In this episode, Matthew Grant sits down with Nicola Turner and Alex Ley, co-founders of Scrub AI, to explore one of the most pressing strategic questions facing insurers today: Build vs Buy in the age of generative AI. 

Five years into building an AI-driven data cleansing platform for carriers and brokers, Nicola and Alex have seen the market shift from scepticism to urgency. Boardrooms are now asking how AI is being embedded into underwriting workflows, and whether those capabilities should be developed internally or sourced from specialists. 

Drawing on their experience building deterministic AI models for exposure data and catastrophe modelling, they offer a grounded perspective on what works, what breaks and where the real risks sit. 

At the heart of the discussion is a simple truth: getting to 80% is easy. Getting the final 20% right is where strategy, domain expertise and long-term thinking matter most. 

In this conversation, Nicola and Alex share: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. 

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In this episode, Robin Merttens sits down with Frank Perkins, CEO and Co-founder of inari, to explore what it really takes to build and scale a modern MGA in 2026. 

From founding an insurance business himself to leading a technology company serving specialist MGAs across Europe, Frank brings a rare dual perspective. He understands both the pressure of getting premium through the door and the responsibility of building systems that underwriters actually want to use. 

As private equity capital accelerates into the sector and niche, digital-first MGAs proliferate across continental Europe, the conversation turns to speed, integration and the quiet evolution of the underwriting workbench. 

In this conversation, Frank shares: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn. 

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In this episode, we bring you a live panel from InsTech’s May event at CodeNode, exploring how automation is reshaping claims in the Lloyd’s and London market — and why the belief that specialty is too complex to automate no longer stands. 

Moderated by Matthew Grant, CEO of InsTech, the panel features Simon White, Chief Claims Officer at Apollo, Aidan O’Neill, Founder and CEO of DOCOsoft, and Zoe Woods, Claims Improvement Manager at Lloyd’s. 

Specialty claims have long been viewed as too bespoke, too nuanced and too reliant on human judgement for automation to play a meaningful role. But as underwriting becomes algorithmic and distribution turns digital, claims can no longer lag behind. 

This conversation moves beyond theory to evidence. Automation is already embedded in live workflows across the market. The firms adopting early are seeing measurable operational gains. 

In this conversation, they share: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. 

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What actually makes automated and enhanced underwriting work in practice? 

In this episode, three early movers in automated underwriting share hard-earned lessons from building digital underwriting propositions that have survived real market cycles. Rather than theory or hype, this conversation digs into where technology genuinely creates advantage, where it does not, and how underwriting judgement remains central even in highly algorithmic models. 

Drawing on experience across cyber, US property and digital facilities, the panel explores why complexity, not commoditisation, is often where automation delivers the greatest edge. From AI-driven cyber underwriting to high-cat surplus lines property and digitally distributed specialty products, each speaker explains how they chose their focus and what they learned along the way. 

Key themes include the role of data discipline in sustaining AI-led underwriting, why platform design matters more than speed to market, and how underwriters’ roles are shifting from generalists to specialists embedded in algorithmic decision making. The discussion also tackles unstructured data, submission quality and why “no data, no deal” may become a defining principle of future underwriting models. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

Featuring perspectives from Marek Shafer of Vave, Tom Squires of AEGIS London and Jonathan Spry of Envelop Risk, moderated by Matthew Grant of InsTech. 

You can also watch the video version of this panel here. 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. 

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What happens when AI meets the backbone of the insurance industry - policy administration systems? In this episode, Liselotte Munk, CEO of Fadata, joins Robin Merttens to unpack how artificial intelligence is reshaping the software layer of insurance. 

With candid insights into Fadata’s AI strategy, Liselotte reveals how the company is using AI to accelerate software development and reduce implementation costs while improving quality. She tackles the big question: will AI make policy admin systems obsolete? Her answer offers a pragmatic view on cost, complexity, compliance and collaboration. 

In this conversation, Liselotte shares: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn. 

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In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Tobi Schneider, Sector Engagement Lead for Financial Services & FinTech at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, to unpack one of the most ambitious research initiatives currently shaping the future of AI risk in insurance. Backed by UKRI and developed in collaboration with AXA Group and three leading universities, the project aims to build a foundational blueprint for how insurers can understand, audit and underwrite emerging AI risks. 

Tobi shares why the shift from traditional to generative and agentic AI has outpaced current risk frameworks, leaving insurers exposed to risks that are poorly defined, difficult to monitor and impossible to price using historic loss data. He explains how his team is exploring dynamic underwriting models, parametric solutions and novel assurance techniques like LLM-based judges and automated red teaming, all with the goal of enabling safer, more accountable AI adoption. 

Ahead of the Agentic AI Half Day event, hosted in collaboration with AI Risk, Tobi Schneider and Lukasz Szpruch wrote an article The New Frontier: Managing and insuring generative and agentic AI risks, further exploring this topic.  

In this conversation, Tobi shares: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn. 

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This week we bring you an episode of Bootstrap Confidential featuring InsTech’s very own CEO, Matthew Grant, who joined Charles Green in the latter half of 2025 to reflect on the eight-year journey of building InsTech from the ground up without outside funding, and with an intentional focus on sustainable growth. 

Matthew’s route to growing InsTech wasn’t typical. With a background in risk, analytics and around 400 podcast episodes as a host, he brought a deep understanding of the insurance sector and what it takes to build a commercially viable, insight-led business. The result? A thriving community of over 30,000, a high-margin membership model and a successful exit achieved through discipline, focus and clear-eyed decisions. 

In this conversation, Matthew shares: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. 

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In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Andy Yeoman, CEO of Concirrus, to unpack how a key player in marine insurance tech has reinvented itself as a core platform provider for the specialty market, and what that transformation says about where the industry is heading. 

Andy shares the thinking behind Concirrus’ pivot from ship tracking to full risk lifecycle processing, what it takes to build end-to-end technology in just 18 months, and why underwriters, not just CTOs, are now leading the charge on system change. 

In this conversation, Andy shares: 

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Robin Merttens on LinkedIn. 

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How can AI weather models improve the accuracy and scale of catastrophe modelling?

Matthew Grant is joined by David Wood, Managing Director at JBA Risk Management, and Jochen Papenbrock, Head of Financial Technology (EMEA) at NVIDIA, to explore how accelerated computing is unlocking new ways to simulate and manage flood risk.

JBA has long been a pioneer in flood modelling, while NVIDIA’s GPU technology has helped drive the recent breakthroughs in AI and generative modelling. Together, they discuss how high-resolution simulations, new ensemble methods and open-source tools are pushing the limits of what’s possible in climate and catastrophe analytics.

Key Talking Points:

If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn. 

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In this episode, Robin Merttens is joined by Dr Thomas Kuhnt (HDI Global SE), Ed Ackerman (Qover) and Vincent De Ponthaud (AXA) for a rare C-suite perspective on Agentic AI — what it is, how it's being deployed and why senior leaders are walking a tightrope between bold innovation and operational risk.

Agentic AI promises transformative value, but for decision-makers at the top, it also brings real uncertainty. What do you build vs. buy? How do you prove ROI? And how do you prevent over-trusting agents that are inherently probabilistic?

In this conversation, Thomas, Ed and Vincent share:

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