July 06, 2022

Jean-Charles Velge: Insurance-as-a-Service

42 minutes

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.

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