Insurance leaders join forces on post-pandemic venture

No comments

The new venture aims to help enable insurers, reinsurers, wealth mangers and health care providers grow post-pandemic

Three insurance leaders have come together to form a venture aimed at helping insurers, reinsurers, wealth managers and healthcare providers to grow in a post pandemic era.

Alchemy Crew’s co-founders include Startupbootcamp’s Sabine VanderLinden, former AXA Seed Factory’s founder Minh Q. Tran and Ninety Consulting’s Dan White bring together over 70 years of experience in the insurance sector combined.

Adapting models

VanderLinden added: “To survive and grow in a post-pandemic world will require insurers to rapidly adapt to the new normal and build highly adaptable operating models and functions.

“That’s where Alchemy comes in. Our systemic approach de-risks game-changing initiatives for executive, transformation and innovation leaders in the insurance sector, and adds speed and convenience to project delivery regardless of market dynamics.”

Alchemy Crew’s model combines a series of evaluation exercises with short, targeted and iterative validation cycles.

It has developed a six-phased criterion to de-risk portfolio-related decisions across ’defining customer needs, viability, scalability, long term relevance, sustainability and transferability’.

It hopes that this will make it easy and quicker for insurers, reinsurers and other players within the finance sector to determine the most suited, relevant and resilient growth ventures.

Reinvention Engines

Tran, currently managing partner at Odysseus Partners as well as co-founder and investor in Alchemy Crew added: “With Alchemy we are industrialising virtual Reinvention Engines, which includes the discovery, evaluation, sourcing and acceleration of demonstrable applications of top digital tech entrants, which are able to deploy their solution in the cloud.

“Couple this approach with our deep industry expertise, data and research from decades delivering impact from executing growth-led innovations, and we believe we are perfectly positioned to become the partner of choice for insurance and reinsurance providers.”

Each programme lasts four months and dives into major group level and business unit strategic problems. It engages with the most dispersed cross functional teams and evaluates and matches international growth-stage ventures able to solve complex challenges. The validation process can be delivered face to face, or virtually.

Each reinvention engine requires the involvement of one problem owner and five to six experts from each corporation for an average of 20 days over a four-month period. The delivery has been fully virtualised to meet emerging needs from Covid-19.

A new hardening

Meanwhile, Dan White, managing partner at Ninety Consulting as well as co-founder and investor at Alchemy Crew: “What I’m seeing from our work in the insurance space is a new hardening of the mandate for innovation in the face of a currently fast changed world.

“But it is a mandate with a different focus. Gone is much of the ‘optional’ innovation, to be replaced with ‘must do’ innovation problems: how to stay relevant, how to pivot operations to 100% digital, how to serve customers and clients in times of hardship, and how to do all that whilst engaging with climate challenge priorities.

”It is a fascinating time to be involved, and I’m proud that Ninety is a founder of Alchemy and joint forces with two other recognised leaders.”