On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Rob Schimek, Group CEO at bolttech, about how bolttech’s connector model is redefining global insurance distribution, from telcos to auto makers and beyond.

They also talk about why the future of protection will depend on trust, data and design more than policy documents and premiums, and what leadership really looks like when you are building at the intersection of revelation, innovation, and human impact. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

If you have an hour to solve a problem you should spend 55 minutes on the problem and then 5 minutes on the solution. I’ve spent my career in the problem, the formation of bolttech is the attempt at the solution – it’s the path that I’ve chosen to bring that solution to the marketplace.

Our mission is to work out how to close a multi-billion-dollar protection gap that has existed for years, that’s getting bigger? In order to do that we need to really understand the problem. We think there are 4 basic drivers for this multi-billion-dollar protection gap that and they’re pretty irrefutable.

We’re trying to make a seamless connection between the buyers of protection products (insurers) and the distribution partners who have access to the customers so we can put those solutions into the hands of the customers. bolttech’s here to try to provide tailored, affordable, accessible, and convenience insurance in the hands of the customer on a B2B2C basis, connecting big partners who have lots of customers to the insurance providers.

Without the data there’s a tendency to paint everything with one brush, like it’s all the same. Data is accessible and available on a real-time basis today and it can be available with no intervention, straight from the vehicle telematics about the unique driver.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘We really want to connect people with more ways to protect the things that they value, we want to close the global protection gap.’ 

‘The more we make connections frictionless, the more the connection will happen and the more the protection gap will get closed.’‘

If the mission and the vision are super-well-known then nothing can distract you from solving that problem, regardless of what’s going on in the marketplace around you.’‘

If a customer doesn’t trust the use of AI in their interactions with you then AI won’t be successful in that space because it won’t be accepted in that space. Ultimately it comes back to do we do things the right way and give the customers a reason to trust us?’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Rob Schimek is Group Chief Executive Office at bolttech where he leads the team across its operations globally, overseeing its growth and partnership opportunities.

With more than 30 years of experience in the financial services industry, Rob previously held senior leadership roles, including Managing Director & Group Chief Operating Officer for FWD Group, President and Chief Executive Officer of AIG’s commercial insurance businesses worldwide, and Chief Executive Officer of the Americas for AIG. Prior to that, he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of EMEA for AIG, and was the Chief Financial Officer of AIG’s global property and casualty insurance business.

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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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to us about all she’s learned from the numerous guests on the show recently, from startup founders who build AI to simplify the chaotic insurance back office, to innovation leaders in Fortune 500 firms wrestling with ethics, regulation, and talent shortages.

After dozens of conversations here’s what Sabine has learned: AI isn’t just changing our tools. It’s changing our temperament.

This episode is her reflection on those lessons; a guide for leaders and builders trying to navigate this new age of intelligence and unpacks five principles that define successful AI adoption.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

When Branch Insurance introduced AI into its claims process, something unexpected happened. It wasn’t the customers who resisted, it was the adjusters. They were worried, not because AI made mistakes but because it didn’t.

When Lisa Bechtold’s (who led AI governance at Zurich Insurance, now at Nestlé) team started implementing AI, they faced the classic dilemma: Move fast or move right. Lisa said: “We don’t see governance as slowing innovation – we see it as enabling trust at speed.”

ERGO Group worked with CamCom, a startup from India that uses computer vision to detect car damage from photos or drones. The tech was brilliant. The challenge? Integrating it into a multinational insurer’s process. They didn’t just hand over the product, they sat side by side – engineers, adjusters, compliance officers, even lawyers – to make it work. It took nearly a year to get from pilot to production and the result wasn’t just faster claims; it was a new relationship model. The startup learned how corporates think. The corporate learned how startups move. That’s the real win.

After all the talk about data, systems, ethics, and pilots, what really matters is how humans evolve. AI won’t replace people, but people who know how to use AI will replace people who don’t. That’s not a threat, it’s an invitation. AI is already changing what we expect from talent. Claims adjusters now need to interpret AI outputs. Underwriters must question models. Leaders must learn to manage digital teammates.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Intelligent tool don’t remove human judgment; they reveal it in higher resolution.’ 

‘In this AI era, trust is the new currency.’‘Every AI dream dies in the shadow of bad data.’‘The irony is that the more intelligent our systems become, the more human our leadership must be. Empathy, creativity, ethics aren’t data points, they’re our differentiators.’

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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Stephen Brittain, co-founder of InsurTech Gateway, a pioneering venture builder focused on bringing early-stage startups into the heart of the insurance world – a regulated industry that typically moves at glacial speed.

Over the past decade, Stephen has helped launch and scale ventures inside one of the most regulated, risk-averse business sectors on the planet: the insurance space. He has been the spark for innovation inside large insurance corporates and the strategic partner for founders who wanted to navigate the labyrinth of regulation, procurement and distribution at scale. In other words: he has been solving the archetypal “how to innovate inside a large enterprise” question while keeping the spirit of a startup alive.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

I was a product /service designer, and I found myself – through building bigger and bigger products – coming up against risk, and I saw risk as a constraint. I knew that if I could only understand risk better that I might be able to do bigger and bolder and better projects. That’s how I outgrew product design and moved into insurance.

InsurTech Gateway’s original intention was to find amazing founders and fast-track them into market with enough creative energy to survive, adapt and evolve in an environment where your first idea had to be your fixed idea. Today we give founders greater agility to learn and evolve, because no one ever knows what to do when they first start, it’s a learning journey.

The upside, the enthusiasm, the opportunity framing of entrepreneurialism and venturing gets everybody started, rallies people together. But, an a bad day, the downside view is actually the long-term sustainability of any new category. VCs and insurers have never sat round the table together.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘The opportunity was not to make insurance sexy, it was to look at the secret powers of insurance to create mutual models to work at scale, to unlock lending and put trust into ecosystems that didn’t exist before.’ 

‘One of the biggest challenges in InsurTech is; to get a successful outcome from something that looked great on day 1 but didn’t evolve into the opportunity.’

‘Pattern recognition has never been higher and the cost to entry and experimentation has never been lower. We recognise what works and what doesn’t much better, but can we validate it with an insurer and get them onside? I think we still need to work out the connectivity.’

‘If you can work with innovators, and you understand risk, and you can help unlock that innovation, you can make it sustainable.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Stephen Brittain is the Co-Founder of InsurTech Gateway, the world’s first authorised venture builder and fund focused on insurtech. A true pioneer at the intersection of innovation, investment, and impact, Stephen has spent the past decade turning bold ideas into scalable ventures that redefine how insurance and technology collide.

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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastien Denef, CEO and co-founder at AGENTS.inc, a company at the forefront of building intelligent agent platforms for enterprises.

On this episode we explore how agentic AI architectures are reshaping industries, what it takes to scale agentic AI solutions across siloes, and why the winners in this space will be those who master both the technology and collaboration.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

You can give a task to an AI agent – a piece of software – that autonomously handles the task. When compared to previous layers of automation, we can now increase the autonomy level because of the AI models and the increased amounts of data we have. 

It’s underhyped. The impact we can have with today’s technology is very, very big and it will impact all sectors, from education to finding a job, buying a house, buying your groceries, deciding where to go on your weekend where right now we’re only seeing the beginnings of what could happen. 

Almost the entire industry is trying to improve ChatGPT, to make it a little bit better, we actually see that this chat function isn’t really needed. What is needed is having a tireless workforce that tirelessly works for you as AI agents – you don’t necessarily want to converse with all of them because there would be too many messages to handle. You need a control interface to steer these new employees.

RPA allowed us to move a document from A to B. AI agents will allow us to understand what’s inside that document, extract the right stuff, put the right thing into the system, evaluate the information, and so on. All these things were impossible before, that’s the big difference and that is possible today.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Think of AI agents as computers that work while you are asleep.’ 

‘We will see shifts in entire industries, especially those with large workforces which will no longer be needed, and we will see new stuff coming up because of that.’

‘Companies are only just waking up from the dream that if you use ChatGPT or Microsoft CoPilot you’re “AI-ready”.’

‘More than 70% of the work people do right now can be automated.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Sebastien Denef is CEO and co-founder at AGENTS.inc who is inventing the future of human-computer interaction.

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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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Ulrich (Uli) Homann, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft, and Mark Luquire, EY Global Microsoft Alliance Co-innovation Leader, about how to build an agentic AI enterprise that doesn’t just work faster, but works smarter and, most importantly, works for everyone.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In the past automation has been very task driven and specific, things had to go in a certain order and you needed to know that order ahead of time. While you need some of that with generative AI, we now have a system that can help do some of that thinking, so if things change in the process along the way, you can deal with it. Now you can rethink what processes even need to exist and focus on the outcome and how to get to it in a new way. 

By giving everyone at EY access to generative AI a couple of years ago we learned that people were able to accomplish more more quickly. They used it as a thought-partner, used it as a way to fine tune the product they were working on. Being able to see the evolution of generative AI to now where it’s coding applications on its own almost, seeing the new agent capabilities and tools, and being able to take action on its own with very little prompting, it opens the doors to possibilities and what you’ll be able to do in the future. 

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Focus on where you want to be and then rethink how you’re going to get there, that’s the real key.’

‘It’s not just an assistant to you, providing you with information, it’s actually taking on work it’s actually thinking through and processing those things as well.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Ulrich (Uli) Homann is a Corporate Vice President & Distinguished Architect in the Cloud + AI business at Microsoft. As part of the senior engineering leadership team, he’s responsible for the customer-led innovation efforts across the cloud and enterprise platform portfolio. Previously Homann was the Chief Architect for Microsoft worldwide enterprise services, having formerly played a key role in the business’ newly formed Platforms, Technology and Strategy Group. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1991, he worked for several small consulting companies, where he designed and developed distributed systems and has spent most of his career using well-defined applications and architectures to simplify and streamline the development of business applications.

Mark Luquire leads the EY organization’s global efforts to co-develop innovative solutions with Microsoft and clients, driving growth and accelerating technology strategy. He oversees cross-functional teams spanning sectors and service lines, serving as a key liaison to Microsoft’s product and engineering teams.

Previously, Mark headed Platform Adoption for EY Global, leading enterprise-wide AI and cloud enablement, including integrating generative AI tools like EYQ, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot. He also created the first EY Global DevOps Practice and led cloud transformation efforts, making EY a leader in Microsoft Azure usage. Mark’s career includes leadership roles in large healthcare enterprises and technology startups, where he established scalable operations, spearheaded digital transformation, and built high-performing global teams.

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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Laurna Castillo, Senior Vice President of Product at CSAA Insurance Group, a AAA insurer serving millions of customers across the western United States.

Laurna has become a leading voice in reimagining how the insurance industry – and entire communities – can build resilience in the face of escalating wildfire risk. On this episode, Laurna will share her journey, lessons learned from the frontlines of growth, and actionable insights for listeners eager to drive meaningful impact in their own ventures.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The AAA was originally an automobile association focussed on making cars safer with advocacy for seatbelts, for example. Without seatbelts car insurance would be more expensive making driving less accessible to the average person. It’s the same with wild fire, there a massive quantities of homes being lost every year and if we don’t have these solutions for less homes being burned down by wild fire, it’s going to be less accessible for the average consumer to live in places like California.

Knowing where to start was our biggest challenge, but picking a direction and sticking with it, and recognising all the different facets that need progressing, we leant in when we recognised those.

We’ve learned that people are overwhelmed. There’s so much information out there, if you speak to your neighbour you might get one thing, if you speak to your local fire-chief you might get another. That was reinforced in our community engagements, as was the fact that trusted voices matter; people are most likely to trust the motivations of people they know rather than insurance companies. 

We’ve been leaning into this problem with this mindset for over a decade and it’s becoming more of a strategic focus and imperative for us because of the increase in really large fires that are affecting a lot of properties. One of the most important issues is where to start, in terms of mitigation. The 0-5 foot ignition zone is the single most important factor. Te next is scalability, we need to rally around and give common standards and similar messages, that will help homeowners receive clear, consistent guidance.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Do the next, best, right thing that’s in front of you. If you keep doing that, eventually it builds up into a system of change and collective progress.’ 

‘I cannot emphasise enough how important partnerships are to this problem. They extend reach.’

‘The easiest way to have a wild fire resilient home is to build one, building one that’s not resilient and trying to retrofit it is less optimal and not as easy.’

‘The single most important thing is clearing flammable material (fences, overhanging trees and bushes) from a 0-5 foot zone from the house.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Laurna Castillo is a forward-thinking leader and passionate advocate for innovation and sustainable growth. With a dynamic background spanning entrepreneurship, community development, and strategic leadership, Laurna has dedicated her career to empowering organizations and individuals to unlock their full potential.

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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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yo Kwon, CEO at Voltaire.Claims.

Together, we pull back the curtain on how enterprise operations (and in particular finance and insurance operations) are being reinvented – not tomorrow, but right now.

KEY TAKEAWAYS          

·       I was working with my co-founder on Ai technology trying to work out what would be applicable for wider businesses. While we were testing ideas someone was using one of our products to write claims letters.

·       Adjustors don’t enjoy writing claims letter, especially denials, they lean heavily on templates and cheat sheets to figure out the clauses to cite, so small mistakes and big ones can slip though. Voltaire generates each letter from scratch, it doesn’t take shortcuts which removes the room for error. 

·       Litigation alone adds an average of $10,718 per claim in loss adjustment expense, we projects Voltaire can reduce litigated claims by 10% or more through more defensible correspondence. Even a conservative 5% improvement in leakage through clearer letters translates to $320,00 in recovered value. 

·       We include critical guardrails. If an adjustor requests a denial letter but there’s no valid policy exclusion that exists to support the denial, the system returns ‘no relevant policy language was found’. This prevents a wrongful denial or compliance violation before it happens.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘Before I started this company I did not think this would be a problem in 2025, and this is a problem because of the complexities of claims.’ 

‘Whenever productivity is measured, people will choose speed over compliance, I’d go far as to say most adjustors never actually learn the correct way to write a claims letter.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Yo Kwon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Voltaire.Claims, where he leads the development of cutting-edge AI solutions that transform insurance correspondence. With deep expertise in artificial intelligence, decentralized systems, and cybersecurity, Yo brings a rigorous technical perspective to one of the industry’s most overlooked but high-impact challenges: claims letter automation. Under his leadership, Voltaire has built a lightweight, API-driven platform that integrates seamlessly with core systems like Guidewire to deliver accurate, regulator-compliant claim letters in seconds.
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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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Bobbie Shrivastav, co-founder and CEO of Solvrays about building AI-driven workflows that aim to eliminate 70% of manual back office work with governance, auditability, and with human-in-the-loop controls directly built in. They also talk about what makes vertical AI for insurance defensible and measurable, compressing sales and implementation cycles without cutting corners on risk, change management, and how to augment teams as talent retires while new talent ramps up.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

When the work comes into an organisation, not everything is digital. Things are still mailed, the first help we provide is extracting the information from those manual sources and place it with the right person in their case management system. That alone eliminates 5-7 touch points.

When an agent sends an email we’re able to get a new business application, we’re able to extract the information, we understand that this is a new business applications, and we can take that data and integrate it into the new business solution. Before, someone would have checked an email, gone to the new business application and keyed that in so work could move in. We’ve eliminated that complex new business touch point.

74% of our industry is still tackling legacy. Customers don’t care if you’re still using mainframes, they shouldn’t feel a difference. We’re using agentic AI as a connector to legacy systems, we’re also doing database to database connectors, and for newer systems we’re using APIs.

We eliminate a dependency factor and empowered IT to work with new technologies, so they’re not dependent on us. But the business and IT partnership with any project, whether it’s our solution or another, is the key to success.

BEST MOMENTS

‘We want to be a ray of hope for the operations staff for back office.’

‘What makes us superior, from an industry point of view, is that we’ve innovated in this space for the last 10 years, we understand operations intimately.’

‘Once a signature is signed, our goal is to do one workflow in two weeks, not months or years, weeks.’

‘Where I’ve seen most anxiety in business and IT is in implementation, it can drain your team. Our goal is: If we can build our orchestration layer the right way you don’t have to be so tense.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Bobbie Shrivastav is founder and managing principal of Solvrays. Previously, she was co-founder and CEO of Docsmore, where she introduced an interactive, workflow-driven document management solution to optimize operations. She then co-founded Benekiva, where, as COO, she spearheaded initiatives to improve efficiency and customer engagement in life insurance.

She co-hosts the Insurance Sync podcast with Laurel Jordan, where they explore industry trends and innovations. She is co-author of the book series "Momentum: Makers and Builders" with Renu Ann Joseph.

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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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Amit Santhirasenan, co-founder and CEO of hyperexponential, an actuary and software engineer who has built the AI native pricing and underwriting platform used by leading specialty carriers.

In this episode we cover how to turn messy submissions into structured signals your pricing model can trust – without hiring an army, multi agent architectures, the agentic AI mesh, and the human in the loop controls executives need for auditability and speed, and where agentic underwriting is ready today (and where it isn’t), plus the metrics executives should track—cycle time, hit ratio, and loss ratio uplift.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Email submissions were a luxury at the start of my career! What’s been so exciting for me, as a self-professed nerd, is the pace at which the capabilities of core models have got so good that even 6 months ago was a whole product’s capability and feature set is now within the gift of Gemini or GPT5.

If you’re an underwriter filling out a spreadsheet/renew model, in 2025 you need to be working with hx underwriting , actuary or agent inside a renew model to have your paired partner helping you get to the best result.

Why can’t you have deep risk research on every single risk? Why can’t you say: Tell me the most important characteristics in the world that you can tell me about the top 3 exposures? No human can do this work, the cost/benefit trade off there isn’t economic, but you can run an OpenAI deep risk API call to do that on every single risk you underwrite today. We do it for you, it’s what we do. All of a sudden it’s dramatically easier to bring that level of differentiation and specialism in the way that great underwriting has always been done to every single risk you want to touch.

BEST MOMENTS

‘You won’t see that many places with a $7 trillion contribution to GDP, with such a small number of companies and people responsible for this.’

‘We demonstrated the first API machine vision algorithm in the market in 2017, now kids coming out of university are doing that as toy projects before they get to our clients.’

‘You can have an army of digital agents helping you now, all for $20 per month!’

‘Generative AI models have unlocked the ability to pull data so quickly out of the information required for underwrite that you can put a very quick red/amber/green status on risks, several orders of magnitude greater than ever before.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Amit Santhirasenan is the Co-founder and CEO of Hyperexponential (hx), the AI native pricing and underwriting platform for P&C insurers. Under his leadership, hx Renew has become known for delivering executive level outcomes: ~50% faster submission to bind, 10× faster model build and deployment, and a platform that supports $45bn+ in GWP for 20+ enterprise customers worldwide.

A qualified actuary and computer scientist, Amrit previously spent over a decade in the London Market. He served as Head of Pricing & Analytics at Tokio Marine Kiln, building the managing agent’s first technical pricing team to support ~£1.5bn GWP, and earlier held actuarial roles at Catlin (including standing up the Canadian actuarial function).

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, accelerated 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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This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Will Ross, Co-Founder & CEO of Federato, and if you’re an underwriting transformation leader—drowning in Excel, stale pilots, and disconnected data sources—this episode is for you.

Will Ross isn’t here to sell you hype. He’s here to show what it looks like when AI actually delivers: faster quotes, better decisions, happier underwriters, and measurable results before the next board meeting.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Thinking back to when Amazon released the Echo with Alexa and a bunch of us bought them and took them apart to figure out how it worked reminds me of how Wild West the early days of AI was a decade and a half ago. Now any undergraduate student taking computer science will have some exposure to AI. One of the first things they might learn is how to do simple tasks like that on very little computational resource. I love jumping into our products like that to understand how they work.

Break down what AI means: There’s an idea of intelligence or grasping a concept or knowledge, then there’s artificial – doing something in place of a human. You can take it a step further and look at ‘generative’ – generating a thing, or predictive – predicting a thing, agentic – giving it agency and allowing it to complete a task. 

What is it that humans do today and, theoretically, what could humans do if they had unlimited time to do their jobs? For underwriters, the process is similar across many line of business: you analyse an exposure, loss history and loss control to come up with a rate perspective, etc. Where can AI systems interact with that process?

BEST MOMENTS

‘One of the things I think is really scary with AI today is its perpetuation of news cycles and how fast it spreads.’ 

‘No matter how sceptical people are, the vast majority of people are already using these technologies to do their jobs. By bringing them into the room, making them aware of what this technology does, and letting the interact with it, that’s a powerful thing.’

‘There are going to be jobs that change, but we shouldn’t think about it as AI replacing our jobs, we should think about it as someone using AI to do our job who will replace us.’

‘What we call AI today will change and change again because it always has; Deep Blue used to be called AI and is now called a chess simulator.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

William Ross is a product and operations leader obsessed with solving the toughest problems in insurance with a mix of pragmatism, speed, and machine learning. As a core member of the Federato leadership team, Will focuses on one mission: turning underwriting from a slow, manual grind into a dynamic, data-driven advantage.

At Federato, Will is helping specialty and commercial carriers build resilience and growth into their underwriting operations, showing chief underwriting and transformation officers that AI doesn’t need to be another failed pilot—it can be the competitive edge that secures market share today.

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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, accelerated 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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