There are always failures. Of course, investors have expectations and you have to fulfill them as a team when you get the trust of your investors, but not everything can be handled by the team, there are some things your team can handle, and some things in the market that you do not have a handle on. You always have to look at why each case wasn’t successful in the end when it looked promising in the beginning. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that are impacting startups. I expect that access to capital, especially in later-stage financing rounds will be tougher and tougher than in past years which means valuations will go down a little bit. I expect the rounds will get a bit smaller and that has an impact on the M&A market, perhaps exiting will take more time than you’ve been used to, but if you’re an experienced VC you know it takes time (5-7 years or more) until you can exit your companies from your portfolio. The VC scene won’t freeze though. It will continue to find winners to yield high returns. We are financially driven. Each startup, from our point of view, needs to have the potential to pay back our complete fund. If we do not see this potential it’s unlikely we will invest. Strategic returns are often combined with financial returns, at least from my point of view. But of course, CVCs often try to get some kind of extra deals with the teams to get earlier access to the product. This is something I would highly recommend startups not to accept, in the end, it’s always unhelpful, especially when corporations change their strategy – which can happen from one day to another – you are no longer relevant to them and the baseline premise of the engagement is over. Startups that want to cooperate with a CVC need to set up evaluation meetings and workshops where they can really create the goals on which they will want to work on. If you don’t find common grounds then stop the conversations because it won’t be a successful partnership. Alignment is key. BEST MOMENTS ‘Over the last 20 years as a VC, I’ve seen a lot of things. My fascination with the VC business and the chance I have every day to work with special people are still there. I still love my job.’ ‘The fundraising process, especially during Covid was not easy. Meetings are no longer possible and investors have to make choices through Zoom calls as to whether they would want to invest in a venture.’ ‘Companies working on climate tech and sustainability are really interesting and I see a lot of potential in this sector because it’s relevant for all of us and the better the solutions are the more they will help our planet to survive, hopefully.’ ‘Startups that started in previous crises often were more successful than companies that start in normal times. The big question is: Do we have normal times at the moment? I would say, definitely not.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Simon Schneider has more than 15 years of experience as an Investment Professional in sourcing, negotiation, financing, and the support & sale of technology start-ups in the fields of B2B/Cloud-Software, Digital Media, eCommerce, Insurtech & Clean-Tech. Simon has years of M&A experience through the trade sales of several portfolio companies. He also serves as a board member for various companies. Neoteq Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Cologne, Germany, that invests in outstanding teams and exceptional technology-based companies. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLind

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kobi Bendelak, a 22-year veteran in insurance. Kobi is the CEO of InsurTech Israel, which he established to promote and lead innovation within the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem. Sabine has known Kobi for over 6 years. He mentored the startups in her European Accelerator and has always been the kindest individual for the startups and her team members to talk to for advice and mentorship. KEY TAKEAWAYS InsurTech Israel has four baseline activities: Investment – We’ve already invested in 10 startups, all of them are Israeli InsurTechs, Consulting – we assist the startups to grow, Media and Events – we hold events and bring big delegation of startups to engage with corporations – Tel Aviv is one of the key capitals for InsurTech startups in the world. Still, there was no accelerator programme in Israel, so we started one with great mentors from all over the world who helped startups learn, grow, and scale. Building an ecosystem is very hard, but having a success story makes it easier. We have four unicorns that assist us in building and growing the ecosystem and laying the foundation for the InsurTech industry here in Israel. For a good ecosystem, though, you have to have a lot of early-stage startups, not unicorns! It’s hard to build that because you have to find the entrepreneurs, and they need to find you. Israel is very good with engagement and connections. We have a culture of entrepreneurship here. The insurance world is very orthodox; it’s a long journey for startups to form partnerships with incumbent players. Both B2B startups and investors need to be patient because there is no great success in the beginning, unlike B2C, where you can succeed faster. Soon, it will be easier, though, because the entire industry will be digitised. The insurance industry is a very logical industry: yes/no, cover/no cover, something happened/nothing happened, which makes it a great playground for AI. The Israeli army has seen many successes with AI, so the entrepreneurs who are coming up are young and well-experienced. They start looking for ‘ideas’ and for ways to use them to solve real market problems. Israelis are the best at solving problems because we live in a very tough neighbourhood. InsurTech is not just technology. Indeed, it is first about solving problems, evaluating options, and then implementing technology to make it happen. Entrepreneurs with strong AI skills bring that knowledge to the InsurTech industry through better underwriting for planes, fraud detection, and healthcare, to name a few areas. BEST MOMENTS ‘I retired at 45 years old, and after a few months, it started to get boring, so I looked around for opportunities, and the InsurTech space became very interesting to me.’ ‘Coming into work every day with passion is key.’ ‘You need to have mileage and a little money to succeed.’ ‘Every InsurTech startup must have insurance domain expertise in the team if they want to get into insurance because it’s a very complex industry that requires subject matter expertise.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Kobi Bendelak is the CEO of InsurTech Israel that he established to promote and lead the Israeli Insurtech ecosystem. The company has four areas of activity: investments, consulting, media, and acceleration programmes. All those activities make InsurTech Israel the leading and most active accelerator program in the Israeli InsurTech sector. Previously, Kobi was the founder and CEO of Reshef Insurance Brokers, part of Migdal/ Generali Insurance Group. He has 22 years of experience in the insurance industry and holds a BA in Management and an MA in Law from Bar Ilan University. He was also a Colonel (Reserve) in the IDF. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Farron Blanc, at the time VP, Brokerage Distribution & Strategy at Legal & General America (L&G America) where he works with an amazing team of innovators to drive growth within life insurance by leveraging emerging technologies to accelerate opportunities within the brokerage channels. Farron is an entrepreneur, too. He started Gerry, a concierge Service platform that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans to navigate requirements and deliver the right support within the long-term senior care space. Farron and his team sold the company in 2021, when he moved to L&G America. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve been at Legal & General for about three months. L&G America is the world’s 11th largest asset manager, but in the US it’s a really nimble business. As a corporation, we’ve invested so much in digital. One of the things I’m really passionate about is helping the underserved get adequate, affordable protection through term life insurance. You have to use technology to reach customers today and empower brokers to do that most effectively. I’m loving it! On the entrepreneurial side, in a venture-backed startup with $4, $10, or $100 million USD, money doesn’t solve anything because – until you’re a big tech like Amazon, Apple, or Google – that money is an investment in the future, and you will have to raise more capital in 12-18 months to scale. So the default mode is death, as you’ll run out of money at some point because you won't be profitable. Profit is indeed still the rule of the game. Another thing people don’t understand is that when you receive funding or a specific amount of money, it comes with expectations. For some a $1 billion USD (Unicorn level) exit isn’t big enough, even if they’re only writing a $2 million USD cheque, they want to be in markets where companies can do $10 billion USD exits (Decacorn level.) If you can understand those metrics, unit economics, and expectations, you will do well. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay focused and relevant while hitting all the milestones you promised your investors, so you get there. Within a corporation, the main challenge is actually "speed to market". You may have distribution, but you may not have innovation because you’re so efficient (e.g., you have processes, best practice committees, procedures, and meetings to ensure that everything that is done gets super efficient) Tech giants like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google do phenomenally well at attracting talent to be able to attack a problem internally, and then by buying companies externally. At L&G America, we want to cover as many families as possible with affordable protection. The only way to do that is by using technology to digitize processes and personalize engagements and internal processes (i.e., rates, the experience, the journey the policyholder goes through) across product design, underwriting, and claims processing. We’re probably the market leader in the application part of the process. Still, we have so much work to do on the back end. You then have to work with distribution partners to optimize all of this. I’d love to be proved otherwise, particularly in the life insurance or mortality coverage spaces. Let's remember that insurance is sold, not bought. No one wants to talk about death. The best way to sell it is through independent distribution, reaching out to the customer, and engaging with them in the way they want to engage and meet. There’s no one magic bullet. BEST MOMENTS ‘I’ve always been fascinated by problems and what’s the best way to solve them. Sometimes it’s a clean sheet of paper with no rules, and sometimes it’s leveraging a 100-year-old brand with a $40 billion USD balance sheet.’ ‘As long as you’re rapidly learning and re-assessing your challenges and assumptions, that’s the most enriching part.’ ‘Within corporate venturing, you must have a strategic return lens on things. Whereas financial VCs are purely looking at gross IRR or total value paid-in capital and multiples. You have to look beyond the numbers even though they are so important.’ ‘The response to the global financial crisis of 2008 was to print more money to avoid a global depression. I think that worked, but it inflated asset prices, and we were at a 0% interest rate environment for essentially two decades, meaning long-term contracts started to fall apart. What does the value of money mean now? It’s a debt obligation, but the rapid inflation we’re seeing means it’s going to be really interesting to see how we’re going to ride that out. How does being in an era of superabundant capital impact people’s subscriptions?’ ABOUT THE GUEST At the time of this recording, Farron Blanc and his team help L&G America drive growth by leveraging technology throughout the broker channel. Prior to that, as co-founder and CEO of Gerry, Farron raised $3.75M in VC funding to launch the startup, a conci

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of Vesuvio Labs, a venture builder dedicated to FinTech startups and the InsurTech space in particular. Vesuvio Labs calls itself the digital rocket fuelling the insurance sector. In this episode, Sabine reviews Kristian’s journey as a FinTech venture builder and how he made the shift from the traditional tech world to the new world of tech. KEY TAKEAWAYS I’ve always been interested in new things, startups, and tech. For most of my career, I’ve traveled, lived in different countries, and worked with entrepreneurs. Eventually, I decided I wanted to turn that into a business and create a lab and ecosystem where we could work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas they have. As a venture builder, what you do is take some degree of risk with the clients and with the projects that you work on. That means someone comes to us very early in their journey and they do not necessarily have a lot of the business there yet, they certainly don’t have the capital, what we try to do at that very early stage is invest in those businesses through our work -- via sweat equity -- until they have launched the very first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses. We often work on 15 projects at the same time, and there can be a lot of commonalities among them. What we try to do, though, is to develop technology in a way that enables greater reuse across the different ventures we work with. We work hard to create a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, thereby reducing the risk of getting it wrong and the time-to-market. Because we are blessed with working with so many entrepreneurs and businesses, we also see a lot of situations where some great people have come together but haven’t invested the effort into figuring out the right framework to help their business get to the destination they set for themselves or how they’re going to work with others. What happens is that it often doesn’t quite work out. There are many things every business must consider. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t work out the way they should. BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technological expertise to execute on those ideas and see if we can partner with them and create great companies together.’ ‘Insurance and financial services know something about their value chain, and they know how they want to change/ improve/ disrupt. We actually can help build the technology infrastructure around that through our technology and the partners we engage with.’ ‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings; we provide the base of the pizza, and they decide whether they want to put pepperoni or whatever on top.’ ‘You have to be quite conscious about what companies you select to work with. It would be natural to pick many companies that look a lot alike, but that does not work. The ones that benefit from tech services are those companies that have a strong technology fit, but more importantly, they can cover different aspects of the insurance value chain.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Led by Kristian, the Vesuvio Labs team aims to transform the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible one. And their focus is clearly on technical execution. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler, former managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne. Before moving to the other side of the coin (i.e., becoming an InsurTech startup enabler), Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich Re. He also has a background in IT strategy; he is a board member and a digital lab development expert. KEY TAKEAWAYS Within our industry, there has been a significant shift in the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the Ergo Lab in Berlin, it was hard to talk with the procurement department to secure a contract between a startup and an incumbent. The insurance industry approached it from an IT background focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software such as Microsoft and SAP, and finally, they were open to working with and collaborating with startups. It’s great to have seen the volume of InsurTech startups increase steadily over the past few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: 1) The willingness and acceptance to support startups and corporate management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. 2) The ability to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to major problems in a very short time period, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create many win-win situations and success stories, demonstrating that a startup solution can help overcome, for example, the bottleneck in internal IT capacity. Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: building a strong, reliable network for all parties, including enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalization. From the beginning, the design of the initiative was that we needed to bring together insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities, all with different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation. By setting up the InsureNXT Conference, our goal was clear. We wanted to ensure that the focus was not only on insurance, startups, and tech companies. We also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical that, if you want to develop insurance innovation and digitalization in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see cross-industry partners joining companies like Garmin, Volvo, and Lufthansa Systems, all collaborating with our startups! BEST MOMENTS ‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’ ‘During the past six months, we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow. We’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our insurance and expert networks. Those connections helped develop over 40 projects. And some are already up and running as products on the market.’ ‘Corporations want to innovate but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages, and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’ ‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers besides the member network that we have created and our partner network.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sebastian Pitzler was the Managing Director of InsurLab Germany. He started in March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Matt Connolly, an entrepreneur and platform builder in the insurance sector. He’s also the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. In this episode, Matt talks about himself and his idea to build the Sønr platform. KEY TAKEAWAYS I always knew I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t know what it would be or what I wanted to invent. The only relevant professional experience I had was working for a digital agency, but my friend and I set up a web design company in 2003 that was going to deliver strategy, creative, and tech for the web. Five years later, the business was very successful and became the number one digital agency in the UK. It was a very unusual position to be in as a 20-something. I always wanted to push, push, and push again. I’m never satisfied. They are terrible traits in somebody, but they are also great traits for an entrepreneur. I hope I’m able to do that with empathy for those around me. Staff retention supports my belief that I can create a strong culture and be a strong leader within my organisation. And, those traits really do drive me forward. Having control over a company's DNA and shaping its culture is a great responsibility and one of the most important things a successful founder can achieve. Once you have that right, the rest of the business will flow. Fun has to be a large part of that. As a founder, you start off with your feet firmly under the desk. You are involved in shaping the operation of the business, KPIs, growth metrics, and all those kinds of things, and you can forget about having fun; that’s where my co-founder, Matt Ferguson, is great at continuously reminding me and us to remember the fun part of work. He makes sure we are going out, and we talk and connect. You need to set a vision, define a purpose within it, and ensure that vision is brought into, and possibly even co-created by, people within the team. If you have that and everybody buys into it and you set a clear pathway to achieving that – whether you’re ahead of it or behind it – then everybody will rally and do their best to make that happen. I’ve always felt it should be somewhat democratic in a business's culture. Rather than employ people to fulfil specific roles, I’d rather employ exceptional talent, understand where they are best deployed, and allow them to function with that intent. That allows them to do the thing they love the best, and invariably they’re the best at, to create the right resourcing landscape to achieve our vision. BEST MOMENTS ‘Employ people who are more talented than you.’ ‘You will always overestimate what you can or will achieve in one year, but you will always underestimate what you can achieve in 10. I need to remind myself of that, I’m an incredibly impatient man.’ ‘Always check in with each other and have those “high five” moments and check in and look after yourself en route.’ ‘I am much better at encouraging others to have fun than doing it myself. But if you’re not having fun and living another life outside of work, you become a one-dimensional person, and that’s never going to be healthy for you.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Matt is the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. Sønr is a subscription-based platform that houses the world’s most comprehensive source of innovation intelligence, designed specifically for the insurance innovator. It is used by some of the best-known insurance companies globally, including Allianz, Bupa, Generali, Munich Re, and Tokio Marine. Sønr connects its clients to innovation globally – the latest market trends, startups, and scaleups reshaping the insurance market. It provides insight into competitors’ innovation activities too... The critical intelligence needed to compete in today’s changing world. It also has an in-built collaboration toolset that enables teams to work smarter, faster, and be more connected. This results in less duplicated effort and ensures everyone is really on the same page. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Mark Dennis, a seasoned insurance executive with strong expertise in software platforms. Mark was the Global COO and Europe CEO for MunichRe Digital Partners, one of the most renowned InsurTech ecosystem builders, which has now been re-integrated within the core business of the MunichRe group. Today, Mark works with various young ventures and helps them with their scaling strategy. Today, he is supporting the Inshur team. KEY TAKEAWAYS In my time, we’ve partnered with 25-30 InsurTechs and invested in only a few, so we’re quite selective about where the capital has gone. The examples where we’ve got it really right are where we’ve blended our products well. In the early years, we were probably more invested in technology, and our assertion at the time was to offer the full tech stack of policy admin. In the middle of that five-year period, we looked at the market and realized there were people out there who could do it far better than we could; there were hundreds of policy administration vendors. You could decide whether to buy rather than build. So we pivoted that model away from building everything to having a network of best-in-class providers that we could connect to our InsurTech customers. Later, we focused more on data infrastructure and collaborating with our InsurTech partners to leverage a data advantage. It’s folly to seek perfect alignment; it’s better to seek out what everybody gets from the partnership, and it’ll vary and move around over time, but as long as everybody gets some kind of upside, then that’s being in a good shape. Seeking perfection is nonsense, really. Insurance has always been data-driven, even 4,000 years ago with the Phoenician traders. They’re always figuring stuff out based on data points (e.g,. When’s the safest time to sail across that ocean to deliver goods?) Now we have the benefit of technology that allows us to process a lot more data, and everybody’s trying to capture data points and gain a data advantage, though sometimes I think we don’t always know what we’re doing; we’re capturing data without necessarily a clear purpose. It’s much more about risk prevention and prediction than about the cure. It’s more a force for good now though I don’t think insurance gets the credit it deserves. In a way, it certainly needs its own PR campaign! BEST MOMENTS ‘The key for me is wanting to be a partnership business, and we try to treat all our InsurTech relationships as partnerships, rather than too transactional.’ ‘Without knowing it – because there wasn’t that much competition in the early days – we built the first InsurTech ecosystems, it wasn’t by design, it was just how it worked.’ ‘It boils down to a few key questions: Is the team the right team? Are they balanced? Do they know the industry or are they being deliberately disruptive? Are they being positive with their disruption?’ ‘You have to respect your insurance partner; they need to get something out of this and create value.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Mark Dennis says: In 2016, I co-founded and built out MunichRe's Digital Partners business from scratch to what is now a large, global operation employing more than 100 brilliant people. With our insurtech and disruptive partners, we have helped build more than 20 insurance businesses. As part of my role, I introduced a flexible working model, with employee wellbeing and care at its heart. For more than 5 years, we have operated a flexible model with meeting-free and wellbeing days, extended breaks, flexibility for working parents, and so on. I am proud to say that some of these ideas have now been adopted more widely in the other MunichRe businesses. I am also passionate about giving people a chance. DP recruits people of all backgrounds and with diverse thinking. I was also an executive sponsor on Munich Re UK's inclusion and diversity programme and for the Re: Connect charitable foundation. I now lead an independent consulting business focused on insurtech scaling, operational resilience, and change management. We also aim to work with more established insurance businesses to develop and execute their innovation ambitions. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Jean-Charles Velge, one of the co-founders of Qover. After spending part of his career in the private equity industry – half in Europe and the other half in Hong Kong – he decided to become an entrepreneur. Jean-Charles started as a consultant at Bain & Company, then joined the largest Benelux fund, NPM Capital, before moving to Redhorse in Hong Kong. Jean-Charles says that he runs the world's first Insurance-As-A-Service platform. KEY TAKEAWAYS There are many different business models and how you can attack the value chain in insurance. Where we tried to be really innovative was in the business model itself and in how you transform the insurance industry through technology. Not just how to distribute a product, or how to use part of the technology stack to enhance the processes of an insurance company, but how to change the industry by applying technology. The model is more valid today than it ever was. Along the way, insurance lost itself. What really makes insurance special is that it will protect you at the moment when you’re most vulnerable. That’s what we need to rebuild and make it possible. Technology is extremely well placed to make it happen at scale and with pinpoint precision. Tech is no longer a vertical; it is a horizontal that runs through all the verticals of the economy. When you look at all the winners on the tech horizontal, all those companies need insurance, either embedded to enhance their products, to cross-sell insurance, or to up-sell insurance. It needs to be digital and cross-border. What we’ve done is create a platform that is basically a digital-native company without a balance sheet, able to build any non-life insurance product for any of those verticals in any country. The complexity of tech companies working with incumbents, especially in the insurance industry, is doubled. Firstly, insurance companies are not really digital, so it’s difficult for them to build the right tools and stack. Secondly, they’re very much local, traditional insurance companies; they have branches in the UK, France, and Brussels, but they don’t really talk to each other. A company that wants to do cross-border insurance has to rebuild block by block. What we try to do is marry tech and insurance so we’re as much a tech company as we are a legal and insurance company to be a single point of contact for your customer to be able to provide insurance digitally and cross-border, and keep all the complexities under cover to make it simple for the customer. BEST MOMENTS ‘When we started the company, we asked, “How can we hack insurance to make it as efficient and smart as possible?” It’s in the DNA of Qover.’ ‘Our philosophy is to build the best policies possible with the best coverage possible with the best service possible. That’s what the industry needs to build to gain the confidence of the consumers back that may have been lost along the way.’ ‘Well done, insurance can be extremely valuable across the whole value chain of many different industries.’ ‘We’ll be the biggest e-bike insurers in the Western world in the next few years because we’ve built a compelling product for all countries.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Jean-Charles Velge co-founded Qover in 2016 with Quentin Colmant. He spent his entire career in the private equity industry – half in Europe and half in Hong Kong. Jean-Charles started as a consultant at Bain & Company, then joined the largest Benelux fund, NPM Capital, before moving to Redhorse in Hong Kong. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration, a master’s in finance, and an MBA. Jean Charles calls Qover the world's first Insurance-As-A-Service. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sebastien Gaudin, co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, an embedded HealthTech InsurTech platform that has grown fast to become a leader in their category across Asia through their platform the CareVoiceOS open platform which delivers a modern insurance infrastructure solution to connect and manage multiple health services providers to shape bespoke health engagement journey for micro-customer segments. Sebastien’s mission is to reinvent the healthcare and insurance spaces. Merging the two to deliver tailored experiences for users and payers. Sabine and Sebastien talk about the recent category paper they wrote ‘Embedded Health: The next growth frontier for insurance’, discussing why embedded health is such an important topic for the health and insurance markets today? What are the winning business models we have seen emerge in recent years? What are the top capabilities needed to build a digital health ecosystem? KEY TAKEAWAYS I value patient-centred care, looking at the patient from a board perspective with multiple stakeholders. From my experience working in China's digital ecosystem, customer-centred, service-oriented approaches are everywhere and you can create more value and relevance if you aggregate services for people. We opened new distribution channels, new ways for insurers to commercialise products. All our experiences have led us to the category of embedded health. It’s about being able to provide targeted customers a range of relevant digital healthcare services together with insurance in one single integrated customer experience. Insurers are really making the move to embed health services with their insurance offering and then prevent or influence positively what may happen before a claim. Think about health players who can embed insurance and likely complimentary health insurance services to bring more value and protection to their customers but also all at once with a monetisation interest model for what they offer as a service. Lastly, noon-insurance, non-health players can also think about embedding health and insurance services as complimentary product offerings and revenues. We’ve been looking at how embedded health can really help to acquire customers. We see micro-insurance in the health space could be interesting because you start to see a number of players embedding micro-insurance and this gives new customers access to insurance that they couldn’t access before. BEST MOMENTS ‘Working with insurers, we helped them to go beyond being a passive payer of claims and take a more proactive role, helping their customers navigate and find the right medical services at the right time.’ ‘With a digital customer journey you can support the individual along the way with easy access to treatments and healthcare professionals.’ ‘The opportunities that have opened up with this wealth of technologies that can impact people’s health. It’s true that digital natives are more suited to embrace this and most of the incumbents have been struggling because of their lack of digital capabilities.’ ‘The past two years have seen a solid acceleration. It’s still difficult to see which model will win, we may have new models emerging, it’s likely there will be multiple winners within different sub-categories. The most important thing is that the needs from both consumers and all stakeholders are strong and the value creation by transforming insurance and improving health is limitless.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sebastien’s career has been dedicated to healthcare. He is the co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, a leading Asian Health InsurTech expanding globally and dedicated to making insurance more humane, with health at its core. With an academic background in pharmaceuticals and business, Sebastien worked in Corporate Development and Marketing, and served as a business leader across multiple therapeutic and geographic markets in the pharma industry. From a young age, he has been involved in creating and growing several new ventures. Sebastien is also the co-founder and non-executive Chairman of the Board of blüüm, a Chinese tech-driven insurtech MGA that was spun off from CareVoice after graduating from PingAn’s Accelerator program. Sebastien and CareVoice received multiple awards and recognitions, including the Top Insurtech Leader 2021 in the “Digital Business Ecosystem Builders” category by ACORD, a non-profit, industry-owned organisation that enables the success of the global insurance industry. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where c

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Simon Torrance who is well known across the FinTech and insurance sectors as Mr. Embedded Finance. In December 2020, Simon wrote a very well-known article, ‘Embedded Insurance, A $3 Trillion Market Opportunity That Could Also Help Close The Protection Gap’. He works with leaders, executives, and board members to create and implement new growth strategies based on corporate venturing techniques focused on the Platform economy and Digital Ecosystems, helping large enterprises transform the business of today to meet the needs of tomorrow. His focus today is on AI risk. KEY TAKEAWAYS The main problem is that digitization, which is happening across every sector, tends to shrink traditional profit pools because of new competitors, new entrants, new regulations, and changing customer expectations. So companies must spend more money to keep up with those emerging expectations. The old models that were absolutely fine in the analog world are coming under increasing pressure. Traditional players are increasingly feeling that pressure and need to do something different. When I was working in telecommunications, I started to think about the why. Why are those digital companies (Google, Facebook) so successful, and what could TelCos learn about them? TelCos have a lot of power in the market, but they tend to focus on what they know best – creating the infrastructure – not so good though at creating services or new types of digital business models. In 2005-6, it was clear that the companies that were succeeding most in a digital world were those that were running ‘platform-based’ business models; they weren’t necessarily creating the end customer products themselves, but they were acting as an intermediary between the customer and the third party that had the solutions. That still is the most powerful business model in the digital world. I wasn’t interested in financial services, I hadn’t done a lot of work in it until about 3 years ago, but it seemed to me that it’s so important for the world, it underpins all our commercial and social activity – we can’t operate without financial services – yet there was something fundamentally broken with that industry and the gap between what people need and what they were being given was incredibly wide – there are so many people who are unprotected and have no insurance around the world – it’s so important for a small business to get a loan. The type of experience I have with my old bank is lightyears away from the new banks that are popping up now, and no one’s really making solutions that look after my financial wellness, to help me understand how I need to save, borrow, plan for the future. I’m just left to access a few quite basic solutions from the incumbents. So, I thought, with these huge gaps and numbers of people excluded or badly served by the industry, there’s got to be some change needed. Embedded finance cuts across all different business models and says: Why don’t we enable other organizations that are much closer to end users and interact with them more frequently than we do? We should do so in order to sell financial services because they have more regular interactions or touch points with the end-users, and they’re often more trusted in certain contexts too. Why don’t we help them not only sell solutions but also embed them – use components that we’ve got to create new types of experiences that make their propositions more attractive. Digital technology has become much more sophisticated; all those capabilities (products, data, underwriting) that were locked away within traditional companies can now be modularised and extracted into software technologies developed by tech companies. They are configured in ways that better suit the customer or are more convenient for end-users through unique experiences. BEST MOMENTS 'The business model is the most fundamental way that a company creates and delivers value for customers, captures value for itself, and increasingly shares value with others. It’s the most fundamental aspect of innovation, and most companies find it very difficult to execute on their business model innovation promise because well-crafted business models address so much more than what is often delivered right now.’ ‘Digital companies have taught us that you do not need to create a platform yourself; you can co-opt developers and third parties to create solutions for your customers, as Apple does with the App Store. In so doing, you drive demand for your core business, in Apple’s case, their phones.’ 'Over 50% of the big publicly traded financial companies were making zero or negative economic profit. There’s something wrong here: the customers aren’t getting what they need, and the majority of those supplying financial products aren’t making any profit either. That suggests there is a fundamental business model problem in finance, which is so important for everybody to live, work, and enjoy the company of others.’ ‘

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews FinTech and Blockchain Advisor Efi Pylarinou about why sustainable investing is so important, her view on the state of FinTech (and what the insurance industry can learn from it), sustainability in the context of Digital Transformation, what the emerging risks are, and more. KEY TAKEAWAYS Switzerland is one of the largest hubs for Blockchain in Finance, emerging from Crypto Valley. It’s an example of how an ecosystem works: You need the regulator, the private sector, the capital, and an international outreach for the recipe to work, and that’s what has happened in the crypto sector, but it hasn’t happened in FinTech. Having said that, the crypto sector in Switzerland is more in the RegTech sub-vertical, which is related to data analytics and so on. That’s the high level at which Switzerland stands. There’s something that worries me: an indicator that we’re early, with the insurance industry interested in climate, carbon footprint, and how companies and individuals can reduce their carbon footprint. But we’re seeing many businesses and startups offering services to trade for credits. We need to get over that. A company can get a high ESG ranking on the climate front, but that might be completely negated because they’re doing something on another front in terms of labour practices, for example. The ball has started rolling in the public markets, and BlackRock is leading and making big announcements. But in the public markets, this has to start from the seed, when the company is born: Is the company thinking sustainably, and what does it mean? How do you treat your team? Is your mission completely segregated from society and nature? No, it isn’t, but we don’t think like that yet. Going forward, we’ll see more incumbent banks partnering with sustainable FinTechs to integrate them into their lending practices, corporate finance, and commercial banking processes, for example. BEST MOMENTS ‘Innovation gets adopted, but before that happens, there needs to be a shift in the narrative. This is what is currently happening with sustainability. Still, we’re early in the journey.’ ‘In December 2020, ESG net inflows surpassed £ 1 billion, a record number.’ ‘Corporates still operate and make decisions in silos. Think about your borrowing needs; they are still separate from your investing needs. We haven’t put the whole picture together. Yet, centralized financing has to be part of the new culture, which is why it needs to start from the startups.’ ‘We’re seeing a trend where digital banking and finance apps take advantage of the lifestyle appeals, whether they’re giving rewards to people or gamifying their offerings due to the fact that people care more about the environment.’ ABOUT THE GUEST No.1 independent Global Woman Influencer in Finance & Data, a seasoned Wall Street professional with a Ph.D. in Finance, with over 200,000 followers across channels. Work at the intersections of Business Development, Marketing, and PR for Brands involved in Digital transformation in various industries. Thought leadership campaigns through strategic collaboration are one of my sweet spots as a B2B domain expert influencer with a passion for innovation. Domain expertise in financial services; Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence are two main disruptive technologies that I focus on. Efi's global audience (c. 200,000 across all platforms) values her multimedia daily curation. I am a prolific writer, a host of weekly audio and video content, a creator of weekly visual content, and a passionate speaker. Efi's passion is creating content that supports her clients' strategic business goals. You can connect with Efi on the platforms below Medium: https://efipm.medium.com/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/EfiPylarinou Twitter: https://twitter.com/efipm Website: https://efipylarinou.com/ ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Erlijn Sie, a seasoned social entrepreneur, leader, and social business advisor. Erlijn wrote a book on Reimagining Financial Inclusion, a must-read for all corporate business leaders concerned with the future of our planet. In the book, Erlijn discusses the 5 levers that shape our financial system. Erlijn also talks about ESG, focusing on social innovation and how social innovators support companies in achieving their impact. KEY TAKEAWAYS Maybe over the last few decades, we've become a bit too focused on the monetary side of ESG, and some companies have forgotten their core relevance to society. We’re now all trying to find our way back to the societal value we originally set out to build our organizations on. What makes social innovation (a person, a solution, a product) different from big corporations' purpose is that smaller companies do it in a radically different way, taking an issue they care about, feel passionate about, and want to solve radically. There’s nothing wrong with taking a good business model to support social innovation, but I do feel it should follow a solution and what fits that solution best. You don’t start your business by monetizing social innovation. You start with the issue, analyze its root causes, and consider how others can contribute to solving it. Big, powerful corporations still underestimate the potential change they could bring, especially financial resilience for those who need it most. Our former financial system was built in the last century, when we didn’t have the digital technology we have now. With such technologies and the speed of their development, we can financially include many more disadvantaged individuals and people who are excluded. If big corporations (not just banks and insurers) start to see the power of newer technologies, imagine how powerful they could be in the space financially, including so many more people, we can then start to really transform the system. We are currently dealing with a former financial system that basically serves half of the world’s population. That’s fundamentally wrong, we all know that financial services like being able to save your money in a safe place, getting a loan, insurance, and pensions, all these financial services allow you to live your life to your full potential. If you exclude more than half the world’s population from that system, that’s a waste of talent! We need to reform the financial system so that we include the other half. We can only do that if all companies work with us to tackle those flaws. Most of the flaws built into our former financial system stem from the technologies of the last century not allowing businesses to incorporate them affordably. Nowadays, we can include so many of them if we truly want to. BEST MOMENTS ‘I became a social entrepreneur by accident because I felt I needed more meaning in my day-to-day life, that’s why I founded a micro-finance institution providing very small loans to the most excluded people in the world.’ ‘ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. I’m mainly focused on the ‘S’, I feel that the ‘Social’ angle goes first.’ ‘Most systemic issues are too big for one of us to solve; the solution needs to be co-created among like-minded experts or people you feel can contribute to solving the issue best.’ ‘Entrepreneurial qualities are much more needed nowadays than they were last century. This has a lot to do with how fast change happens these days. The most important skill for all of us to learn is how to cope with change, how to be resilient, how to be able to constantly adapt to change.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Erlijn is a seasoned social entrepreneur, leader, and social business advisor to both the social and business/corporate sectors. Her background is rooted in business management, and her focus is on social innovation and financial inclusion. She has supported a range of systems that have enabled social entrepreneurs, as well as impacted the corporate sector, to develop new strategies, approaches, and models to drive inclusion in society. Erlijn brings a combination of deep insights, hands-on experience, and the latest trends in social innovations, blended business models, hybrid value chains, and new ways of organizing. She is dedicated to catalyzing impact, in general and specifically in financial inclusion, by connecting innovative and inclusive solutions with the challenges corporations face. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, co

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Susanne Chisthi, one of the leading names in the industry. Susanne started her career in finance before becoming an influential voice in FinTech. Susanne is also renowned for her work with investors and FinTech startups through the FINTECH Circle, a platform where startups can access education and angel investment. Susanne is also renowned for the wonderful books that she has written in collaboration with other co-authors and co-editors to educate the FinTech sector. KEY TAKEAWAYS The unique thing about our books is that we crowdsourced the best knowledge, worldwide, because we believe in the power of the community. No single person could ever write such a comprehensive book on FinTech, RegTech, or InsurTech, for example. It would be impossible. But accessing knowledge from 70 authors globally, representing corporations, Tech startups, Tech scaleups, and thought leaders, all contributing their expertise to the projects, makes these books extraordinary. Talking about the lessons we learned from the lack of travel, when you buy products abroad, you can claim the VAT back, sometimes large amounts. I never actually claim my VAT, because I never wanted to queue up at the airport to claim my VAT receipts. So I never claimed these back in my whole life. One of the FinTech companies I’m working with at present is putting all of this online. Imagine the future of VAT claims. This is an example of FinTech addressing a pain point in B2C that millions of customers worldwide face, and we can already see a significant impact when travel returns to normal. Diversity is key for anyone in a large financial institution. The team should be diverse. When we think about the testing and development of AI, business leaders need to be accountable for it too. Particularly, how fair is AI-led decision-making? Who gets accepted or rejected by an AI algorithm for a loan? Remember that those things can be very discriminatory if they’re coded wrongly. It is important for businesses to access a diverse workforce to develop AI-led technologies, consider use cases, how they can go wrong, and protect every individual through ethical AI. An ethical AI board is an important mechanism for ensuring businesses do the right thing in the long term and avoid well-known stereotypes. We have a responsibility as citizens to make things simpler and more transparent. We’ve seen significant movement in the FinTech sector in terms of investment behavior, but the good news is that, in the long term, the FinTech sector will continue to boom, and investors will want to stay in it. Investors will return to invest in ventures and deploy capital from earlier to later stages. BEST MOMENTS ‘Our goal is to make FinTech a mainstream sector and, at some stage, to replace finance overall – there will be no finance without FinTech.’ ‘Lots of banks are trying to figure out the best way to engage with the FinTech sector. It’s certainly easier said than done. The devil is often in the details. If you acquire a FinTech company, the key thing is to make sure you integrate the company into your organization well so that it still works after the acquisition without destroying its spirit, so both the startup and the corporation can benefit.’ ‘Technology is everybody’s responsibility; it’s mandatory for leaders to understand how technology can shape, empower, and enable what they do from a strategic point of view.’ ‘2020 was a year that shocked us all. I was in China in January of 2020, actually promoting a book. The effect of the current change will be profound. And nobody knows yet what the future will look like. So planning long-term will remain challenging.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Susanne Chishti is the CEO of FINTECH Circle, Europe’s 1st Angel Network focused on fintech opportunities. Susanne is also the founder of the FINTECH Circle Institute, the leading fintech learning platform that offers innovation workshops for C-level executives and online courses. She is also the Co-Editor of the bestselling The FINTECH Book, which has been translated into 10 languages and is sold across 107 countries, as well as The WEALTHTECH Book, The INSURTECH Book, The PAYTECH Book, The AI Book, and The LEGALTECH Book (all published by WILEY). She has also been a FinTech TV Commentator on CNBC. After completing her MBA, Susanne began her career at a FinTech company (before the term “FinTech” was invented in Silicon Valley 20 years ago). She then worked for more than 15 years across a number of financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley, and Accenture in London and Hong Kong. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Nicole Anderson, Founding Partner at Redsand Ventures, who supported Sabine’s acceleration programs over a 5-year period by providing those startups with proposition design and go-to-market strategic thinking. These two skill sets are crucial for gaining customers and accessing capital. In this episode, they discuss Nicole’s journey from a FinTech venture builder to a sustainable investor. KEY TAKEAWAYS I have sat now, effectively, in almost every seat around the table when it comes to looking at what investible ventures look like, feel like, and what success should and could be. Thankfully, I’ve had to go through the toughest schooling to make venturing successful and break through some of the barriers in financial services. It has always been a big aspiration of mine to break down the barriers of consumerism and finance. The path I’ve been on is a perfect platform for learning how to access capital, because there is money to be allocated in the world. There always will be. Still, it’s only when you’ve taken the journey yourself and been involved at the grassroots that you understand fundamentally what needs to be done. You can immediately see the true impact of the investment. I’ve finally got to the point in my life where I’m bringing it all together. I’m just a do-er, really, and I’ve always done things the hard way. Building ventures is very, very tough, and all the lessons that came out of those eight years prepared me for one thing: The biggest success factor in a venture is firstly knowing your market and not assuming it’s going to remain static. Secondly, thinking ahead of the market and remaining absolutely relevant with your value proposition. This requires a really strong degree of paranoia, which then cascades down into how your business model evolves. Never make any assumptions that things are going to stay the same, or that you know your consumer/customer more than you think you do. Thirdly, everything fails without money. Money will always find a good opportunity, but never underestimate the runway you need to grow and scale. We are not a VC or private equity fund; we’re a private equity structure that uses very innovative project financing techniques to deploy financial instruments across a varied portfolio and absorb quite a lot of risk for that portfolio. By the way, we’ve engineered the allocation of money. We don’t invest at a very early stage, except in very strategic areas, but most of our work is in the growth phase of a venture, and we’ve moved well out of financial services. I identified 5-6 areas – all verticals or industries – that I believe in. My goal is to build a stellar portfolio with one major investment in each one of them in order to make a significant impact in selected countries/regions; that’s the strategy we’ve taken. BEST MOMENTS ‘Like anything in life, the best opportunities come to you rather than you chasing them down. Often, what you think you want is not actually good for you.’ ‘I knew that if I was going to be successful, I needed to sit on the money myself and be master of my own universe. By hook or by crook, I was going to do what it took to find ways in which to build my own investment structure, so I set up a fund.’ ‘The real frustration of many entrepreneurs is that their innovation, which is often in the area of green innovation, was being misunderstood. I wanted to fill that gap.’ ‘We’re in an evolution phase. Anyone in the spectrum of grassroots investing right up to multi-fund structure is in the adoption phase of some kind of strategy linked to sustainability and ESG.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Nicole is a venture builder and investment advisor (corporate venture, VC, family office, and token/digital asset). As a multiple-time technology entrepreneur (CEO & Founder) and an innovation thought leader, she has gained an in-depth knowledge of crypto technologies, blockchain, and green finance. Passionate about technology business models that are challenging the status quo and providing greater inclusion for people globally and having a positive impact on our environment, she has focused her lens on the intersection between emerging technologies and emerging markets, both physical and virtual. Her company Redsand Ventures, works with corporate visionaries and professional investors who are unfaltering in their execution of the green economy. It sits at the intersection of disruptive business models and sustainable real estate as an investment opportunity. Redsand Ventures has built and exited over 10 disruptive financial technology ventures in the last 7 years. Voted Innovator of the Year, 2017 by the South African Chamber of Commerce, Top 100 Women in FinTech 2016 by Innovate Finance, and included in the Power Women of FinTech 2015, 2016, and 2017, Nicole is also active in the London and European start-up acceleration, incubation and growth arena working as an advisor and mentor to Level39, Startupb

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Gwen Yu, an expert in sustainable finance with a background in transfer pricing, who helps international ventures understand the best way to expand internationally. Sabine talks to Gwen about how she made her way into sustainable finance, and how her past business and personal experiences have shaped her decision to support a better future and a better planet. During the course of the discussion, Gwen shares her vision, mission, and goals with regard to shaping a more sustainable future. KEY TAKEAWAYS There is so much variety in everything that I’ve done in my career. It’s only looking back now that I see how all the different pieces fit together. If you take sustainability in a broader sense, you’re looking at ESG in general, and transfer pricing is relevant for understanding governance and how everything fits holistically within the puzzle. Everything from understanding your supply chain to figuring out where demand goes. Early in my career a manager came to me and said: “The younger you, is most of the options you will have and it’s going to be really hard to make a decision to shut certain doors offered to you. But you shouldn’t look at it that way; you should look at it as that’s the path you’re going to go down eventually. And maybe you’ll circle back around. But early on, you must define what’s important to you as a person. It doesn’t matter what that is, but you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and recognize the person you are.” That has fuelled my path. I want to have a positive impact in whatever I’m doing, and I want to leave wherever I’ve touched enhanced and better than before. To get a loan from a bank, you would go through a credit committee, which traditionally would check if the person is risky, has defaulted before, where they are positioned, and if they have a sound business plan. To incorporate sustainability into what financial institutions are doing now, they’re looking at the sustainability rankings in terms of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) of whoever it is they’re providing a loan to. Typically, it’s mostly for big corporations because that’s where the data is available. Do they have proper supply chain governance? Are they doing something harmful or positive for biodiversity? How are they funding new projects? These are now becoming standard practices and will be rolled out so that, when you go to the credit committee to get a loan, how sustainable you are will play a role in the interest rate you get. If you’re not sustainable, you are likely to become a riskier client. Technology will be a critical part of driving change in sustainable finance. From the decision-making process, the required data analysis inputs will need to be pushed out, and quality controls will need to be put in place to ensure it’s actually sustainable. I don’t think the big guys are going to be able to do it alone. The innovation will start with small pockets and groups with great ideas. This will be pushed through to ensure that tech is doing well and serving a diversified community rather than a one-dimensional one. BEST MOMENTS ‘I think transfer pricing gets a bad rap because one of the most important parts is trying to figure out the actual market price you should be paying for services as opposed to the negative connotation where you’re doing tax evasion.’ ‘I believe the universe comes full circle somehow, and I’m not at the end of my circle, but I can see where all these interconnections happen.’ ‘Purpose and impact have become much more important, much more than just what people want to say in their marketing brochures, but actually drilling down to see how what you’re telling is true? Are you doing what you are saying you’re going to do? Am I investing in companies that I feel are in line with my values?’ ‘Sustainable finance is just adding another lens to ensure that your money is invested in what’s necessary or good. Is your investment making a negative or positive impact? Is it going to serve an underserved community or causes that you want to see addressed?’ ABOUT THE GUEST Gwen Yu is an expert in sustainable finance, with experience in transfer pricing, and has worked with renowned companies, including Sherpa and BNP Paribas. She also worked with the European Commission as a member of the data and usability subgroup. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine Vander

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sam Evans, Partner at EOS Venture Partners, a Strategic Venture Capital fund and an InsurTech investment specialist with offices in London and Philadelphia. This is their 2nd interview as Sam appeared in episode 6 of Scouting for Growth. Here, the pair discusses sustainability and ESG, the impact of urbanization, climate risk, and supply chain risk. Topics that have become increasingly important for many sectors of the economy, with over 2.2 trillion searches on Google's search engine for the term ESG (as of May 2022) KEY TAKEAWAYS As a global economy, we’re facing a number of pivotal challenges. These include major weather-related events linked to climate change and other natural catastrophes, significant population dynamics in many parts of the world, including aging populations, as well as the development of the right urban infrastructure to support people. With current urbanization trends, a significant proportion of the population is moving into cities, resulting in challenges with housing and logistics. Insurance and InsurTech have a key role to play in supporting these major macro shifts. Equality of access to healthcare is going to be critical as we face growing populations. Here we’re looking at the ability to leverage different ways of thinking about insurance, making it less about a pure protection-driven product and more about a protection-focused approach to help them live healthier, longer lives. We’re going to see a lot more gig economy workers, and we’re already seeing that traditional insurance solutions aren’t fit for purpose because they’re generic, not usage-based, and don’t align with policyholders' underlying behaviors. Responding to natural catastrophes is an area where the insurance industry as a whole is already doing significant work, and there are many initiatives to reduce the protection gap, but clearly, a large proportion of vulnerable economies and populations still lack insurance. So, closing that protection gap will be important. BEST MOMENTS ‘Clearly there’s a lot that can be done to make healthcare more affordable, easier to access, but also a lot more efficient.’ ‘Close to 50% of the US population score badly from a credit risk perspective and are therefore penalised through the cost of their insurance. The ability to tailor usage-based coverage that switches seamlessly between personal and commercial usage – for example, if you’re using your vehicle for a ride-share scheme, this becomes very relevant for individuals.’ ‘Energy usage and efficiency gains are going to become a lot more important. We have to be much more focused and smart around how we use resources. Technology can play a key role even from a home perspective on energy usage by using IoT, sensors, and smart AI to improve behaviours, enhance efficiency, and lower energy usage.’ ‘Insurance touches every single part of the economy, so it’s a natural enabler for driving these initiatives.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sam is a partner at EOS Venture Partners, a Strategic Venture Capital fund and an InsurTech investment specialist with offices in London and Philadelphia. EOS invests in Series A and Series B growth ventures with emerging business models and new technologies that will impact and transform the insurance industry. Today, EOS provides financing and advisory services to leading entrepreneurs building innovative insurance businesses. In partnership with RAW Capital Partners, EOS offers a unique solution for growth-stage InsurTech companies. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]