London 2020
How a Colossus Took a Duck and Turned it into a Unicorn
Swiss Re is a Reinsurer with 14,500 employees and an annual revenue circa $34B – their core business for most of their history has been insuring insurers (Reinsurance). In order to diversify, tap into new risk pools and provide a wider range of services, they have created a business unit (Life Capital) to give birth to, nurture and scale B2B2C digital insurance start-ups. In essence, providing digital and operational insurance platform(s) as a service to other large non insurance brands wanting to diversify into insurance but who lack the capability, license and expertise.
This is the story of one of those start-ups: iptiQ P&C EMEA and the first 2 years of its life starting out as a vision and business case all the way through to its launch into 3 markets with its first partners. We want to share our story with you so you can understand the dead-ends and wrong turns, the mistakes and how we ultimately overcame them, the transformation of the company, its culture and ourselves…and how we ‘went native’ and now cannot turn back.
We will tell our story in chapters, each of them describing a stage and key challenge in the journey and how it was ultimately overcome so that we can move onto the next chapter.
The stories' unlikely heroes are Victoria-Head of Compliance and James- Interim Head of Delivery–we will also hear how their lives changed and the impact on them as they progress through this journey. And, of course, we’ll have a few surprises on the way.
VM
Victoria Mayo
Head of Compliance- iptiQ EMEA P&C, Swiss Re
JH
James Head
Founder, Rebellion Consulting
Transcript
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Next up is Victoria Mayo, who is head of compliance for iptiQ EMEA Property and Casualty, which is a part of Swiss Re, the world's largest insurance and reinsurance company. Founded in the year 1863, she's co-presenting with James Head, who was her counterpart as the interim head of delivery and also CEO of Rebellion Consulting. I'm so excited about this presentation because Victoria and James described how the startup iptiQ PNC was built inside of Swiss Re. They described why and how the strategically important program was created and how it has earned the highest levels of support from within the organization. They shares the successes and lessons learned, creating digital insurance offerings sold through new channels such as retailers. This is such a fantastic talk about how Swiss Re's Horizon one businesses created a set of ambitious horizon three initiatives to explore, innovate, and win in the marketplace. So please welcome Victoria and James.
Hello everyone, and thanks for taking the time to listen to our keynote for DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020. We're so excited to tell you our story. You can catch us on Slack throughout to ask us your questions. My name's James Head, I'm CEO and founder of Rebellion Consulting. I'm joined by ex-colleague and now close friend Victoria Mayo. She's head of compliance with Q-M-E-P-N-C and part of the executive team.
Hi everyone.
Our keynote today is how our Colossus took a duck and turned it into a unicorn. Our story of transforming 150 6-year-old reinsurer and ourselves in the process. Really hope you enjoy the talk and it gives you some useful insight and inspiration.
So before we dive into Ipta Q, we wanted to first introduce you to its home, which is Swissy. And Swissy is currently the world's largest reinsurance company and its origin stem from May, 1861 when more than 500 houses went up in flames in the Swiss town of two thirds of that town sank into Ash, more than 3000 people lost, lost their home, and that fire really showed that insurance coverage in Switzerland simply wasn't adequate to protect people and businesses in the event of such a natural catastrophe. So in 1863, the Swiss Reinsurance company was officially incorporated in Zurich and simply put, reinsurance is effectively insurance for insurance companies and it's purchased to help insulate itself from the risk of a major claims event. So Swiss Re itself is made up of three core business units. The first is reinsurance, and that's by far the, the largest.
It makes up around 80% of Swiss Swiss's overall revenues covering life and health and also property and casualty on non-life business. Then we have corporate solutions and that's our corporate to corporate insurance arm that offers various insurance s for multinational and mid-size firms. And then last but not least, we have Life Capital. So Life Capital is where Ipta, qp, and C, the company that we'll be talking about today actually sits and Life Capital is probably the newest part of Swiss Re from a business unit perspective. And its primary goal is to boost long-term revenues of swissy. And by accessing new insurance areas, reinsurance is a kind of shrinking or a much smaller pool than it used to be. And so iptiQ is part of that strategy to access the primary insurance pool. And iptiQ is a B two B2C insurer, meaning it aims to offer a fully digital insurance proposition through the existing distribution channels of the world's leading brands, ecosystem, banks and other insurance companies.
And we aim to do that in an efficient, transparent way in order to make that insurance more accessible and much simpler for end customers like you and me. So historically the big player in Life Capital was reassure and that was an insurance runoff specialist in the uk and it was a huge cash generator for Swiss Re for a number of years. So reassure was, uh, sold to Phoenix Group this year subject to regulatory approvals. And this will then now bring iptiQ firmly into the investor spotlight from a a global Swiss Re perspective. So it's an initiative that's super important at the Swiss re board level. So just to give you a sense of where James and I actually sit or sat in the organization. So the group CEO of sire is Christian Tala that you can see there reporting to Christian is Tiri Leisure and he is a member of the group executive committee and CEO of the life Capital Business unit. Overall reporting to him is Andrea Shazier and he's our very own iia, uh, CEO. And we operate in a matrix reporting line in Swiss Re. So James reported both to the life capital CTOO and an, uh, who was another reporter of of Tiri as well as to Andreas and myself. I report to the head of compliance for Life Capital also as well as to Andreas.
So let's now talk a little bit more about Ipta Q. So Ipta Q's key for Swiss three. They really believe this is their future growth engine. As Victoria described, they're a way to tackle the innovator's dilemma and the third horizon, they're willing to invest in this over the long term. They're now for Ipta Q, sorry, they're Ipq is now in four continents of the world. And it's something the board take a keen interest in, but it's not just a pure financial play. For Swiss Re, re, Swiss Re are not just a reinsurer but a risk knowledge company. They want to further their intellectual capital research and data to become increasingly more of a risk tech company. IQ is their gateway into this new world of innovation and technology. IQs business model is uniquely built around digital insurance partnerships with the world's leading brands. If you recognizes that insurance is not the top priority for most people, so bring it to the customer when they need it most and to compliment other products and services.
So whether you are buying a car, a house, a kitchen, or an airline, ticket it to you want to be there to make sure you and your family are protected. Traditional insurance companies are made up of a web of complex legacy ERP and mainframe systems, waterfall and outsource processes and outdated, outdated and siloed practices with a significant amount of technical, organizational and cultural debt. All this needs to be paid down and this also results in a huge amount of paper and it's very manual, high cost brittle business that struggles to improve, let alone innovate. Because of all this legacy, the end customer experience is usually at the low end of company priorities behind cost cut outsourcing in the latest sales campaign. To make matters even worse, insurance distribution is a mess of brokers, agents, intermediaries, and complex insurance products. Everyone fighting for their commissional margin.
Again, all at the detriment of the end customer. At iq, we want to do something completely differently. Itq is completely greenfield as no legacy, no retail brand. It's a pure white label model where each participant plays their part and brings value. The partner bring the brand customer and distribution channels while it toq provides the insurance license operation and digital platform starting for Clean chief of paper with Cloud, agile and DevOps built in with a relentless focus on focus on the customer and their experience. We built tried to build a company around a culture of high quality engineering and innovation, innovative insurance experience at the heart of everything we did. So myself and my origins. Um, I'm a self-taught engineer from a data and business intelligence background. And I started my, uh, a career in the mid nineties with a company, uh, a sign called Toland that ultimately became Vodafone that we all know today.
After Vodafone, I found a own consultancy business and was lucky to work with the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Mars, Royal Mail, BP Shell, and typically working with a c-suite on technology strategy and delivery. In 2014, I was asked to help the executive team at Swiss Street to rescue a financial initiative that was going badly wrong. And I was working for the COO as a technology advisor on m and a strategic programs and turnaround projects. The main focus was still relatively operational. I didn't feel like we were really going far enough on the technology or the ways of working. I was trying desperately to get the executive team to see things differently and be more innovative. I felt like I was getting nowhere slowly or at least so I thought
So myself. So I'm admittedly a little bit of a swissy baby. So during university in the UK where I studied law, I spent my summers working in Swiss three's legal department in London. So I was hired straight out of university in two, uh, 2012 and started my career in compliance looking after both corporate solutions and reinsurance EA for Swiss three. And I built up a an experience of different compliance risks and, and different jurisdictions. And my focus has always been on the client enabling side. So really trying to support the business to achieve their goals and navigate obstacles in a compliant way. So in March, 2018, Swiss Re's then group chief compliance officer asked if I would rotate into this IPTA queue for PNC business, uh, the life capital was forming and to keep an eye on them essentially was what I was tasked with. And my first reaction was, I don't do retail insurance. You know, if a customer in in reinsurance is unhappy, they pick up the phone to their lawyers. Retail customers are everyday people with usually no such safety net. And that responsibility to a compliance officer is quite scary. But I saw it as a great challenge and I figured I'd help out for a few months and then I simply never left. And I think a big part of that was the tangible nature and immediacy of retail insurance is very intoxicating.
So Victoria and I decided to talk a little bit around what our feelings were when we first met. So I have to confess, I was pretty cautious around volunteering too much too soon and scaring Victoria without crazy ideas in financial services compliance can be overbearing, extremely risk averse and very conservative, all of which makes sense. But I think technology offers opportunities to be both fast and safe. Victoria and I hit it off straight away and quite quickly became sparring partners, sharing our knowledge and expertise from our very different domains. Victoria never prescribed the how, this is where I think she's different. She always explained the regulations and their limits and boundaries so that we could then work together on how we could achieve the outcomes that we both wanted. This meant that we developed very high levels of trust, honesty and a really pragmatic approach. And this then radiated to other members of the technology team and outwards across legal risk InfoSec and the procurement communities. Given our previous roles in the central business unit level in our ivory towers, we're both now accused of going native in the new business, a battery both wore with immense pride.
So in terms of my first impressions of James, so when iptiQ was in its early stages, there was a lot of focus of course around the agile methodology. And for someone like me who knows insurance but does not come in any way from a technical background, some of the discussions I found myselves in in the early iptiQ days, it was like I'd operated midway through a conversation with people not only speaking a totally foreign language, but like they weren't even really talking about building an insurance company. And given I was responsible for making sure that this insurance company was compliant, I suddenly became very worried that I was, I was missing things. So I sat down with James, uh, for our first proper catch up and really was prepared to be met with yet again another wall of agile and tech jargon. But to my great pleasure, James really connected the dots for me and most importantly, in a very clear and non patronizing way. And from there we really became each other's mutual guides, you know, me for him through the maze of corporate governance and and regulation. And he, for me, through that world of technology and and delivery build. And I think having that person that you fully trust to say, look, I just don't get, this is something that's hugely valuable in business and I think often very underrated.
So I want to talk a little bit around the tech technical and operations strategy that we defined that really gave birth to this business in April, 2017. The COO that I was working for was replaced by a new CTOO from Barclays. Her name's Pravin, a advert, and she was a champion for technology and enterprise agility. And we immediately gravitated towards each other and began working on a new strategy, a north star for the life capital business unit, really with operations and technology embedded together rather than separate silos. The strategy attempted to shift the focus from more traditional top down waterfall and vendor led approach with on-premise and ERP systems for more modern agile DevOps cloud native open source model with an added emphasis on repatriating our engineering knowledge and beginning to build technology rather than buy particularly in those areas that we saw differentiating, we saw one of the biggest opportunities for attract more diverse talent who had worked in technology and creative industries before.
And this meant for going the shirt and the tie and going out and pushing insurance as an exciting place to be, which is no easy feat. We started from a conference in InsureTech and meetup scene to spread the word that we're doing something really interesting. And with it toku, you get the best of both worlds, the opportunity to work in a startup, but with a big corporate background provided in financial security. Once the strategy was accepted and adopted by the business unit executive team and CCOs, I wasn't exactly clear what role I was gonna have in making it happen. To start with, I operated as a central enterprise architect of sorts from ivory towers telling the entities what to do, but not really helping them with the how I felt conflicted. I believed in the strategy needs to change the organization. I felt from the sense top down wasn't me.
I really wanted to roll my sleeves up and get involved sharing the pain, if you like. In 2007, sorry, November, 2017, I was invited into a new top secret project where I was gonna be one of the founding team of brand new digital insurer that was intended to be the embodiment of a technology strategy we'd written three months earlier. It was a chance to put all the three theory into practice for me. It was gonna be the most challenging and reward in two years of my life. As I relaxed with my family at Christmas 2017, I didn't really realize the rollercoaster I'd strapped myself into.
So one of the benefits of being part of a large group like Swiss three is of course the financing. And if IQ were a standalone privately financed company, I think the pressure on very short term return on investment would be really immense. And so Swiss three offers a slightly more insulated playing field, but this of course comes with certain specific expectations. So senior management of course want to know how is all of this money that we're giving you to build this now translating into premium? And those expectations though had to also be managed in light of the fact that it comes, you know, it takes time to build those digital platform capabilities in a sustainable way. And also, of course came with the expectation that we are adhering closely to swissy internal standards and governance so that we didn't accidentally destroy 150 6-year-old reputation before we'd even gone live.
So iptiQ took the spirit of an agile tribe and created the control tribe. So that was made up of the various Swiss three governance functions like compliance, legal, data protection, information security. And this tribe was really about educating those people whose day job was simply not iptiQ, unlike myself. And that control tribe allowed those people to get closer to what IPT Q were really trying, uh, to achieve. And I firmly believe that even as a second line risk function, you can't identify what the real risks are if you are too closed off, if you're in your ivory tower. And being close of course with business and being objective is a very careful balance to be, to be struck. But frankly, distance from what the business is doing will tend to make your enabling approach far more conservative because the unknown always creates fear. So once we moved out of that initial, uh, build phase for ifta QI dissolved the control tribe as a central body.
And those requirements instead became integrated into the wider domains and delivery teams as part of BAU. One of the really interesting cultural challenges in Ipta Q is that we have to balance this innovation and regulation. We hire, you know, motivated, smart, creative people into the UX team, into the marketing teams, into the tech team. And I really had to balance not wanting to crush that fresh creativity with the balance that we are still a highly regulated insurance company. And the fact is to be truly innovative, you are always going to be one step ahead of regulation in that it's not the job of regulators to account for all possible, you know, future developments that InsureTechs could could have. So I think to navigate that transparency is just absolutely fundamental. And exploring together from that design phase, you know, what is the sandbox that we can play in is and was remains really important in NIPT Q.
So IFT QPNC was officially approved, um, to be kicked off in early 2018 by the Swiss three group exec committee and the group board of directors. And that official kickoff, uh, began in a Zurich, uh, hotel conference room in May, 2018. So when IPT Q was just a vision on a PowerPoint, there was no even legal entity behind it. And we had our CEO on board, uh, as well as our head of insurance and our head of corporate development. And of course we had James as our interim head of delivery and myself on rotation. So the vast majority though of the rest of those people were external consultants. And, uh, IPT Q was officially granted its Luxembourg insurance license in, uh, November, 2018. And very shortly after that we were granted our Swiss branch license. I think looking back on that first encounter in May, one of the biggest lessons learned with some hindsight is that the agile methodology was and is the right way forward, but it came with far too much agile evangelism, bearing in mind many of the first people in that room were completely new to this way of working.
Suddenly we're being told that if we're doing agile right, you know, we don't need milestones to be building this company. But we wanted milestones and it felt like we were often trying to balance keeping with true agile methodology and the actual doing and management of an insurance company. So I think a lot of that was we were trying, you know, to apply the agile religion to the letter and not necessarily to the spirit. So when I was looking back on this uh, journey for this presentation, I also asked our CEO what he thought was the real turning point in this journey. You know, when did he feel like the vision was really coming together? He immediately said when the executive team was almost complete. So that was in January, 2019, and that's really when it felt like the vision had a team to direct it. And we had a very first offsite and, um, we had done one of those management self-assessments to assess personality types and working styles, and we were really pleased with ourselves because we had such a diversely spread executive team and that is fantastic. But what isn't so often talked about when it comes to our diverse team is actually then the challenge that you have to take all these people with different ideas and perspectives and ways of working and form it into one functioning coherent team. And that can take time and it certainly takes a shared vision.
So as Victoria mentioned, we had quite a few changes through the first 12 months and some interesting people kind of came and went some good and some bad. I think when I, I look back, we spent too much time going round and round on making some decisions about how we really got going. For me, the key learn is you can get a really bunch of smart people together in a room, create a concept, a plan, and an architecture, but you need people who've executed and have delivered before. Progress isn't always neat and tidy and mistakes will always be made along the way. Too many large corporations fail, fall into the trap of having a perfect plan, a, a thorough analysis and want above all want demand, certainty and success. This isn't how the real world works. Real progress is messy and difficult. We've dealing with emergent complexity can be controlled and boxed in despite what we wish.
I have to confess, some of the agile and DevOps evangelism that Victoria mentioned was coming from me. I think I was overly scared that the big traditional corporate culture would be too strong and overwhelm us, which is why I think I pushed so hard on the concept of agile and DevOps. Ultimately, the principles are more imp important than the practices. And I think sometimes I lost sight of this. I was trying so hard to make success of this business, but for me, this is part of the learning and improving both personally and as a learning organization. What's not shown here is the long and winding journeys that Victoria and I will spending each week moving from Heathrow to Zurich, owning our Silver Cup, BA cards, the barista knowing coffee orders before Victoria even arrived in Heathrow, and me having a personalized greeting in the same hotel room every week. We can't complain too much though. Zurich's an amazing place and I really miss the culture, the open spaces, the bars and restaurants and most of all my walk through the park in the morning to our office, which faced directly onto the lake.
So speaking of the lake, so our first real proof point, point came in April, 2019 when we went live with our very first insurance offering, and that was a cyber protection available to our colleagues in the Swiss Re Munich office. So there was no actual distribution partner involved for this one. And in true Swiss reinsurance fashion, I think we were striving for perfection. And looking back, I think I was too, to an extent there were many eyes, uh, were watching and even with a small internal launch, we didn't want to damage our credibility before we'd actually built any. So we sat in our executive team meeting and officially approved the go live. And luckily we had a willing, uh, Munich employee over in Zurich who became our first official customer. And I think his photo is actually sort of in our customer care center as a sort of mini shrine watching the traffic on Slack pick up with numerous warnings from the tech developers to not touch anything in production.
And then this explosion of celebration on Slack when there was a confirmed payment and that a policy had actually been generated in our backend. That was really the first time that I realized what digital truly means, you know, the sheer machine that's needed to power it in the backend versus I could have just printed off a policy and asked, uh, Stefano our colleague to sign it there. And then, um, so we headed to the lake to celebrate, uh, with some beers. And as you can see with our new giant iptiQ duck mascot, which our, uh, own CEO had to apparently source from some farflung farflung Chinese distributor. I didn't really wanna ask too many questions at that point.
So see if you can spot Victoria in photo, that's a challenge for you. But after a year of hard work, I was excited and anxious about the soft launch. We had targeted the 1st of April for launch, but we were ultimately a day late, which I don't think is too bad. I was up at 3:00 AM and at the airport for 4:00 AM and landings are around 10:00 AM but I was so distracted on calls, slack and everything else that I left my laptop on the airplane. I didn't realize this until I was 15 minutes into my journey to Zurich. So I desperately flew ba uh, uh, fought back my way back to the airport and waited over an hour and a half to my laptop to be reunited with me. Upon reaching the office, I only had minutes to spare before the Jugo live date. I realized my building passed had then expired and I had to steal one from someone else, which I got a slap risk from security. Um, but I wasn't gonna miss this for all the world, uh, all the money in the world. I've arrived with seconds de spare and as Stefana arrived and started his onboarding journey on the new site Victoria doesn't know is I'd already onboarded myself four or five times and already ramped to a big credit card bill just to make sure this didn't go all horribly wrong. During the executive showcase when it finally happened, I was so relieved, I was just desperate to relax and go and have a beer down by the lake.
So in order to continue Ipta Q's successful journey in 2019, it became very clear that an emphasis on an internal model ramp up was needed and a move away from an outsourced expertise model. And it it's been, and it continues to be about building both our platform and people capabilities. And people in Swiss history often ask, you know, when they see what they're, what we're doing, is it too much too soon? But in a large corporate will always be too much. You know, there's always a balance between focusing on backend constraints, not creating legacy, but keeping your front end flexible and opportunistic for new partners and in the middle, making sure that that management stretches is really equal. And that is the inherent complexity of a B2B two c, uh, business model. You need to have an agnostic platform to be scalable, but enough capabilities to be tailor.
So we also continue to grow the team quite a lot in 2019, particularly on the technology side. Very unusually for an insurer, the vast majority of our internal headcount are technology developers and engineers. They're not insurance agents. And also with, to be honest, an overall demographic of a far younger age group than you might otherwise see in traditional financial services having such a huge volume of, of developers. Definitely raised a few, uh, eyebrows within Swiss three, particularly before you've even launched your first partnership. But it's so needed from a platform bill perspective to ensure that longevity and not create legacy. So 2019 was also the year that I to Q won the DIA, uh, a hundred top InsureTechs awards. And most excitingly in November, the combined global Ipta Q brand was officially given unicorn status. So backing up though to June last year, here came our next major milestone, which was the launch of our first, uh, Swiss distribution partner, which James will talk more about. And this year so far we've launched a jam partner, uh, with a flood property cover, and of course our second Swiss partnership, which is ikea, which I will talk more about as well.
So as Victoria mentioned, our first uh, partner, uh, delivery was with all things. And that launch came only three months after our initial friends and family launch in April. All things are European PropTech ecosystem platform. They provide an app to tenants all over Europe for them to access an extensive range of complimentary services to live in one of their properties. For example, rental deposit, maintenance services, laundry, and even bread orders. And they want to partner with VicU to provide insurance services on their platform. This is a completely different way of working for Swiss Re. All things didn't have an extensive resources and capacity. We were just another platform participant to them. This meant we did the majority of our interaction via Slack and engineer to engineer with a brief weekly call. But ultimately we had to figure it all out. It was amazing to see our proposition and brand come together with theirs and really test our white labeling capabilities For the first time.
I think the team did an amazing job and allowed us to practice and learn for the bigger fish that were coming down the road. The Reese felt at the first real time we began to grow into our own skins as a real business with a real identity who could achieve anything we wanted if we just put our minds to it. The buzz of going this life this time felt even more of a high for me. And I felt a mixture of emotions because I knew that I achieved what I set out to do. I'd been on the founding team and helped build a digital insurer from the ground up. There was no instruction manual. We'd done this in ourselves and we'd given our all to this endeavor and been successful. It still makes my hair stand on end when I talk about it. I was immensely proud of what we achieved, but it was bittersweet as I knew that I couldn't stay forever and then coming months I would need to move on and begin searching for my next challenge.
So our launch with Ikea sadly came after James had left it to Q, but of course couldn't have happened without him laying down some really fundamentals. And our launch with IKEA in Switzerland came in February of this year. So it's a household contents in private liability insurance called Hems Secker, literally translated from Swedish's Home Safe and Hems Secker is a really great example of exactly why we created it to QP and c it's an affordable simple to understand insurance sold through a trusted global brand. It's a fully white labeled embedded insurance journey that's embedded within the existing IKEA customer journey. So getting to launch was by no means easy. And in particular, we really had to ensure that a brand like IKEA was such an excellent reputation, felt comfortable with insurance distribution, you know, they have limited experience in a regulated world and it was a co-development process.
We wanted to have features that were unique to that proposition. So for example, a no claims bonus or, uh, claims reimbursements available to customers in the form of IKEA vouchers. And there's also features that build, you know, on ip, both iptiQ and the partners core value. That is really the ipta queue mission. And you know, the simplified digital journey though doesn't just stop at the point of sale. So our online customer portal also allows customers to update their, their details or submit a claim, um, and administer their documents without ever needing to wait in some long call center queue. Although sometimes you can have the best intentions in the world when it comes to digital insurance propositions, but market culture will always play a really huge role. We still get Swiss customers asking if we can please send their policy and quotation by the mail. So I'm very proud to say that I'm a he sector policy holder myself since moving to Zurich. Um, and I can tell you you've really not experienced true customer centricity until you're asked to approve your own policy terms and conditions.
So now we want to give you the opportunity to take a sneak peek, uh, sneak peek inside it to queue so you can see what it is we built.
Meet the tech challenger of the insurance industry. ICU is a startup. Our people come from all over the world and from a wide range of industries. We work fast and flexibly. There are no tired routines here, but instead a variety of work that's ever changing. It's a very collaborative and fun environment here and we're shaping our culture a little bit more every day. Want to join the disruptors? Join iptiQ. We're transforming insurance from within.
So I hope now you're attempted to have a look at iptiQ as a potential career option. So what we doing now? So from my perspective, I'm continued to build my consultancy practice. I still continue to work for C-suite of other enterprises, particularly in the UK on their journeys into the world of digital agile and DevOps. And, uh, Victoria mentioned reassure earlier. So I'm currently working for them on a new asset management, uh, platform and operating model. How can you help? So I two Q is hiring all over the world, um, product and platform engineers, product UX, design and delivery, as well as insurance knowledge. So all over the planet looking for more, uh, capability in the IQ brands. I'm always looking to foster new relationships with people in leadership and DevOps community. So I would like to continue to learn and expand my knowledge and help create extraordinary organizations.
So from my side, so on a personal note, I've officially moved to Zurich as of this year, as I mentioned, in an attempt to shorten my commute from London to Zurich. Little did I know that that commute would actually turn into about 10 seconds from my bedroom to the living room thanks to Covid. But such as life for iptiQ itself though. So 2020 is our year of growth and expansion, so also into the Italian and Dutch markets for for 2020. And it's also really about growing our capabilities and of course our people. So I can only echo what James has said about if you want a career in tech insurance. I'm personally always really interested in hearing others who work in the field of legal and compliance in a tech sphere and really listening to what their experience has been, whether it's in a regulated environment or not. 'cause I'd love to get insights into what is, you know, I think traditionally a very traditional role like legal and compliance and how it's adapting in different companies to, to new technologies and, and to new challenges. So I'd really love to see what I could learn from you.
So lastly, we just wanted to say thank you very much for listening. I think you, I hope you found the talk, um, pretty interesting and useful today. So thank you from me
And thank you very much everyone. It's been an absolute pleasure.