Alchemy Crew seeks to uncover ‘true issues and gaps’ in insurance sector growth strategies

When it comes to growth strategies post-pandemic, the insurance sector will need to rapidly adapt to the “new normal” and build the right operating models. 

These strategies can come in the form of partnerships, investment, capacity provision, acquisitions and even market exits.

This is according to one of the three co-founders at the recently launched Alchemy Crew, Sabine VanderLinden, who was previously chief executive and managing partner at accelerator Startupbootcamp. 

VanderLinden said that, while insurers may think they know the best strategy for their business, there is often more work required to ”unearth the true issues and gaps” in their business.

“Often insurers believe that they have a clear understanding of the issues that are most important,” VanderLineden said. “However, when we drill down to determine strategic priorities, we realise that lots of work is still required to unearth the true issues and gaps and define the criteria to solve the problem with ventures.

”We have fine-tuned our approach to reduce lags, ensure that each participating partner’s time is used in the most efficient way possible and that those growth ventures that have been found from the four corners of the world really nail the problems we agreed to solve alongside our stakeholders.”

The three co-founders, which include VanderLinden, Min Q. Tran, the former founder of the AXA Seed Factory, and Dan White, specialist insurance innovation leader and managing partner at Ninety Consulting who fund Alchemy Crew, spent months refining the model to identify the most pertinent growth ventures for businesses.

“It is not about the identification of those ventures but understanding the depth of the problem that needs solving first and the disruptive factors that will affect the sector second,” VanderLinden added.

Acceleration

VanderLinded said this is because the pandemic has forced many insurers to accelerate virtualisation, automation, and digitalisation. She listed three pillars: adaptability, product and service innovation, and the process of designing business models of tomorrow. 

“Adaptability for us means creating flexible teams, environments, processes that are able to manage these tough societal shocks,” she added.

This is because Alchemy Crew can see that insurers are seeking basic efficiency innovation to ensure that those engagements and processes that should have been customer-centric before Covid-19 are truly optimized as a baseline.

And product and service innovation, she said, has left “no doubt that the current crisis has highlighted new groups of underserved customer segments from gig economy workers to front line health staff”.

Listening

Speaking about her five-year stint at Startupbootcamp back in 2015, VanderLinded said that what made it so successful was its ability to listen to the needs of its insurance and financial partners and adapt its commercial model accordingly.

“We [Alchemy Crew] accelerate by truly listening to the underlying problem shared with us and by leveraging an international network of non-insurance specialists that seek new ways to solve the problem,” she said.

It does this in four ways, sharing the most pressing problems affecting the UK today, screening for interesting use cases, shaping completely virtual open innovation workspaces and learning to achieve the most suited growth strategies, whether these be partnerships, investment and capacity provision, acquisitions or exits

Not forgotten

After the insurtech sector having faced various challenges during the pandemic as well as ongoing problems with funding and partnerships, VanderLinden provided reassurance that the insurtech sector has not been overlooked in Alchemy Crew’s plans. 

“Insurtechs are a core part of this proposition,”she said. ”While the investment prediction for 2020 has halved, 1,500 startups received $29bn investment for the past six to seven years. Today’s corporates and investors will ask for more thorough due diligence evaluations to ensure that young ventures can survive demanding corporate assessment processes. Many of these ventures have pivoted their business models to address Covid-19 requirements.”

VanderLinden has taken the lead of the insurtech portfolio during Covid-19.

---

Read more…Barton/Reid warn of execessive consolidation at inflated prices 

Not subscribed? Become a subscriber and access our premium content