Kristian Feldborg, Founder and CEO of Vesuvio Labs
Doha: Insurtech is going to be one of the most interesting places to be as an investor or as an entrepreneur. The insurance industry is one of the parts of that supply chain that the various startups are trying to improve or disrupt, said an expert during a session of Tech Talks Opportunities in Insurtech organized by Qatar Financial Centre’s (QFC).
Tech Talks is an informative series where technology firms, experts, and innovators from across Qatar’s digital ecosystem share innovations, network, and discover opportunities across all verticals of field. Kristian Feldborg, Founder and CEO of Vesuvio Labs, an expert deliverer of software for the past 20 years delved deeper into the challenges faced by traditional insurance supply chain and looked at the size of the opportunities and the success stories.
Speaking on QFC’s role in nurturing a vibrant fintech ecosystem he said, “We like QFC and Qatar want to be part of building a start-up ecosystem for both public and private sector and help to incubate companies in Qatar and when they are mature enough, we want to export them regionally and beyond. Qatar and QFC have a sizable role in developing this industry beyond Qatar. If you are part of the right ecosystem, you and your partners will be more successful than the other ecosystems.”
He said, “We are venture builder, and we help setup and grow startups, primarily and almost exclusively in fintech’s and about 80 percent of our activities are insurance related. Insurance is a big industry, it is about ¤5 trillion in annual premium income.”
According to Kristian, Insurtech is the most exciting place to be invested in 2021-2025 over the next five years.
He discussed about the insurance supply chain which consists of consumers, distributor, manufacturer, and supplier. Over the last couple of years Insuretechs have focused on simplified products and have started to digitize certain elements of what the brokers are doing which was a manual process and has become more digital and automated now.
He said, “To be successful as an insurance company you need to allocate that capital in a way it generates return and gives available liquidity.”
According to projection by McKinsey report, by the year 2025, around 25 percent of insurance industry will be fully automated which Kristian said would be enormous amount of change. This will completely shift the players in the market because not everyone will be able to shift in a way that would be needed. We are right in front of the significant disruption and change to the supply chain, he added.
He said, while many companies can develop machine learning algorithms, fewer can build useful analytics on top and very few can integrate their AI into operational enterprise grade production systems. “Many big companies are contributing to the insurance market like in China a lot of insurance and financial products are distributed by tech players and this is the area in which Google, Microsoft and Amazon are looking at as an interesting market for them. According to the expert in some areas things will get more automated and a very different kind of insurance distribution will be seen and some of the big tech players will have a significant stake in that through acquisitions,” he added.
Vesuvio Labs is a vertically integrated Venture Builder that provides digital transformation and artificial intelligence across the insurance supply chain.
