Theresa Blissing has more than 15 years experience in the insurance industry both in Europe and Asia. Excited by the first signs of change in an industry typically resistant to change, she followed her passions into technology and big data after working with Italian insurer Generali for 10 years. Theresa is responsible for some of the first academic research into the adoption of Big Data into the Southeast Asian insurance business. Prior to starting Accelerating Insurance, Theresa worked with a German management consultancy as Asian Insurance Lead. As a well-recognized expert in the field, her advisory practice now brings to bear a deep knowledge of the InsurTech landscape in Asia and a fundamental understanding of upcoming trends, innovations and new technologies with the experience and know-how for applying it to incumbents. She is also the Founder of the Asia InsurTech Podcast and InsurTech Amplified.

Theresa wrote the new book, The Future of Insurance, Volume IV. Asia Rising, as the latest entry in the best-selling Future of Insurance series.

Highlights from the Show

• Theresa comes from an insurance background, with parents who were agents, and her own career having started at Generali
• She spent some time in Asia for Generali, and then decided to move there in 2015 after being fascinated by the activity in the region, and the developments and possibilities in insurance there
• While there, she founded the Asia InsurTech Podcast, and recently started another with co-host Michael Waitz, called InsurTech Amplified.
  • For more on her background, you can hear the first time she was on the show in Season 1, Episode 13
• Theresa joined the show to share the news that she has written a new book in The Future of Insurance series, volume 4, which is all about startup activity in Asia, and it will be released on October 17th, 2023 (and is already available for pre-order on Kindle)
• Her aim was to tell the story of different types of startups in different countries and situations, including stories in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and India
• The companies profiled through first-hand accounts, often written through interviewing the company founders, are:
  • YAS
  • OneDegree
  • Tune Protect
  • bolttech
  • Qoala
  • PhonePe
  • Ping An
  • Habitto
• One of the things that makes many markets in Asia so interesting for starting an insurance company is how low the penetration and knowledge of insurance is, which forces you to rethink how you enter and grow in the market
  • Embedded insurance comes up very often in the book because of this, including in the case about Qoala, YAS and bolttech
• Japan is profiled through the case of Habitto, where the issue of an aging population, and a young generation that hasn't been focused on or served creates lessons that many other developed markets are or will soon be facing, like the US and Europe
• There are three major takeaway lessons that applied across all of the cases and have value to people in different situations, markets and companies:
  • Build a customer-focused business
    • Many insurers are product-centric, thinking about their offering and how to market and run it successfully, rethinking this to start from the customer and their needs leads you to then see how insurance might fit into that equation – or not – which then informs the options available to you to move ahead
  • Embrace change
    • Don't just be open to change, but when things don't go as planned or don't work out, rather than ignoring the failure or looking to blame someone, take learnings and lessons from the experience to do better next time or have more insight about what customers really want (or don't want)
  • Leverage the power of partnerships
    • Ecosystems is a buzzword going around a lot today, but carriers often see themselves at the center of the ecosystem with others buzzing around them, but that's not always the ideal way to do it
    • You can't be good at everything, so you need the right partners to support your goals

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance Volume IV. Asia Rising by Theresa Blissing, part of the Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.