Building Insurance Companies from Within

In this episode, our hosts James Benham and Rob Galbraith interview Hanno Mijer who’s been involved with many of the biggest insurance companies in the world and now, does consulting for technology implementation, sales and marketing.

Hanno Mijer graduated college as an actuary, but his passion for building businesses was evident early in his life. Hanno realized early in his career that his passion was around marketing and business development.

“Pretty early on during my university I realized I was probably the worst actuary in the room but also probably one of the very few who was really interested more in the marketing sales business development side of the industry”.

After graduating from college, he started developing client solutions for a dutch insurance company. After proving to be a valuable asset for the company, they quickly sent him abroad to central eastern Europe, and Asia, where he joined what is now called Willestow Watson, which was in those days called Watson Wide, very much a traditional actuarial firm.

After his experience with Watson Wide, he joined Zurich, the big global insurance company. They offered him to set up a new business. He got into the venture of opening successful branches of Zurich, like Zurich Global and Zurich Resilience Risk Consulting.

With years of experience in the industry, Hanno retired in early 2024, but continued to provide strategic consulting services for insurtech companies.

“To my surprise there were a lot of similarities between what I’ve done building insurance companies in an insurance company and now that I’ve joined a number of InsurTechs as an advisor and also working with private equity.”

Looking ahead to the future of the industry

With his years of experience, Hanno has a panoramic view of where insurtech came from and where insurtech is right now. He states that “technology was always there and played an important role” but now companies have the ability to harness data, gather data and leverage it into improvements for products and services in the insurance industry.

“Technology is accelerating all the time, right? If it’s around digitizing the claims process or if it’s about using AI to really leverage sophisticated models and translate it into insights which people understand, it has always been there. But what I find very encouraging is that technology wasn’t really on the radar screen of leadership at all. Now, they’re moving a little bit more from an operational perspective. They ask how technology could help processes become more effective.”

Hanno thinks that technology is more than ever, a vital part of what the industry tries to achieve to make life easier for customers and stakeholders. Not only in terms of better positioning but also of better value and to provide insights based on data.

According to Hanno, the industry still has a long way to go.

“There was an article in the Financial Times about how difficult it is for people to ensure their homes in New York or Florida. It was referring to flooding and other climate driven changes and I have to say when I read that article I almost fell off my chair because basically it was saying ‘It’s extremely hard or sometimes impossible to get appropriate or affordable insurance. I was flabbergasted because the technology is there, there are sensors, there are models, there is data and particularly the hope that AI makes it possible for carriers to be much more accurate about the underwriting in the pricing and make it available to customers.”

He questions why, while having the available technology, that there are hundreds of thousands of people who cannot get appropriate insurance. For him, that means that as an industry, insurance still has to harness technology and the available data and put them into good use for their users.

“Every single day now, I can see a lot of the lessons I’ve learned when building insurance companies from within. It’s about how you bring together people who come from completely different perspectives in this case, how do you bring together traditional thinking insurance executives. The thing is in the end, how do we make sure as an industry that technology is accessible and usable for the customer. Whoever it is and wherever they may be.”

For Hanno, the fundamental aspect of technology that is often overlooked is how technology is implemented, what benefits it brings to the end user and the mindset within the company.

The fluff vs the real stuff around technology

When asked about separating true revolutionary developments on tech for the insurance industry Hanno retaliates, “Do we really understand the underlying need of the end customer?”. His bottom line is that insurance companies can do much more to help their clients become more resilient.

Hanno shared an example around climate change saying that in his last job, there was a lot of fluff. Initially, a number of climate scientists developed great climate models, analyses and diagrams. But that didn’t do a lot by itself, so it was fluff. Nobody wanted to buy it, even internally. It was great to show in meetings but they didn’t have a concrete application.

Hanno and his team realized that they could put this data to use to benefit customers.

Hanno highlights that “it’s not only about the content but also how you can use it if that makes sense now”.

At the same time, Hanno states that there are dozens and dozens of big multinational companies across Europe, but also in the US, who’ve actually incorporated insurtech services. This is because they realize it is the combination of the risk management philosophy of insurers and knowledge with technology that actually offers stuff which clients are happy to pay for. For Hanno, it’s about strategic business.

“I think it is actually the result of a lot of incremental things you do, but but I want to refer to what you said because it really does start with the mindset, but that’s linked to having a very clear understanding what you’re trying to achieve”.

All in all, Hanno believes it is fundamental to know what you want to do when building an insurance business from within, and how to use technology for the benefit of the customer.