Breaking the ICE

In episode fourteen, Lloyd Overton is flying solo in the host seat, and is joined by special guest Steven Loudwill - a 30-year insurance and reinsurance veteran and former motor insurer CEO - to talk about his new venture, the Icoco Club, and why motor insurance is so overdue a makeover.

Steve is refreshingly honest about the problem: motor insurance is an intangible product - you are buying a promise - that customers rarely value and insurers often lose money on, inside a fragmented, structurally challenged market. He shares the catalyst for change, including a shocking motorway accident with his partner where their own insurer's response was dismal, all while he was serving as a motor insurer CEO himself. Out of that frustration came Icoco: a free-to-join community club built around real local connections between individuals, businesses, charities and schools, with five promises at its heart - safer roads, support for good causes, everyday savings, rewards, and a genuine free share in the business for members.

The conversation widens into trust and conduct as the root of many of the market's problems, the squeeze on the charities and schools Steve wants Icoco to help, and the role of technology - where ageing insurer systems meet new AI capabilities, and where ICE-Tech comes in. Freshly launched on 11 September and still in build mode, Icoco has passed its first 100 individual members, and Steve sets out what success looks like: a better deal for motorists, real money for good causes, and a measurable drop in accidents.

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Find out more and join the club at https://icococlub.co.uk/

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In episode thirteen, hosts Elliott Draga and Mark Colonnese are joined by Mike Jackson, co-founder of Helm and a vet of more than 20 years. Mike built and later sold a multi-site veterinary practice in Scotland before moving into technology, and the conversation tackles one of the thorniest gaps in pet care: the disconnect between the vet's consult room and the insurer.

Mike explains what Helm is building - a system that sits alongside the practice management system as a practice's operational backbone, handling communication, workflows and protocols with AI underneath. Much of the discussion centres on "contextualized care": getting the right information to the right person at the right moment, and why today almost nobody in the consult room knows a pet's true financial and insurance position. Through a vivid example, Mike shows how treatment choices and their costs hinge on that missing context, and the trio dig into the pain points around claims, multiple portals, and the risk vets carry when they treat on good faith.

They look ahead to a "Nirvana state" of shared medical records, proactive record-sharing at policy inception and even predictive cover that rewards good preventative care - alongside the data-protection wrinkles, the geriatric-pet drop-off, and the big, controversial question of whether pet insurance has pushed up the cost of veterinary care. Mike's parting message is optimistic: this is a tech problem, and it can be solved by joining up the vet and insurer worlds.

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In episode twelve, hosts Elliott Draga and Lloyd Overton are joined by Joe Wood, a new member of the ICE-Tech team, recently arrived in an account management role focused on supporting existing clients. Joe shares his route into insurtech and his early impressions from behind the curtain at ICE-Tech.

Joe traces a path from a law degree into insurance broking and then insurtech, where client management has been the constant thread. He and the hosts explore what has stood out since he joined - the breadth of the ICE platform across policy and claims, its configurability from motor and home to commercial, pet, travel and IPMI, and the deep insurance domain expertise that sits alongside the engineering. Joe sets out his "ladder of partnership" approach to customer success, from getting the basics right through to true partnership, while the trio discuss ICE-Tech's responsible, guardrailed approach to AI - combining large language models with deterministic processes rather than using AI for its own sake.

The conversation broadens into growth opportunities - geographic expansion across English-speaking markets, product-line diversification, and reputation built on proven deployments - before a lively tangent on cyber as an emerging risk, from pricing the near-unquantifiable to whether any of them would buy personal cyber cover. Joe closes on what excites him ahead: meeting more customers, an upcoming client day, and helping clients get the most from what ICE-Tech offers.

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Episode eleven is a business update from Elliott Draga and Lloyd Overton, running through what's coming up this autumn - the Insurance Innovators conference in London on 3-4 November, and the upcoming Alice Claims webinar on 7 October, introducing ICE-Tech's Alice AI suite covering sales, policy servicing and first notification of loss across both the Nordic and ICE platforms.

The conversation then turns to a comparison of trends either side of the Atlantic. Elliott shares striking Canadian data on catastrophic climate claims - 2025 was the tenth-costliest year on record, with the past decade's payouts more than double the one before, driven by wildfires and urban flooding - while Lloyd reflects on the UK's own shifting weather-related claims, from subsidence to escape-of-water and heat-related school closures. They also cover diverging trends in commercial insurance, where falling rates and rising MGA activity contrast with Canada's tariff-driven pricing uncertainty, and fraud, which is becoming more organised on both sides, with Canada projecting $5 billion in losses for 2025 and the UK grappling with its own long-standing challenges.

The episode closes on a lighter note about AI cutting both ways - with consumers increasingly using it to challenge claims decisions - before Elliott and Lloyd sign off for the week.

Alice Claims Webinar: https://ice-tech.com/alice-claims-webinar-page/

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Episode ten picks up where the previous episode left off, with Elliott Draga and Lloyd Overton joined again by Mark Colonnese for part two of their pet insurance conversation, recorded around the time of the NAFIA pet round table event.

The discussion covers the history and future of vet-insurer data integration, from the legacy Vet Envoy platform to newer entrants and ICE-Tech's own direct integrations. Mark sets out the shift from a reimbursement model towards a "pay at point of care" approach, and the industry's ongoing struggle with underwriting at time of sale - where pre-existing conditions often only surface after a claim is made, and how better data sharing and automation could fix that. 

The conversation then broadens into distribution: retail and pet food channels, kennels and shelters as a trusted first touchpoint, the UK's aggregator-driven market, and the growing use of wearable pet health devices. The episode wraps with a lighter note on some of the wilder claims Mark has seen...

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In episode nine, hosts Elliott Draga, Lloyd Overton and Mark Colonnese turn the spotlight on Mark, the show's resident pet insurance expert, for the podcast's first deep dive into the pet market. Mark explains what makes pet insurance so distinct from other personal lines - and why, in his words, it's really all about claims.

Drawing on a career spent building pet insurance and claims technology, Mark traces the UK and US markets from niche beginnings to today's fast-growing, increasingly crowded landscape. The trio dig into the numbers behind pet claims - where 100,000 policies can generate 70,000-plus a year - and the automation challenge that follows, from rules-based processing to machine learning. They explore what makes pet unique on the policy side, from breed-based pricing across hundreds of species to a shift towards modular, build-your-own cover with wellness add-ons. Much of the conversation centres on the vet channel, where the vet is both the source of claims and a key sales channel, and on the tensions created by private equity consolidation and retailer-owned practices like Pets at Home.

They close on the pressures ahead - rising indemnity spend and premiums, the affordability of cover for ageing pets, the ethical questions that raises, and the lingering effects of the COVID pet boom - before running out of time. Elliott and Mark tee up a follow-up episode, with vet-to-insurer connectivity flagged as the next big shift to watch.

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In episode eight, host Elliott Draga is joined by podcast veterans Tom Bool and James Austin of Lexxika, a language services provider specialising in the travel insurance and medical assistance industry. The conversation digs into a corner of the industry few people see: the high-quality, high-stakes medical translation that sits behind live assistance cases.

Tom and James explain what makes assistance translation so demanding - documents that are short, urgent and highly complex all at once, unpredictable demand across 90-plus languages, ugly source scans, and strict data security. They cover the human element that keeps skilled translators in the field, and how Lexxika has become a technology company with its own portal and development team. On AI, they're candid: medical data can't simply be fed into open-source models, and only four core languages - French, Italian, German and Spanish - produce output good enough to edit. They describe their ethical approach, bringing translators in-house rather than squeezing freelancers, and why editing AI output is a wholly different skill from translating.

The episode closes on the years ahead - climate change reshaping where people travel, the ever-growing desire to explore, and a shared conviction that humans must stay at the heart of assistance.

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In episode seven, host Elliott Draga is joined by two of ICE-Tech's senior leaders - Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Passfield, back for a second appearance, and Chief Technology Officer Al Robertson. Together they set out to demystify Artifical Intelligence in enterprise software and how the engineering team uses it to augment its own software development lifecycle.

Our resident CTO discusses the move towards "shifting left" - engineers now spend far more time on requirements, specification and architecture, while Artificial Intelligence based agents handle much of the build. He also discusses the investment behind it: an "AI champions" community spreading best practice across teams, an internal "agentic layer" of around 300 skills that teach the models ICE-Tech's private codebase and standards, and how tools like Claude Code and Codex used together for building and review. Andrew and Elliott press on the realities lost in the hype - that tokens, training, and heavier upfront specification all carry real cost, and that humans remain essential for judgement, architecture, and quality assurance.

The guys also weigh in on where artificial intelligence does and doesn't belong - where plain code is more efficient, or where its non-determinism clashes with a process that must be reliable - alongside standout wins like an AI-built migration framework that would once have taken many man-years.  

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In episode six, host Elliott Draga is joined by ICE-Tech colleague Jane Hegeler, who brings 25 years in travel insurance and medical assistance from the Nordic Insurance Software side of the business. Together they explore how the travel market is changing, and where technology and AI genuinely help in assistance - and where the human touch still matters most.

Jane traces her path from the British Embassy in Thailand into medical assistance across the APAC region and, four years ago, to Nordic Insurance Software. She and Elliott discuss the wave of M&A in travel, and why the market isn't shrinking but drawing in new entrants through globalisation, embedded cover and B2B partnerships. They cover the evolution of assistance technology, the balance between automating routine cases and keeping people front and centre in a crisis, the EU's new AI regulatory framework, and the value of tools like ICE-Tech's Orchestrator for surfacing a patient's medical history and location at the point of need.

The episode closes on a competitive but optimistic market, where cheaper technology is lowering barriers to entry and, ultimately, making travel safer for everyone. Elliott also teases an upcoming episode focused on reliability, availability and scalability.

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Episode five opens with a quick news roundup from Elliott Draga - Alphabet's cloud growth and first-ever negative cash flow, OpenAI's move into enterprise video chat with Presence, and Google's rollout of selfie-video authentication - before welcoming the show's third guest, Andrew Passfield, co-founder of ICE InsureTech - and now Chief Commercial Officer at ICE-Tech following its merger with Nordic Insurance Software.

Andrew traces his career from the mid-1980s UK direct insurance boom through to founding ICE InsureTech in 2002/2003, building it first around claims and later policy, and the milestones along the way - early motor and household implementations, the company's first insurer client in 2008, and its acquisition by Acturis in 2012. The conversation then turns to the January merger of Nordic Insurance Software and ICE InsureTech to form the newly combined ICE-Tech, the logic behind bringing together NIS's global travel and IPMI strength with ICE InsureTech's UK personal lines base, and how the now-merged teams across the UK, Copenhagen, Poland, Malaysia and Toronto are settling in.

The episode closes on AI: separating genuine capability from hype, ICE-Tech's orchestration and agentic work with early customers, and Andrew and Elliott's shared view that legacy transformation needs more than AI as a "silver bullet."

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