00:00:09

Next up is Victoria Mayo, who is head of compliance for Ellipta Q AMEA 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 APTA Q PNC was built inside of Swiss re describe why and how the strategically important program was created and how it has earned the highest levels of support from within the organization. The shares, the successes and lessons learned, creating digital insurance, offering sold through new channels, such as retailers. This is such a fantastic talk about how Swiss re is horizon. One businesses created a set of ambitious horizon, three initiatives to explore innovate and wind in the marketplace. So please welcome Victoria and James.

00:01:06

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 is Dane tad, I'm CEO and founder of rebellion consultant. I'm joined by ex colleague and now close friend, Victoria Mayer. She's head of compliance with secure mere PNC and part of the executive team. Our keynote today is power Colossus to conduct and turn it into a unicorn. Our story of transforming 156 year old red shore and ourselves in the process. Really hope you enjoy the talk and it gives you some useful insight and inspiration.

00:01:41

So before we dive into Epicure, we wanted to first introduce you to it's home, which is history and surgery is currently the world's largest reinsurance company and its origin stemmed from May, 1861. When more than 500 houses went up in flames and the Swiss town of Glarus two thirds of that town sank into Asheville. Then 3000 people lost their home and not 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 patches to help insulate itself from the risk of a major claims event. So sorcery itself is made up of three core business units. The first is re-insurance and that's by far the largest, it makes up around 80% of sister's overall revenues, covering life and health, and also property and casualty or non-life business.

00:02:35

Then we have corporate solutions and that's our corporate to corporate insurance arm, but offers various insurance conferences for multinational and mid-sized firms. And then last but not least, we have life capital. So life capital is where it to Q P and C the company that we'll be talking about today, actually sips and life capital is probably the newest part of Swiss re from a business unit perspective. And its primary goal is to boost longterm revenues of fishery and accessing new insurance areas re-insurance is a kind of shrinking or a much smaller pool than it used to be. And so if DQ is part of that strategy to access the primary insurance pool, and if the queue is a B2B to C Fisher, meaning that 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.

00:03:22

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 Ronald specialist in the UK. And it was a huge cash generator for Swiss re for a number of years. So Rachel was sold to Phoenix group this year, subject to regulatory approvals. And this will then now bring it to cute family into the investor spotlight from a global Swiss re perspective. So it's an initiative that's super important at this history 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 CICD is Christian movements that you can see that reporting to Christian is Tiara 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 shots again, and he's all very own into Q a Mia as CEO. And we operate in a matrix reporting line in Swiss re. So James reported both to the life capital CTO and an, uh, who another report of, of Terry as well as to Andres and myself. I report to the head of compliance for life capital also as well as two entrees.

00:04:31

So let's now talk a little bit more about it to queue. So if the is key for Swiss street, they really believe this is their future growth engine. As Victoria describes their waste tackle, the innovator's dilemma and the third horizon, they willing to invest in this over the longterm there now for it to queue, that's like their excuse now in four continents of the world and something the board take a keen interest in, but it's not just a pure financial play for Swiss re re ministry and 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. It keeps their gateway into this new world of innovation and technology. It keeps business model is unique. You built around digital insurance partnerships with the world's leading brands. If you recognizes that insurance is not the top priority for most people.

00:05:14

So bring it to the customer when they need it most and to compliment other products and services. So whether you're buying a car, a house, a kitchen, or an airline ticket, it's a queue wants to be there to make sure you and your family are protected. Traditionally insurance companies are made up of a web of complex legacy ERP and mainframe systems, waterfall and outsource processes and outdated, outdated siloed practices with a significant amount of technical organizational and cultural debt. All this needs to be paid though. And this also results in a huge amount of paper, and it was very manual, high cost, brittle business that struggles to improve let's learn innovate because of all this legacy and customer experience is usually at a lower end of company priorities. Buying cost cuts in outsourcing and the latest sales campaign to make matters. Even worse. Insurance distribution is a massive brokers, agents, intermediaries and complex insurance products.

00:06:05

Everyone fighting for their commissioner margin. Again, all at the detriment of the end customer. It's a cure. We want to do something completely differently. It's curious, completely Greenfield has 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, what it to Q provides the insurance license, operation, and digital platform starting for clean sheet of paper with cloud agile and dev ops built in with a relentless focus on that, focus on the customer and their experience. We built tried to build the 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 by, uh, a career in the mid nineties with a company called Torklift that ultimately became Vodafone that we all know today after Vodafone, I founded my 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 the C-suite on technology strategy and delivery.

00:07:10

In 2014, I was asked to help the executive team at Swiss re to rescue a financial initiative. It 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 solely or at least so I thought

00:07:37

So my self, so I'm admittedly a little bit of a slippery baby. So during university in the UK, where I studied law, I spent my summers working into the three's legal department in London. So I was hired straight out of university in 2012 and started my career in compliance, looking after both corporate solutions and re-insurance media force history. And I built up a, an experience of different compliance risks 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 then group chief compliance officer asked if I would rotate into this empty 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 re-insurance 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

00:08:49

The Victor. 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, we are crazy ideas in financial services. Complaints can be overbearing and extremely risk averse and very conservative, all of which makes sense, but I think technology offers opportunities to be both fast unsafe Victoria, and I hit it off straight away and quite quickly became sparring partners, sharing our knowledge and expertise. My very different domains, Victoria never prescribed to how this is what 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 and the new business, a batch. We both wore the men's price.

00:09:48

So in terms of my first impressions of James. So when 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 myself in, in the early up to two days, it was like I 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 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 that, we really became each other's mutual guides. You know, me for him through the maze of corporate governance and regulation. And he, for me through that world of technology and at 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.

00:10:53

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 CEO that I was working for was replaced by a new CTO from Barclays, her name's Pravina Ludford. And she was a champion for technology and enterprise agility, and will be immediately gravitated towards each other and began working on a new strategy, a north star for the life after 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 the RP systems for more modern, agile dev ops cloud native open source model with another emphasis on repatriating, our engineering knowledge and beginning to build technology rather than buy, particularly in those areas that we saw differentiate him. We saw one of the biggest opportunities for, to attract more diverse talent who had worked in technology and creative industries before.

00:11:47

And this meant for go in the shirt and the tie and going out and pushing insurances and exciting place to be, which is no easy feat. We started from the conference InsureTech and meetup scene to spread the word that we're doing. Something really interesting with it to key. You get the best of both worlds, the opportunity to work in a startup, but with a big corporate background, providing financial security, once the structure was accepted and adopted by the business unit executive team and in CCOs, I wasn't exactly clear what role I was going to have in making it happen to start with, I operated as a central enterprise architects of sorts from ivory tower as telling the entities what to do, but not really helping them with the, how I felt conflicted. I believe in the structure in these changed the organization. I felt from the sentence top-down wasn't me.

00:12:30

I really wants 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 going to be one of the founding team of brand new digital insurer that was intended to be the embodiment of the technology strategy. We'd written three months earlier. It was a chance to put all the three theory into practice with me. It was going to be the most challenging and awarding two years of my life. As I relaxed to my family at Christmas, 2017, I didn't really realize the rollercoaster that I'd strap myself into.

00:12:58

So one of the benefits of being part of a large group like Swiss re is of course, the financing and evicted Q we're a standalone privately financed company. I think the pressure on very short term return on investment would be really immense. And so Swiss re offers a slightly more insulated Plainfield, 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 Swiss re internal standards and governance so that we didn't accidentally destroy 156 year old reputation before we even go in life.

00:13:45

So if DQ took the spirit of an agile tribe and created the control tribe, so that was made up of the various Swiss re governance functions like compliance, legal data protection, information security. And this tribe is really about educating those people whose day job was simply not septic you unlike myself and that control tribe allowed those people to get closer to what if you were really trying to achieve. And I firmly believed 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 build phase for after Q I 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.

00:14:40

One of the really interesting cultural challenges in a PQ is that we have to balance this innovation and regulation. We hire 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 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 in, was remains really important in it to queue. So you have to queue PNC was officially approved, um, to be kicked off in early 2018 by the Swiss re group exec committee and the group board of directors.

00:15:34

And that official kickoff, uh, began in a Zurich, a hotel conference room in May, 2018. So when empty cube was just a vision on a PowerPoint that was never even legal entity behind it. And we had our CEO on board 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 if DQ 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.

00:16:22

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 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 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.

00:17:09

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 diversity 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.

00:17:41

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 look back, we spent too much time going round and round or 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 architecture, but you need people who have executed. And if delivered before progress, isn't, it was neat and tidy and mistakes will always be made along the way too many large corporations fail and fall into the trap of having a perfect plan, a thorough 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 within with emergent complexity.

00:18:21

It 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 at the big traditional corporate culture would be too strong and overwhelmness, which is why I think I pushed so hard on the concept of agile and dev ops. Ultimately, the principles are more 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-winded journeys that Victoria and I were spend in each week, moving from Heathrow to Zurich and in our silver cut 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. So Zurich's an amazing place. And I really missed the culture, the open spaces, the bars and restaurants, and most of them, I walked through the park in the morning to our office, which faced directly onto the lake.

00:19:16

So speaking to the lake, so office real proof point points 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. I'm looking back. I think I was too, to an extent there were many always we're 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 I sort of mini shrine, watching the traffic on slack pickup with numerous warnings from the tech developers to not touch anything in production.

00:20:09

And then this explosion of celebration on slack when there was a confirmed payment and that our 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 Stephano our colleague to sign it there. And then, um, so we headed to the lake to celebrate with some beers. And as you can see, without new giant empty queue duck mascot, which our own Theo had to apparently source from some far-flung far-flung Chinese distributor. I didn't really want to ask too many questions at that point.

00:20:48

So see if you can spot Victoria and 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 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 London's are at around 10:00 AM. I was so distracted on calls, slack and everything else. I left my laptop on the airplane. I didn't realize it until I was 15 minutes into my journey and dessert. So it desperately flew, but fought my way back to the airport. I waited over an hour and a half to my laptop to be reunited with me upon reaching the office. I only have minutes to spare before the do go live date. I realized my built in password 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. All the money in the world, I've arrived with seconds to spare and it's to find a ride and start this onboarding journey on the new site that didn't melt Victoria doesn't know is I'd already onboarded myself four or five times and naughty ramped to the big credit card bill, just to make sure this didn't go horribly wrong journey. 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.

00:21:53

So in order to continue if to Q successful journey in 2019, it became very clear that an emphasis on an internal model brand pup was needed and to move away from an outsourced expertise model. And it it's been an, it continues to be about building both our platform and people capabilities and the people whose history often ask, you know, when they see what that, 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 to C uh, business model. You need to have an agnostic platform to be scalable, but enough capabilities to be tailorable.

00:22:38

So we also continued 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, our technology developers and engineers. They're not insurance agents 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 eyebrows within Swiss theory, particularly before you've even launched your first partnership, but it's so needed from a platform build perspective to ensure that longevity and not create legacy. So 2019 was also the year they dipped to Q1, the DIA a hundred top InsureTechs awards, and most excitingly in November, the combined global execu brand was officially given unicorn status. So backing up third 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 partner, uh, with a flood property cover. And of course, our second partnership, which is Ikea, which I will talk more about as well.

00:23:42

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 went to partnership to provide insurance services on their platform. This is completely different way of working for Swiss re all things don'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 this, or really test our white labeling capabilities for the first time.

00:24:32

I think the team did an amazing job and allowed us to practice and learn from the bigger fish that were coming down the road. The felt like the first real time we began to grow into our own skins as a real business with a real identity. You could achieve anything you wanted. If we just put our minds to it, the of go in this life is 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've done this in ourselves and we've given our all to this endeavor and been successful. It still makes my hats on. And 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 come in months, I would need to move on and begin searching for my next challenge.

00:25:11

So I'll 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 I launched that here in Switzerland, came in February of this year. So it's a household contents in private liability insurance called him Seco, literally translated from Swedish as home safe. And him Secor is a really great example of exactly why we created a to Q P and Z. It's an affordable, simple to understand insurance sold through a trusted global brand. It's a fully white labeled embedded insurance. Johnny that's embedded within the existing Ikea customer journey. So getting into launch was by no means easy. And in particular, we really had to ensure that a brand like a Kia was such an X, their reputation felt comfortable with insurance distribution. You know, they have limited experience in a regulated world and it was a co-development process.

00:25:59

We wanted to have features that were unique to that proposition. So that for example, a no claims bonus or a claims reimbursements available to customers in the form of Ikea vouchers. And there's also features that build on both MTQ and the partner's core value. That is really the execute 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 and administer that 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 micro-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 half second policy holder myself since moving to Zurich. And I can tell you, you really not experienced true customer centricity until you're asked to approve your own policy terms and conditions.

00:26:55

So now we want to give you the opportunity to take a sneak peek, a sneak peek inside it to queue. So you can see what it is we built

00:27:06

Meet the tech challenger of the insurance industry 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 tires if he's here, but instead of a variety of work, That's an ever-changing Very collaborative and fun environment and are shaping our culture a little bit more every day. One to join the disruptors, join it to cue We're transforming insurance from within.

00:27:49

So I hope now you're tempted to have a look at Epicure as a potential career option. So what we're doing now, so from my perspective, I'm continuing 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 dev ops. And Mo Victoria mentioned reassure idea. So I'm currently working for them on a new asset management, uh, Platform and operating model. How can you help? So if tequila is hiring all over the world, um, product and platform, engineers, product UX, design, and delivery as well in insurance knowledge. So all over the planet, working for more, uh, capability in it to do brands, I'm always looking to foster new relationships with people in leadership and DevOps community. So I would like to continue to learn, expand my knowledge and help create extraordinary organizations.

00:28:40

So from my side, so at 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 up to Q 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 own the echo, what James has said about, if you want a career in tech insurance, I'm passing the 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, because I'd love to get insights into what is, you know, I think traditionally a very traditional role like legal compliance and how it's adapting in different companies to, to new technologies and enter new challenges. So I really love to see what I could let for you.

00:29:34

So lastly, we just want you to say thank you very much for listening. I think I hope you found the talker pretty interested in useful state. So thank you from me

00:29:41

And thank you very much, everyone. It's been an absolute pleasure.