ILC ARTICLE

Meet Your ClaimsTech Lead

13th September 2023

What was your first job?

I worked at Mr Minutes the key cutters and shoe smiths cutting keys for £3 a day when I was 8 years old. My first ‘techy’ job was fixing computers at Computer Man when I was 11, though I was paid in computer parts not money unfortunately!

How did you get into the industry?

A random opportunity to build a ‘coming soon’ page for a friend’s father who was setting up an insurance company back in 2009, which lead me an eventful 12-hour job interview at Wembley Stadium with the founders of InsureTheBox. I quit university and never looked back.

What is the most exciting opportunity in this sector at the moment?

The talk around Open Banking being replicated into Open Insurance is something that I think will really open the sector up. Multiple schemas and closed systems with multi-year wait times for build slots closes off the insurance sector as it once did for banking, but the Open Banking API changed the way we interact with our money, be it through consumer apps like Monzo or the way we can now do payments from our bank account direct. Having an Open Insurance API will change the way we do insurance and claims, and allow much more seamless integrations between the driver, the insurer and the supply network.

What are the hot topics of the conference?

Large language models (LLMs) will crop up obviously – it’s the ‘go to’ topic at every tech conference currently with Google and AWS mentioning it in pretty much every session of their conferences. The impact they can have on counter fraud, triaging, pattern identification, and, more importantly, as a co-pilot for staff, supporting them doing their job will be huge. For now though, we have to remember that these things aren’t always accurate, so it’s going to be interesting to watch that space develop.

But while LLMs and artificial intelligence (AI) in general have a place and will continue to grow and takeover how we ‘do tech’, there will also be talks on how technology doesn’t need to be ‘fancy’ to solve a problem! A simple solution to solve a complex problem will always be the chief information officer’s (CIO) dream as it’s less likely to go wrong in the future, plus it’s more cost effective to implement. We should see people talking about this at ClaimsTech LIVE, where the theme is ‘Using technology to solve a problem’.

Who can we expect to be attending the conference?

We’ve got some interesting people talking from within the sector and beyond, along with claims leaders as well as venture capitalists (VCs) who will have been involved in The Pitch event earlier. I’m really excited to hear from Sharif Ishaque at Uber, and the Uber story! I’m sure like any scale up, they’ve got some fantastic stories from behind the scenes!