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 size 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 sometimes you can’t always 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 on a few of our concepts – is a way to not signal to everyone what you are doing, so that 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 where you tell someone they’re infringing on your IP and 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 be able to make it simpler for the person we engage with and who’s got a problem we can solve.  Second, they also need to be able to articulate it well to ensure that 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 that 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 up businesses with a broad set of technologies, using different business models and team-based delivery.  Henry now serves as CEO for AkinovA, an insurance technology company that he co-founded with a specialist ILS (insurance-linked securities and related insurance products.) Henry drives 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 served 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 €1bn+ PPP.  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 patents granted and pending and has several papers published in well-known, peer-reviewed, scientific journals, topics including composite materials, neutron diffraction, and processes to improve industrial product development cycles.  Henry is regularly invited to speak at international conferences and spoke in the US Senate and French Senate too. Henry provides advice to selected major global institutional, venture capital, and private equity funds. In addition to meeting several Heads of State, Henry made several appearances on Live-TV and recorded TV and Radio programs (e.g. Live CNBC TV, Live Bloomberg TV, Live BBC Radio 4 “The Today Programme”, recorded BBC and other programs, provided thought leadership and quoted articles in broadsheets, e-newspapers, and The Huffington Post.) 

Henry is married to Anne. They both have one child called Alexander.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henriwinand/

AkinovA is building an electronic marketplace for the transfer and trading of (re)insurance risks. By working in collaboration and partnership with the insurance industry, AkinovA helps optimize the risk transfer value chain by providing a capital markets grade, industry-regulated, trading platform, and clearing house. AkinovA provides valuable data and analytics to participants and regulators from the aggregated data that passes through the marketplace. AkinovA grows the overall size of the insurance marketplace by enabling new participants to enter and existing participants to transact more business. There is significant pressure from the Capital Markets wanting an appropriate mechanism to access insurance risks that are de-correlated from the bonds and equity markets. Creating an effective secondary market for (re)insurance risks, to enable these risks to be traded, will dramatically increase the volume of business that is transacted across the marketplace. AkinovA is working with a number of brokers, who act as key channel partners for the existing industry, to kickstart liquidity in the marketplace. AkinovA provides them with a venue to service their clients’ needs in a more efficient and timely manner as well as gives them access to new clients entering the market who would benefit from their advice. AkinovA’s goal is to remain an independent marketplace enabling it to attract and work with all trading parties without undue influence from industry participants.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/akinova-limited/ 

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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