The Global Innovation Sandbox: Why Global Insurers Are Scaling the Future Out of Ireland

Speaker A: Welcome to the Tech People Podcast. My name is Ken Coyne. I'm your host and founder, as well as an ambassador for OPS talent. I believe at the heart of any success story are the people who made it happen. Diversity, creativity and innovation, where nurturing people can lead to an unbeatable formula. I created this podcast to share the experiences of some truly inspirational leaders on a journey to success. Enjoy the show. Hey guys. Welcome back to Tech People. I recently had the pleasure to return to Dublin for the Transformation Summit and I must say I walked away with some incredible insights on exactly what is happening across the insurance sector, especially around the current challenges and where the global focus is shifting. If you are an executive trying to navigate the massive transformation currently hitting this sector, today's episode is built specifically for your playbook. In this conversation I sit down with Gary Layden, the CEO of Instech.ie we unpack why traditional tier one carriers are starting to move past the proof of concept pargatrad. We look at the fascinating evolution of the Insuratech journey, shifting away from superficial digital front ends and and moving deep into core enterprise architecture. Gary lays out exactly why Ireland has become the premier international sandbox for global groups to test new high risk business models safely before scaling them across the world. But more importantly, we dive into the human element. Gary shares his philosophy and why change philosophy depends entirely on solving deep organizational and cultural blocks. Long before you rewrite your technology code. I found this a relaxed peer to peer strategy session with Gary bridging the gap between global insurance networks and agile tech hubs. With that, let's dive straight into my conversation. Gary, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hi Ken, how are you?

Speaker A: I'm doing very well, I um, must say. And listen, great to see you at the Insurer tech event last week. A massive success from what I saw.

Speaker B: Great. Was great to have you over in Dublin and great for you to meet the ecosystem as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, very cool. So maybe just before we get into the podcast, maybe you could just give us a brief introduction about yourself and your background, please.

Speaker B: Yeah, so usually my background isn't insurance, so my background is actually tech investment and so I would have, uh, run Ireland's accelerator, invest in an early stage technology companies for over 10 years and through that one of my angel investors is some of the portfolio companies. Happened to be a, uh, CEO of a big uh, insurance company in Ireland and he approached me just to explore how we could replicate what we'd done in building the technology ecosystem in Ireland into the insurance ecosystem, which he felt was a real gap and an Opportunity. So four and a half years ago we set up Instec ie.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean I've seen you guys evolve a lot right over the last few years. I mean going from digital front end to really deep core system transformation. I saw that firsthand myself last week. Terms of it's great feedback and uh, learning from other companies what they've done in terms of AI, new technology, how they've evolved. But talk to, given your role as CEO, I mean how have you seen the conversations between legacy carriers and tech disruptors shift from early stage skepticism, you know, to now Deep integrated ecosystem collaboration.

Speaker B: Yeah, look, I think the change has been remarkable over, over a relatively small number of years. And when we started Instec ie we started with a coalition of the willing, as we call it, of 10 insurance companies who took a leap of faith in us. We've now got over 24 companies that are backing us. And I think you know, first of all that shows that there's a uh, there was a real need and we were tapping into it and we were obviously addressing a real gap in the market. But actually one of the biggest insights we got from increasing that number was just understanding that no one insurer is on the same transformation journey and each and every one of them is, is different. So rather than have a programmatic, one size fits all response to the insurance industry, we built a platform around their individual needs so it could be customized around an insured specific transformation journey. And I think the other thing that we've really noticed is probably that the first wave of insured tech was positioned as a threat to the incumbents, that somehow these new insuretechs were going to slay the incumbents. And the reality is insurance is a complicated business and a lot of insuretechs really struggled with replicating that business model. So now what you see in the, in the next wave of insurer tech is really collaboration. It's understanding that you need to partner, that you know, you can't do this alone. So I suppose most successful organizations have realized that transformation isn't something they just simply buy from a vendor. It's something they achieve through partnerships. So that relationship has evolved from I suppose a customer supplier to an ecosystem collaboration. And instech E sits in the middle of that ecosystem that we created. So we connect insuretechs with insurers, with regulators, with enterprise agencies, with brokers, with technology companies.

Speaker A: Okay, fantastic. Yeah, because I met, I mean a number of different insurance companies and in the space last week and you know, no offense to insurance, but it is Quite. You know, it's a century old institution I feel myself personally and that is still very much behind the curve in terms of technology and change. And what I can see, it's changing definitely, but it's still, I uh, think a long way to go. And you mentioned there about transformation and that on the transformation journey at the moment, culture definitely is a big aspect of it. I mean, I, uh, don't know. Be great to get your insight in terms of, you know, what is the biggest cultural roadblock, you know, these companies are facing? Is it because of the history of it? Is, is it management background or is it, do you see a big, is it really being much quicker now versus what it was when you started, you know, three or four years ago?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's kind of all of the above really. But I think without question it's probably really a fear of failure. And I think there's only an unusual paradox in the insurance industry in that the insurance industry is built on managing risk. And that's what makes the industry really strong and resilient. But at the same time, that mindset that helps organizations manage that risk can really help, you know, make it harder or more reluctant to embrace the uncertainty that the pace of technology is really driving and the pace of customer expectations that it's driving. So uh, there's very few executives in the insurance industry that don't understand the potential of emerging tech. But the challenge is really by creating an environment where people on their teams feel empowered to actually experiment with this. And I think for me anyway, innovation doesn't really begin with the technology, it begins with curiosity. So the organizations that really make progress in this space are where they're creating, I suppose, an environment where people can explore, learn, test new ideas without I suppose demanding immediate certainty or a guaranteed outcome. And they're probably rewarding learning as much as they are rewarding success.

Speaker A: Okay, should talk to us a bit more about that, I mean, because uh, that came up very much so in the, in the event last week about the whole high risk environment. And a few sides are saying, you know, because startup space, right. It is difficult to get into these large companies if so many demands requirements like, you know, security policies, I mean, how do you guys de risk it? You know, for the large encumbrance we have to work with these new creative, innovative startups, I suppose, especially how the Irish insurotech really, you know, quickly helping the industry at this.

Speaker B: Yeah, so when we started out, we spent a lot of time with insurance companies kind of doing deep dives with Them to um, really understand what their specific challenges were, where the blockers were and ultimately where the opportunities were for collaboration. And we thought that, you know, what we do is just make introductions. So we'd say you've got this problem, here's a really interesting insuretech that's solving that problem. Go figure it out together now. And the reality was that that just didn't happen in that uh, the insurers weren't ready for that conversation both culturally and organizationally. And you know, what they termed POCs or proofs of concepts were really the beginning of a procurement exercise and they weren't really about figuring out this stuff around experimentation. So what we invested in was a digital sandbox. So we partnered with ah, a company called NIA1. So they provide technology sandbox environments for the likes of the FCA big banks around the world. So we invested in an Irish digital sandbox on behalf of our members. So that's a enterprise grade secure environment where you can customize the technology in it, but more importantly you can also create synthetic data so you can really meaningfully test new technologies, new data sources, new business models in a safe and secure environment. And then when you've de, risked it or you know, become comfortable with it, well then you can take it into your production environment. So that's really. We needed to invest in that, what we call innovation infrastructure to provide that environment where you could experiment a bit more space, uh, safely, you could be that little bit more curious and maybe look at, you know, a few more insurer attacks in a given year than you normally would.

Speaker A: Okay, have you talked to us about some of them you present? Last week we saw some of the Irish success stories in terms of insuretechs and it was very much around AI. Right, it's all AI at the moment. I don't know if you could maybe share some examples or some technologies which we saw and how they progressed, maybe helping, I don't know, some big companies. I'm not sure if you can share some details that give us a high level overview maybe of how the insuratech is evolving in Ireland.

Speaker B: Yeah, so again one of the things we did in the early days of Instec was we actually went and mapped what the insurtechs in Ireland look like. So we have a living directory on our website and we're tracking a little over 120 indigenous companies, technology companies are selling innovative products into the insurance vertical. So we work with all of those and that's a very broad spectrum from somebody as successful as who's now a public company down to a company that would have come through our Foundry accelerator program. And they may be only just six months old. I suppose being a small country, our entrepreneurs think globally very, very early on. So they're really looking to go after big problems in big markets. So the breadth of opportunities they go after is quite interesting. So we have quite a broad spectrum of different types of solutions. But offhand some of the companies that are doing some really interesting stuff is we have a company called Cana IO. They're based in Cork. And um, what they're doing is they're embedding insurance into the vertical SaaS platforms that SMEs use. So if you're a hairdresser or a beautician, you're probably using a product like Forest or glowfox or something like that to run your business. Well, within that SaaS platform is all the information that broker needs to actually make sure that that company is insured properly. So Kana actually embeds the insurance into that platform, making sure that the uh, SME owner is properly insured. Because SMEs are notoriously for being either underinsured or overinsured, they're very rarely correctly insured. So embedded insurance, you know, having insurance where it's really needed at the point of purchase is, is a really interesting segment at the moment. We have another company called Blink Parametric. So they have a parametric solution. And um, Parametric solution is about making the claims process painless for the customer. So when the risk is triggered they simply just pay out. So there's no applying for, you know, your claim and paperwork associated with that. And a great example of it is travel interruption. So if you're sitting in the airport and you're plane is canceled at the last minute, Link will already know that because they'll be tracking that journey for you and they'll immediately send you a voucher for the nearest lounge to go sit in until, until your plane's ready to go. So that's another really interesting company and they're again a corp based company and they're growing.

Speaker A: Always happy to hear that.

Speaker B: Being a corp, I know I'm appealing to you now.

Speaker A: What do you want? Your trinity is bottom me up here for something that's amazing. But I also, what I loved about it, I mean is the Irish tech scene is they always, you know, punch above the weight, you know, and that's very relevant as well from the event last week because you had, I mean company, you had insurance companies globally from the U.S. you know, Europe you had other insurance tech organizations, you know, from America, England, places like this. Uh, it was great to see that, you know, global collaboration. How did you get, Would you tell me a bit about this and maybe and talk about how that's working and how that's accelerating the whole innovation piece?

Speaker B: Yeah. So look, I think one uh, of the risks for any industry is that it becomes too inward looking. I think insurance of all industries is really an industry that up to now has been very, very siloed. And we just think it's really important that insurers look beyond their own organization and not just into the local ecosystem, but into the global ecosystem. So insurance challenges are increasingly global, whether that's AI adoption, cyber risk, climate resilience, talent or even just operational transformation. So no single market has all the answers. So at instac, our role is really to connect Ireland into a global conversation. And um, we've built relationships with peer organizations like instec right across the world. So at the Transformation Summit we would have had uh, peer colleagues from New York, from Miami, from Germany, from Switzerland and all over the States. Actually Enterprise Ireland supported, ah, a uh, buyer's trip from US based insurance companies to come over and see the Irish insuratech ecosystem. We would also build a presence internationally at some of the big international trade shows around insuratech. So with the support of Enterprise Ireland and the ida, we have an Ireland Pavilion at uh, ITC in Las Vegas which is in October. And that's where we bring 10 Irish insurtechs over obviously to sell their individual wares, but more importantly to really demonstrate the depth of the innovation ecosystem in Ireland and tell our story through their innovation.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And you mentioned there about the accelerator program that you do tell us a bit more about that and you uh, know how large organizations are involved in this accelerator program.

Speaker B: Yeah. So look, we track those 120 or so Irish insurer techs, but we've also got to be very mindful and look to the future and we've got to help create the pipeline of the next generation of insurtech entrepreneurs. So with the support of Enterprise Ireland through a program called Smart Regions, we designed and launched a very early stage accelerator which we call the Foundry. And we just completed the first cohort there in March of this year and we're currently recruiting for Cohort 2 now which will start in September. So we had 10 companies go through that, a wide range of companies. We had someone trying to disrupt the life insurance business. We took companies in the cyber space, we had Parametric Insurance and We had a number of folks in on helping transform the broker market.

Speaker A: Okay, very cool. And is that in collaboration then with large insurance companies as well? Uh, or how does it, or is it more you guys helping them, advising them, bringing in specialists?

Speaker B: No, it's very much like that's part of the attraction of I suppose securing a place on the program is that you'll be paired with one of our industry mentors. So somebody that's coming from industry but also our member firms from the insurance side are involved in choosing the opportunities that get selected. So what we're really doing is validating very quickly from insurance partners that there's a real need for the insuretech that's pitching to us and ah, that really helps. And um, those mentors come not just locally because a lot of our insurers based in Ireland are part of group. So we have access to a ah, mentor network that we've built now on a global basis.

Speaker A: Fantastic Gary. Just to finish off great, amazing success stories today. Sounds awesome. What's the goal, what's the vision for the next few years?

Speaker B: You know it's a big vision but we really believe that Ireland can become internationally recognized as the world's most connected insurance innovation ecosystem. So not necessarily the biggest market. We know that we can't compete in that, but definitely the place where insurers, reinsurers, brokers, technology providers, investors, academics, policymakers, regulators, you know, all come together to shape the future of insurance. We have an unusual density in that we can get all those stakeholders around the table relatively easy. We have a real culture of collaboration in Ireland already. So we think we can really build something that, that is really unique on a global scale.

Speaker A: Awesome Gary. Well listen, thank you for your time today Gary. If anybody wants to get in touch with you or learn more about your organization, what's the best way to do it?

Speaker B: So best places come to the website www. Uh instec.ie we have a host of resources there. Our recent transformation summit, all the videos of the panels will be going up live next week but we also have a number of research publications that do a deeper dive into our insurtech map and give you a really good idea of the depth and breadth of innovation that's coming out of Ireland.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Gary, listen, thank you for your time today. Really enjoyed the event last week and uh, I look forward to taking part again in the future.

Speaker B: That's uh, great. Thanks Ken.