Exec InsurTech cologne 2019 Review

1. Uli Kleber, The Digital Insurer
EXECInsurtech conference, Cologne/Germany on October 1st, 2019
EXECInsurtech 2019 – REVIEW

2. EXECInsurtech – REVIEW
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EXECInsurtech was organized by PIRATE.global:
 known for wicked start up events like Pirate Summit and Jeck’n’Tech
and presented in collaboration with InsurLab Germany:
 the Insurtech hub supported by the German government’s Digital
Hubs initiative focusing on digital innovation
EXEC is rooted in the start up community and focuses on the impact
of technological change in the insurance industry bringing together
new and traditional players in order to shape the digital future.
2019 saw 340+ attendees with 46% start ups, 30% corporates, 10%
investors and 14% others (service providers, press…) from 18+
nationalities.
This deck captures some personal takeaways and comments from the
event. Please forgive all errors and omissions!

3. Insurance Shaper Of The Year award 2019
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• The Insurance Shaper of the Year Awared celebrates and recognizes outstanding
achievements and innovations in the field of insurtech.
• In five different categories, the winners went through an open nomination
process, were shortlisted by a community-driven qualification process and then
selected out of a top 3-group by a jury of industry-experts.
Scale up Investor Founder Community Start up
Kasko Blackfin Capital
Partners
Nick Sühr Yas.life Inzmo
Independent VC from
France focusing on
FinTechs, InsurTechs
and RegTechs.
API-based insurance
product and sales platform
integrating between
customer touchpoints and
legacy IT-systems.
Better health for
health insurance
customers through
gamification.
CEO and founder of
Kasko – if you look to
the left, you can see that
Nick actually won this
award twice. ;-)
Full-service insurance
solution for all
participants – from
insurers to distributors
to end-customers.

4. Pitch competition with 15 seed and early stage startups –
health & wellness and enablers show up in force
Prevention, health & wellness:
Underwriting:
Broker support:
Enabler/service provider:
Cyber insurance: Situational/niche insurance:
Claims analysis: Employee Benefits:

5. Bendesk and Cardiolyse convinced the jury with their
presentations and value propositions
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Pitch competition winners:
• Category Seed:
Bendesk
• Category Early Stage:
Cardiolyse

6. Tractable – AI-based image recognition for accident and disaster
damage appraisal and recovery
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• Idea: Tractable’s AI solution uses photos to automate damage appraisal, allowing
insurers to reduce turnaround time and improve the customer claims experience.
• Why: The current process of visual appraisals for car claims can be slow and
inefficient. AI-based image recognition predicts repair costs in real time, thereby
settling claims faster and increasing the audit level of body shop invoices to 100%.
• How: Tractable integrates into the audit process through an API compatible with
standard industry solutions. The AI then screens pictures of the damaged vehicle
and verifies if the damaged parts check out with the positions and amounts
invoiced by the garage. Suspicious cases are elevated to the insurer’s claims
department for follow up.
• Next steps: The start up has implemented the software with 12 global insurers in 8
countries and is now entering further European markets. A typical integration starts
with reviews of estimates and then moves up the value chain to also handle FNOL.
Interview with: Cornelius Vogel
FNOL = First Notice of Loss

7. MINDS medical – supporting medical underwriters by automizing
manual tasks at the crossroads of burn-out and bore-out
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• Idea: Machine learning to support medical underwriting and health claims
management.
• Why: Underwriters spend a lot of time extracting important information from
unstructured data. Extracting the data with the help of AI and structuring it based
on significance can save time and free up resources for value added tasks.
• How: The machine learning software “MM-sure” is trained to extract diagnoses
from physician letters and presents its findings in a dashboard. In collaboration
with the underwriting team relevant themes (e.g. chronic and severe illnesses) are
identified and enable the model to provide recommendations for loadings, etc.
• Next steps: MINDS medical is working in a joint research project with universities
to transfer training results between medical facilities. Additionally, the company
also works with hospitals to automate the current manual process of
coding diagnoses.
Interview with: Lukas Naab

8. WETTERHELD – Insuring restaurant and events against
adverse weather conditions
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• Idea: Wetterheld provides insurance for businesses (from farmers to festivals)
that may suffer from adverse weather conditions (e.g. rain or absence of snow).
• Why: The livelihoods of many small businesses depend on favorable weather
conditions. Sometimes, a few critical days make up a large part of annual
earnings that fall flat, if the weather does not turn out as expected.
• How: Partnering with InsurTech Element as their insurer, Wetterheld has
developed a pricing model to cover the risk of specific weather conditions (rain,
temperature, snow). The claim event is based on independent information from
the German Weather service (DWD) triggering the payout.
• Next steps: Wetterheld is currently in Beta-mode and has been testing its
product with a select group of customers since August 2019. Furthermore, the
start up is preparing to expand its product proposition into parametric insurance
for different types of crops like wheat, grapes and apples.
Interview with: Nikolaus Haufler

9. Fireside chat – To which extent could AI improve risk
assessment or damage consumer trust?
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AI to enable, not replace employees:
• Insurers need to educate employees about use cases with the goal to change mindsets towards knowledge and
innovation
 Three approaches:
1. Shift the discussion from replacing humans to help them and make their work more meaningful and interesting
2. Ask employees to imagine how AI can help them in their daily work
3. Show what technology can do (e.g. help claim assessor in settling the claim more easily) without putting too
much focus on the technology, instead talk about benefits
Moderator: Christian Czempiel-Mentrak
(Liberty Mutual Re)
Panelists: LeX Tan (MotionsCloud)
Nils Mahlow (Claimsforce)
Priscilla Cournede (SCOR)
Use of AI in insurance:
• All Toolsets are already available. The issue is more about integrating them with the existing
technology.
• Also, insurance is about trust and personal interaction: the client wants to feel the human on the
other side.
• Take away: insurers should focus less on developing high-flying technology and instead apply
existing AI use cases to current challenges, like transforming manual tasks and processes into
digital solutions to free up the experts
Key takeaways on..

10. Panel discussion – Cooperation between startups and
established insurers – is the honeymoon phase over?
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Collaboration in the early days:
Start up view: Originally you needed to work your way through
procurement who asked for your credit rating to start the
collaboration. Since then a lot of progress in the understanding from
incumbents has made collaborating much easier.
Incumbent view: Corporates felt a lot of reluctance and guilt about
their own shortcoming. Also, there was little education about the
possibilities. So, time was needed to go through the process
Moderator: Tilman Freyenhagen
(Alsterspree/InsurTech Werft)
Panelists: Sebastian Pitzler (Insurlab)
Konstantin von Jagow (Munich Re)
Oliver Oster (OptioPay)
From honeymoon to Love island – 3 steps for the start up - incumbent
relationship:
1. Flirt: discuss the collaboration
2. Honeymoon: build an MVP to see whether tangible benefits arise for the
company and clients.
3. Real life: What did we actually achieve together and is there a future for
our collaboration?
Key takeaways on..
„You now need to deliver on the promise,
else there is no future for the
collaboration. The time to learn and burn
through clients is over.“ – Oliver Oster

11. Moderator: Samarth Shekhar (SixThirty)
Discussion table –
InsurTech trends in Europe from a US perspective
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Data at the crossroads of FinTech and InsurTech
• FinTech and InsurTech offerings start to converge with the help of
data exchange through PSD2 (= 2nd Payment Service Directive)
• Will wearables be the next data goldmine as contactless payment
at the Point of Sale gains traction?
Investment environment
• The number of deals is down but with higher volumes as investors look for
established teams and products.
• Later stage investments and mega-deals by strategic investors rule while
InsurTech is gearing up for its first European unicorn (value > 1 bln EUR).
Enablement and platforms are the key:
• Trend to pivot from disrupting (B2C) to enabling (B2B2C) as customer
acquisition costs have been hard to overcome. Insurtechs are therefore looking
for strategic investors to help in scaling their customer base
• Are insurers able to take over the orchestrator role or will they be replaced by
white label insurance offerings that are embedded into the
ecosystem/platform?
Key takeaways on..

12. Final takeaways and impressions
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• Consequently, investor interest shifts from early and
seed to later stage investments as proven teams and
business models start to consolidate the market.
• In line with this trend conference participation from
investors has decreased from 22% to 10% between
2017 and 2019.
• The Insurtech scene has become more international
and more professional. New start ups and ideas
continue to flow into the sector but most base
technologies and use cases already exist.
• The focus is therefore on honing and scaling the
business models as the wheat separates from the
chaff in InsurTech start ups.

13. Thank you for listening!
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You can now put down your mobile phones.. 

14. About the author
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In over 12 years and four countries Uli has held
management roles in corporate insurance and
reinsurance for one of the top global insurers. To quench
his insatiable curiosity, he then worked with a number
of startups and is now supporting companies in their
digital insurance transformation endeavors at Accenture
Management Consulting.
Uli is particularly interested in how digitalization will
unlock value for corporate and retail clients through
improved analytics, customer experience and
interaction.
He is covering TDI’s news on Germany and Switzerland.
Please note that the views expressed are strictly his own
and do not represent the opinion of his employer.
Uli (author – left) with Lukas Naab (MINDSMedical)
and Sten Nahrgang (Mailo Versicherung).

15. Picture credits
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Slide 5 – 275_1.jpg on http://gratisography.com/ by Ryan McGuire is licensed under CC0 1.0
Slide 12 – 94H.jpg and 444_1.jpg on http://gratisography.com/ by Ryan McGuire are licensed under CC0 1.0
All other pictures: own and courtesy of Pirate.global/EXEC