Scouting for Growth

By Sabine VanderLindenBusiness Entrepreneurship Technology

Scouting for Growth episodes

August 10, 2022Farron Blanc: L&G America
On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Farron Blanc, at the time VP, Brokerage Distribution & Strategy at Legal & General America (L&G America) where he works with an amazing team of innovators to drive growth within life insurance by leveraging emerging technologies to accelerate opportunities within the brokerage channels.
Farron is an entrepreneur, too. He started Gerry, a concierge Service platform that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans to navigate requirements and deliver the right support within the long-term senior care space. Farron and his team sold the company in 2021, when he moved to L&G America.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I’ve been at Legal & General for about three months. L&G America is the world’s 11th largest asset manager, but in the US it’s a really nimble business. As a corporation, we’ve invested so much in digital. One of the things I’m really passionate about is helping the underserved get adequate, affordable protection through term life insurance. You have to use technology to reach customers today and empower brokers to do that most effectively. I’m loving it!
On the entrepreneurial side, in a venture-backed startup with $4, $10, or $100 million USD, money doesn’t solve anything because – until you’re a big tech like Amazon, Apple, or Google – that money is an investment in the future, and you will have to raise more capital in 12-18 months to scale. So the default mode is death, as you’ll run out of money at some point because you won't be profitable. Profit is indeed still the rule of the game.
Another thing people don’t understand is that when you receive funding or a specific amount of money, it comes with expectations. For some a $1 billion USD (Unicorn level) exit isn’t big enough, even if they’re only writing a $2 million USD cheque, they want to be in markets where companies can do $10 billion USD exits (Decacorn level.) If you can understand those metrics, unit economics, and expectations, you will do well. As an entrepreneur, you need to stay focused and relevant while hitting all the milestones you promised your investors, so you get there.
Within a corporation, the main challenge is actually "speed to market". You may have distribution, but you may not have innovation because you’re so efficient (e.g., you have processes, best practice committees, procedures, and meetings to ensure that everything that is done gets super efficient) Tech giants like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google do phenomenally well at attracting talent to be able to attack a problem internally, and then by buying companies externally.
At L&G America, we want to cover as many families as possible with affordable protection. The only way to do that is by using technology to digitize processes and personalize engagements and internal processes (i.e., rates, the experience, the journey the policyholder goes through) across product design, underwriting, and claims processing. We’re probably the market leader in the application part of the process. Still, we have so much work to do on the back end. You then have to work with distribution partners to optimize all of this. I’d love to be proved otherwise, particularly in the life insurance or mortality coverage spaces. Let's remember that insurance is sold, not bought. No one wants to talk about death. The best way to sell it is through independent distribution, reaching out to the customer, and engaging with them in the way they want to engage and meet. There’s no one magic bullet.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I’ve always been fascinated by problems and what’s the best way to solve them. Sometimes it’s a clean sheet of paper with no rules, and sometimes it’s leveraging a 100-year-old brand with a $40 billion USD balance sheet.’
‘As long as you’re rapidly learning and re-assessing your challenges and assumptions, that’s the most enriching part.’
‘Within corporate venturing, you must have a strategic return lens on things. Whereas financial VCs are purely looking at gross IRR or total value paid-in capital and multiples. You have to look beyond the numbers even though they are so important.’
‘The response to the global financial crisis of 2008 was to print more money to avoid a global depression. I think that worked, but it inflated asset prices, and we were at a 0% interest rate environment for essentially two decades, meaning long-term contracts started to fall apart. What does the value of money mean now? It’s a debt obligation, but the rapid inflation we’re seeing means it’s going to be really interesting to see how we’re going to ride that out. How does being in an era of superabundant capital impact people’s subscriptions?’
ABOUT THE GUEST
At the time of this recording, Farron Blanc and his team help L&G America drive growth by leveraging technology throughout the broker channel. Prior to that, as co-founder and CEO of Gerry, Farron raised $3.75M in VC funding to launch the startup, a concierge service that used data and licensed Social Workers to help thousands of Americans navigate long-term senior care. Farron told us that he sold the business in the middle of 2021.
Farron was named by Digital Insurance as one of the 20 Insurance Innovators to know, as well as one of the top 35 young executives by Intelligent Insurer in 2017.
Farron is a recovering global reinsurer, corporate VC, life insurance carrier President, BCG Strategy Consultant, and insurance Chief Marketing Officer with deep Asian and North American experience in startups and corporations. Ensure to reach out to Farron; he is such an amazing expert, influencer, and person.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
45 min
August 03, 2022Kristian Feldborg: Building Versuvio Labs
In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Kristian Feldborg, founder of Vesuvio Labs, a venture builder dedicated to FinTech startups and the InsurTech space in particular. Vesuvio Labs calls itself the digital rocket fuelling the insurance sector. In this episode, Sabine reviews Kristian’s journey as a FinTech venture builder and how he made the shift from the traditional tech world to the new world of tech.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I’ve always been interested in new things, startups, and tech. For most of my career, I’ve traveled, lived in different countries, and worked with entrepreneurs. Eventually, I decided I wanted to turn that into a business and create a lab and ecosystem where we could work with many entrepreneurs and help them execute the great ideas they have.
As a venture builder, what you do is take some degree of risk with the clients and with the projects that you work on. That means someone comes to us very early in their journey and they do not necessarily have a lot of the business there yet, they certainly don’t have the capital, what we try to do at that very early stage is invest in those businesses through our work -- via sweat equity -- until they have launched the very first version of their platform and are starting to raise turnover for their businesses.
We often work on 15 projects at the same time, and there can be a lot of commonalities among them. What we try to do, though, is to develop technology in a way that enables greater reuse across the different ventures we work with. We work hard to create a shared baseline infrastructure that everyone can benefit from, thereby reducing the risk of getting it wrong and the time-to-market.
Because we are blessed with working with so many entrepreneurs and businesses, we also see a lot of situations where some great people have come together but haven’t invested the effort into figuring out the right framework to help their business get to the destination they set for themselves or how they’re going to work with others. What happens is that it often doesn’t quite work out. There are many things every business must consider. The structure and the processes are really there to support you when things don’t work out the way they should.
BEST MOMENTS
‘It’s all about finding great people with great ideas that perhaps do not have the technological expertise to execute on those ideas and see if we can partner with them and create great companies together.’
‘Insurance and financial services know something about their value chain, and they know how they want to change/ improve/ disrupt. We actually can help build the technology infrastructure around that through our technology and the partners we engage with.’
‘We want to allow people to focus more on the toppings; we provide the base of the pizza, and they decide whether they want to put pepperoni or whatever on top.’
‘You have to be quite conscious about what companies you select to work with. It would be natural to pick many companies that look a lot alike, but that does not work. The ones that benefit from tech services are those companies that have a strong technology fit, but more importantly, they can cover different aspects of the insurance value chain.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Led by Kristian, the Vesuvio Labs team aims to transform the insurance industry into a faster, cheaper, and more accessible one. And their focus is clearly on technical execution.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
49 min
July 27, 2022Sebastian Pitzer: Building InsurLab Germany
In this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler, former managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne.
Before moving to the other side of the coin (i.e., becoming an InsurTech startup enabler), Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich Re. He also has a background in IT strategy; he is a board member and a digital lab development expert.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Within our industry, there has been a significant shift in the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the Ergo Lab in Berlin, it was hard to talk with the procurement department to secure a contract between a startup and an incumbent.
The insurance industry approached it from an IT background focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software such as Microsoft and SAP, and finally, they were open to working with and collaborating with startups.
It’s great to have seen the volume of InsurTech startups increase steadily over the past few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: 1) The willingness and acceptance to support startups and corporate management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. 2) The ability to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to major problems in a very short time period, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create many win-win situations and success stories, demonstrating that a startup solution can help overcome, for example, the bottleneck in internal IT capacity.
Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: building a strong, reliable network for all parties, including enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalization. From the beginning, the design of the initiative was that we needed to bring together insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities, all with different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation.
By setting up the InsureNXT Conference, our goal was clear. We wanted to ensure that the focus was not only on insurance, startups, and tech companies. We also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical that, if you want to develop insurance innovation and digitalization in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see cross-industry partners joining companies like Garmin, Volvo, and Lufthansa Systems, all collaborating with our startups!
BEST MOMENTS
‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’
‘During the past six months, we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow. We’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our insurance and expert networks. Those connections helped develop over 40 projects. And some are already up and running as products on the market.’
‘Corporations want to innovate but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages, and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’
‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers besides the member network that we have created and our partner network.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Sebastian Pitzler was the Managing Director of InsurLab Germany. He started in March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
43 min
July 20, 2022Matt Connolly: Platformifying InsurTech Insights
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Matt Connolly, an entrepreneur and platform builder in the insurance sector. He’s also the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform. In this episode, Matt talks about himself and his idea to build the Sønr platform.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I always knew I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t know what it would be or what I wanted to invent. The only relevant professional experience I had was working for a digital agency, but my friend and I set up a web design company in 2003 that was going to deliver strategy, creative, and tech for the web. Five years later, the business was very successful and became the number one digital agency in the UK. It was a very unusual position to be in as a 20-something.
I always wanted to push, push, and push again. I’m never satisfied. They are terrible traits in somebody, but they are also great traits for an entrepreneur. I hope I’m able to do that with empathy for those around me. Staff retention supports my belief that I can create a strong culture and be a strong leader within my organisation. And, those traits really do drive me forward.
Having control over a company's DNA and shaping its culture is a great responsibility and one of the most important things a successful founder can achieve. Once you have that right, the rest of the business will flow. Fun has to be a large part of that. As a founder, you start off with your feet firmly under the desk. You are involved in shaping the operation of the business, KPIs, growth metrics, and all those kinds of things, and you can forget about having fun; that’s where my co-founder, Matt Ferguson, is great at continuously reminding me and us to remember the fun part of work. He makes sure we are going out, and we talk and connect.
You need to set a vision, define a purpose within it, and ensure that vision is brought into, and possibly even co-created by, people within the team. If you have that and everybody buys into it and you set a clear pathway to achieving that – whether you’re ahead of it or behind it – then everybody will rally and do their best to make that happen. I’ve always felt it should be somewhat democratic in a business's culture. Rather than employ people to fulfil specific roles, I’d rather employ exceptional talent, understand where they are best deployed, and allow them to function with that intent. That allows them to do the thing they love the best, and invariably they’re the best at, to create the right resourcing landscape to achieve our vision.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Employ people who are more talented than you.’
‘You will always overestimate what you can or will achieve in one year, but you will always underestimate what you can achieve in 10. I need to remind myself of that, I’m an incredibly impatient man.’
‘Always check in with each other and have those “high five” moments and check in and look after yourself en route.’
‘I am much better at encouraging others to have fun than doing it myself. But if you’re not having fun and living another life outside of work, you become a one-dimensional person, and that’s never going to be healthy for you.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Matt is the CEO of Sønr - the world's #1 InsurTech scouting and open innovation platform.
Sønr is a subscription-based platform that houses the world’s most comprehensive source of innovation intelligence, designed specifically for the insurance innovator.
It is used by some of the best-known insurance companies globally, including Allianz, Bupa, Generali, Munich Re, and Tokio Marine.
Sønr connects its clients to innovation globally – the latest market trends, startups, and scaleups reshaping the insurance market. It provides insight into competitors’ innovation activities too... The critical intelligence needed to compete in today’s changing world.
It also has an in-built collaboration toolset that enables teams to work smarter, faster, and be more connected. This results in less duplicated effort and ensures everyone is really on the same page.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
51 min
July 13, 2022Mark Dennis: Building the first wave of digital ecosystems
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Mark Dennis, a seasoned insurance executive with strong expertise in software platforms.
Mark was the Global COO and Europe CEO for MunichRe Digital Partners, one of the most renowned InsurTech ecosystem builders, which has now been re-integrated within the core business of the MunichRe group. Today, Mark works with various young ventures and helps them with their scaling strategy. Today, he is supporting the Inshur team.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
In my time, we’ve partnered with 25-30 InsurTechs and invested in only a few, so we’re quite selective about where the capital has gone. The examples where we’ve got it really right are where we’ve blended our products well.
In the early years, we were probably more invested in technology, and our assertion at the time was to offer the full tech stack of policy admin. In the middle of that five-year period, we looked at the market and realized there were people out there who could do it far better than we could; there were hundreds of policy administration vendors. You could decide whether to buy rather than build. So we pivoted that model away from building everything to having a network of best-in-class providers that we could connect to our InsurTech customers. Later, we focused more on data infrastructure and collaborating with our InsurTech partners to leverage a data advantage.
It’s folly to seek perfect alignment; it’s better to seek out what everybody gets from the partnership, and it’ll vary and move around over time, but as long as everybody gets some kind of upside, then that’s being in a good shape. Seeking perfection is nonsense, really.
Insurance has always been data-driven, even 4,000 years ago with the Phoenician traders. They’re always figuring stuff out based on data points (e.g,. When’s the safest time to sail across that ocean to deliver goods?) Now we have the benefit of technology that allows us to process a lot more data, and everybody’s trying to capture data points and gain a data advantage, though sometimes I think we don’t always know what we’re doing; we’re capturing data without necessarily a clear purpose. It’s much more about risk prevention and prediction than about the cure. It’s more a force for good now though I don’t think insurance gets the credit it deserves. In a way, it certainly needs its own PR campaign!
BEST MOMENTS
‘The key for me is wanting to be a partnership business, and we try to treat all our InsurTech relationships as partnerships, rather than too transactional.’
‘Without knowing it – because there wasn’t that much competition in the early days – we built the first InsurTech ecosystems, it wasn’t by design, it was just how it worked.’
‘It boils down to a few key questions: Is the team the right team? Are they balanced? Do they know the industry or are they being deliberately disruptive? Are they being positive with their disruption?’
‘You have to respect your insurance partner; they need to get something out of this and create value.’

ABOUT THE GUEST
Mark Dennis says: In 2016, I co-founded and built out MunichRe's Digital Partners business from scratch to what is now a large, global operation employing more than 100 brilliant people. With our insurtech and disruptive partners, we have helped build more than 20 insurance businesses.
As part of my role, I introduced a flexible working model, with employee wellbeing and care at its heart. For more than 5 years, we have operated a flexible model with meeting-free and wellbeing days, extended breaks, flexibility for working parents, and so on. I am proud to say that some of these ideas have now been adopted more widely in the other MunichRe businesses.
I am also passionate about giving people a chance. DP recruits people of all backgrounds and with diverse thinking. I was also an executive sponsor on Munich Re UK's inclusion and diversity programme and for the Re: Connect charitable foundation.
I now lead an independent consulting business focused on insurtech scaling, operational resilience, and change management. We also aim to work with more established insurance businesses to develop and execute their innovation ambitions.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
43 min
July 06, 2022Jean-Charles Velge: Insurance-as-a-Service
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
43 min
June 29, 2022Sebastien Gaudin: Embedded Health... The next growth Frontier for insurance
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sebastien Gaudin, co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, an embedded HealthTech InsurTech platform that has grown fast to become a leader in their category across Asia through their platform the CareVoiceOS open platform which delivers a modern insurance infrastructure solution to connect and manage multiple health services providers to shape bespoke health engagement journey for micro-customer segments.
Sebastien’s mission is to reinvent the healthcare and insurance spaces. Merging the two to deliver tailored experiences for users and payers. Sabine and Sebastien talk about the recent category paper they wrote ‘Embedded Health: The next growth frontier for insurance’, discussing why embedded health is such an important topic for the health and insurance markets today? What are the winning business models we have seen emerge in recent years? What are the top capabilities needed to build a digital health ecosystem?

KEY TAKEAWAYS
I value patient-centred care, looking at the patient from a board perspective with multiple stakeholders. From my experience working in China's digital ecosystem, customer-centred, service-oriented approaches are everywhere and you can create more value and relevance if you aggregate services for people.
We opened new distribution channels, new ways for insurers to commercialise products. All our experiences have led us to the category of embedded health. It’s about being able to provide targeted customers a range of relevant digital healthcare services together with insurance in one single integrated customer experience.
Insurers are really making the move to embed health services with their insurance offering and then prevent or influence positively what may happen before a claim. Think about health players who can embed insurance and likely complimentary health insurance services to bring more value and protection to their customers but also all at once with a monetisation interest model for what they offer as a service. Lastly, noon-insurance, non-health players can also think about embedding health and insurance services as complimentary product offerings and revenues.
We’ve been looking at how embedded health can really help to acquire customers. We see micro-insurance in the health space could be interesting because you start to see a number of players embedding micro-insurance and this gives new customers access to insurance that they couldn’t access before.

BEST MOMENTS
‘Working with insurers, we helped them to go beyond being a passive payer of claims and take a more proactive role, helping their customers navigate and find the right medical services at the right time.’
‘With a digital customer journey you can support the individual along the way with easy access to treatments and healthcare professionals.’
‘The opportunities that have opened up with this wealth of technologies that can impact people’s health. It’s true that digital natives are more suited to embrace this and most of the incumbents have been struggling because of their lack of digital capabilities.’
‘The past two years have seen a solid acceleration. It’s still difficult to see which model will win, we may have new models emerging, it’s likely there will be multiple winners within different sub-categories. The most important thing is that the needs from both consumers and all stakeholders are strong and the value creation by transforming insurance and improving health is limitless.’

ABOUT THE GUEST
Sebastien’s career has been dedicated to healthcare. He is the co-founder and CEO of CareVoice, a leading Asian Health InsurTech expanding globally and dedicated to making insurance more humane, with health at its core. With an academic background in pharmaceuticals and business, Sebastien worked in Corporate Development and Marketing, and served as a business leader across multiple therapeutic and geographic markets in the pharma industry. From a young age, he has been involved in creating and growing several new ventures. Sebastien is also the co-founder and non-executive Chairman of the Board of blüüm, a Chinese tech-driven insurtech MGA that was spun off from CareVoice after graduating from PingAn’s Accelerator program. Sebastien and CareVoice received multiple awards and recognitions, including the Top Insurtech Leader 2021 in the “Digital Business Ecosystem Builders” category by ACORD, a non-profit, industry-owned organisation that enables the success of the global insurance industry.

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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
42 min
June 23, 2022Simon Torrance: The future is embedded
On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Simon Torrance who is well known across the FinTech and insurance sectors as Mr. Embedded Finance. In December 2020, Simon wrote a very well-known article, ‘Embedded Insurance, A $3 Trillion Market Opportunity That Could Also Help Close The Protection Gap’. He works with leaders, executives, and board members to create and implement new growth strategies based on corporate venturing techniques focused on the Platform economy and Digital Ecosystems, helping large enterprises transform the business of today to meet the needs of tomorrow. His focus today is on AI risk.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The main problem is that digitization, which is happening across every sector, tends to shrink traditional profit pools because of new competitors, new entrants, new regulations, and changing customer expectations. So companies must spend more money to keep up with those emerging expectations. The old models that were absolutely fine in the analog world are coming under increasing pressure. Traditional players are increasingly feeling that pressure and need to do something different.
When I was working in telecommunications, I started to think about the why. Why are those digital companies (Google, Facebook) so successful, and what could TelCos learn about them? TelCos have a lot of power in the market, but they tend to focus on what they know best – creating the infrastructure – not so good though at creating services or new types of digital business models. In 2005-6, it was clear that the companies that were succeeding most in a digital world were those that were running ‘platform-based’ business models; they weren’t necessarily creating the end customer products themselves, but they were acting as an intermediary between the customer and the third party that had the solutions. That still is the most powerful business model in the digital world.
I wasn’t interested in financial services, I hadn’t done a lot of work in it until about 3 years ago, but it seemed to me that it’s so important for the world, it underpins all our commercial and social activity – we can’t operate without financial services – yet there was something fundamentally broken with that industry and the gap between what people need and what they were being given was incredibly wide – there are so many people who are unprotected and have no insurance around the world – it’s so important for a small business to get a loan. The type of experience I have with my old bank is lightyears away from the new banks that are popping up now, and no one’s really making solutions that look after my financial wellness, to help me understand how I need to save, borrow, plan for the future. I’m just left to access a few quite basic solutions from the incumbents. So, I thought, with these huge gaps and numbers of people excluded or badly served by the industry, there’s got to be some change needed.
Embedded finance cuts across all different business models and says: Why don’t we enable other organizations that are much closer to end users and interact with them more frequently than we do? We should do so in order to sell financial services because they have more regular interactions or touch points with the end-users, and they’re often more trusted in certain contexts too. Why don’t we help them not only sell solutions but also embed them – use components that we’ve got to create new types of experiences that make their propositions more attractive. Digital technology has become much more sophisticated; all those capabilities (products, data, underwriting) that were locked away within traditional companies can now be modularised and extracted into software technologies developed by tech companies. They are configured in ways that better suit the customer or are more convenient for end-users through unique experiences.
BEST MOMENTS
'The business model is the most fundamental way that a company creates and delivers value for customers, captures value for itself, and increasingly shares value with others. It’s the most fundamental aspect of innovation, and most companies find it very difficult to execute on their business model innovation promise because well-crafted business models address so much more than what is often delivered right now.’
‘Digital companies have taught us that you do not need to create a platform yourself; you can co-opt developers and third parties to create solutions for your customers, as Apple does with the App Store. In so doing, you drive demand for your core business, in Apple’s case, their phones.’
'Over 50% of the big publicly traded financial companies were making zero or negative economic profit. There’s something wrong here: the customers aren’t getting what they need, and the majority of those supplying financial products aren’t making any profit either. That suggests there is a fundamental business model problem in finance, which is so important for everybody to live, work, and enjoy the company of others.’
‘99% of a financial institution’s resources and money go on digitizing, making more efficient, and optimizing the existing business model. It is necessary but insufficient if that business model is going to deliver profits and economic returns to shareholders.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Helping companies transform their business models with digital platforms, ecosystems, and ventures, Simon Torrance works with leaders, executive teams, and boards to create and implement new growth strategies and ventures based on the new disciplines of ‘Platform Strategy’, ‘Digital Ecosystem Management’, and ‘Corporate Venture Building’.
Simon is the author/presenter of the New Growth Playbook and co-author of a new book called 'Fightback' (how traditional corporates can win in the digital economy with platforms, ventures, and entrepreneurs).
As we enter more deeply into what many are calling the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – enabled by a fusion of emerging technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds – Simon believes that organizations in every sector need to radically rethink their role in the world and how they create and capture value.
Working in collaboration with a global network of subject matter experts and tech entrepreneurs, he supports organizations with this transition via a mix of services:
Advisory: helping clients develop and implement new strategies that transform their business models into faster-growing, more valuable platform-based models.
Digital Ventures: helping incumbent organizations create portfolios of impactful new businesses.
Executive Education: training leaders and teams on the topics of 'New Growth Strategies in the Digital Economy'
Simon collaborates with many leading institutions, including the World Economic Forum, MIT, London Business School, and Singularity University.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
1 hr 3 min
June 15, 2022Efi Pylarinou: Why sustainability investing?
On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews FinTech and Blockchain Advisor Efi Pylarinou about why sustainable investing is so important, her view on the state of FinTech (and what the insurance industry can learn from it), sustainability in the context of Digital Transformation, what the emerging risks are, and more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Switzerland is one of the largest hubs for Blockchain in Finance, emerging from Crypto Valley. It’s an example of how an ecosystem works: You need the regulator, the private sector, the capital, and an international outreach for the recipe to work, and that’s what has happened in the crypto sector, but it hasn’t happened in FinTech. Having said that, the crypto sector in Switzerland is more in the RegTech sub-vertical, which is related to data analytics and so on. That’s the high level at which Switzerland stands.
There’s something that worries me: an indicator that we’re early, with the insurance industry interested in climate, carbon footprint, and how companies and individuals can reduce their carbon footprint. But we’re seeing many businesses and startups offering services to trade for credits. We need to get over that. A company can get a high ESG ranking on the climate front, but that might be completely negated because they’re doing something on another front in terms of labour practices, for example.
The ball has started rolling in the public markets, and BlackRock is leading and making big announcements. But in the public markets, this has to start from the seed, when the company is born: Is the company thinking sustainably, and what does it mean? How do you treat your team? Is your mission completely segregated from society and nature? No, it isn’t, but we don’t think like that yet.
Going forward, we’ll see more incumbent banks partnering with sustainable FinTechs to integrate them into their lending practices, corporate finance, and commercial banking processes, for example.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Innovation gets adopted, but before that happens, there needs to be a shift in the narrative. This is what is currently happening with sustainability. Still, we’re early in the journey.’
‘In December 2020, ESG net inflows surpassed £ 1 billion, a record number.’
‘Corporates still operate and make decisions in silos. Think about your borrowing needs; they are still separate from your investing needs. We haven’t put the whole picture together. Yet, centralized financing has to be part of the new culture, which is why it needs to start from the startups.’
‘We’re seeing a trend where digital banking and finance apps take advantage of the lifestyle appeals, whether they’re giving rewards to people or gamifying their offerings due to the fact that people care more about the environment.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
No.1 independent Global Woman Influencer in Finance & Data, a seasoned Wall Street professional with a Ph.D. in Finance, with over 200,000 followers across channels.
Work at the intersections of Business Development, Marketing, and PR for Brands involved in Digital transformation in various industries. Thought leadership campaigns through strategic collaboration are one of my sweet spots as a B2B domain expert influencer with a passion for innovation.
Domain expertise in financial services; Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence are two main disruptive technologies that I focus on.
Efi's global audience (c. 200,000 across all platforms) values her multimedia daily curation. I am a prolific writer, a host of weekly audio and video content, a creator of weekly visual content, and a passionate speaker.
Efi's passion is creating content that supports her clients' strategic business goals. You can connect with Efi on the platforms below

Medium: https://efipm.medium.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/EfiPylarinou
Twitter: https://twitter.com/efipm
Website: https://efipylarinou.com/

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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
42 min
June 08, 2022Erlijn Sie: Reimagining financial inclusion
In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Erlijn Sie, a seasoned social entrepreneur, leader, and social business advisor. Erlijn wrote a book on Reimagining Financial Inclusion, a must-read for all corporate business leaders concerned with the future of our planet. In the book, Erlijn discusses the 5 levers that shape our financial system. Erlijn also talks about ESG, focusing on social innovation and how social innovators support companies in achieving their impact.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Maybe over the last few decades, we've become a bit too focused on the monetary side of ESG, and some companies have forgotten their core relevance to society. We’re now all trying to find our way back to the societal value we originally set out to build our organizations on. What makes social innovation (a person, a solution, a product) different from big corporations' purpose is that smaller companies do it in a radically different way, taking an issue they care about, feel passionate about, and want to solve radically.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a good business model to support social innovation, but I do feel it should follow a solution and what fits that solution best. You don’t start your business by monetizing social innovation. You start with the issue, analyze its root causes, and consider how others can contribute to solving it.
Big, powerful corporations still underestimate the potential change they could bring, especially financial resilience for those who need it most. Our former financial system was built in the last century, when we didn’t have the digital technology we have now. With such technologies and the speed of their development, we can financially include many more disadvantaged individuals and people who are excluded. If big corporations (not just banks and insurers) start to see the power of newer technologies, imagine how powerful they could be in the space financially, including so many more people, we can then start to really transform the system.
We are currently dealing with a former financial system that basically serves half of the world’s population. That’s fundamentally wrong, we all know that financial services like being able to save your money in a safe place, getting a loan, insurance, and pensions, all these financial services allow you to live your life to your full potential. If you exclude more than half the world’s population from that system, that’s a waste of talent! We need to reform the financial system so that we include the other half. We can only do that if all companies work with us to tackle those flaws. Most of the flaws built into our former financial system stem from the technologies of the last century not allowing businesses to incorporate them affordably. Nowadays, we can include so many of them if we truly want to.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I became a social entrepreneur by accident because I felt I needed more meaning in my day-to-day life, that’s why I founded a micro-finance institution providing very small loans to the most excluded people in the world.’
‘ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. I’m mainly focused on the ‘S’, I feel that the ‘Social’ angle goes first.’
‘Most systemic issues are too big for one of us to solve; the solution needs to be co-created among like-minded experts or people you feel can contribute to solving the issue best.’
‘Entrepreneurial qualities are much more needed nowadays than they were last century. This has a lot to do with how fast change happens these days. The most important skill for all of us to learn is how to cope with change, how to be resilient, how to be able to constantly adapt to change.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Erlijn is a seasoned social entrepreneur, leader, and social business advisor to both the social and business/corporate sectors. Her background is rooted in business management, and her focus is on social innovation and financial inclusion. She has supported a range of systems that have enabled social entrepreneurs, as well as impacted the corporate sector, to develop new strategies, approaches, and models to drive inclusion in society. Erlijn brings a combination of deep insights, hands-on experience, and the latest trends in social innovations, blended business models, hybrid value chains, and new ways of organizing. She is dedicated to catalyzing impact, in general and specifically in financial inclusion, by connecting innovative and inclusive solutions with the challenges corporations face.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at [email protected]
50 min