Tällt's IPO, getting PoCs very wrong and a China immersion

Hello.

A relatively short Sø.Nws this week. Mainly due to the pile up of work I still need to get through having spent yesterday dressed in tweed, shooting clays. A long story but I suddenly have the urge to buy a 1,000 acre estate in Oxfordshire.

Maybe it’s time for that Tällt IPO.
I hear it’s all the rage these days.

Let’s dive in. Another fascinating couple of weeks in the world of insurance innovation.

Lemonade is now up and running in Germany, Trov is pulling out of the UK, and after a 900% growth in the past 12 months, Zego have raised a cracking $42m Series B to expand across Europe.

Money, big and small
Honcho landed some more cash last week; a further £750k from PE firm Maven Capital. It’ll be interesting to see how these guys get on with their ‘reverse auction marketplace’ where companies bid for consumers’ business. They will be launching ‘very soon’.

Till death do us part
A couple days back I read about MetLife Asia’s world of insurance innovation centre partnering up with a Singaporean media company and a local, socially-focussed, insurer. The initiative will use blockchain to automate life insurance claims for bereaved families.

Brilliant. I can totally see the use case for this.

What I couldn’t quite get is…

‘The pilot, to end in October, will target 1,000 randomly selected Income life insurance policyholders. Family members who place obituaries in The Straits Times will be informed about Lifechain.’

WTF? You place an obituary and you’re contacted about Lifechain? Oh no, no, no. Let’s not forget the real-world folks. We all love our world of insurance innovation but let’s step back from what we’re up to once in a while, right? There has to be a better way to PoC this.

Back to Europe and Luko, who I’m sure were ‘another Neos’ just a year or two ago, has partnered up with Munich Re to launch its AI driven satellite imagery home insurance. It’s a super interesting proposition – you enter your address, select your plot, and the satellite image instantly appears detecting a bunch of variables (roof type, pool, etc).

What a 9am Monday morning webinar looks like
A few months back we headed out to China with a team of 15 from BGL Group.

Last Monday morning we hosted the Explòr China webinar, catching up with Steve Woodford, CTO over at BGL, John Artman from Technode.com (the TechCrunch of China) and Chris Potts from Alibaba.com.

For those who weren’t able to make it, you can see the full recording here: https://vimeo.com/341578398. Be gentle, it was early and it was on a Monday.

• Get a glimpse into how our own markets will change in the next few years
• Learn what the leading innovators are doing, and how they’re doing it
• Connect with technology partners that can drive your business forward

The long and short is you get to China. It so happens there are a few spaces left for our upcoming Sept 2019 trip.

Across 7 days you’ll have 30+ meetings with the best in class startups, accelerators, VCs and corporate innovators – from ZhongAn to Alibaba. Priceless.

You can register your interest and find out more here: https://explor.tallt.ventures/

Calling ALL (well, some) innovation directors
Robb, our Proposition Design Director, is interviewing a bunch of folk, the objective being to gather insight and learnings into the conditions that give the world of organic insurance innovation the greatest chance of success, with a view to sharing best practice.

Thanks to all those who have said yes to interviews. We could still do with a handful more.

We’ll be distributing this to our 2,500+ contacts; if you can spare a few minutes, want global fame and fortune and have something interesting to say, get in touch.

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Right time to sign off. A little more graft and then it’s the Tällt summer party tomorrow so wish us luck.

Have good weekends all.

Matt

No one is quite sure what’s happened to all the vowels but if you did want a market intelligence and proposition development company to work with, we’re pretty exceptional.

Our vision is to accelerate corporate innovation and entrepreneurship by providing intelligence on the trends, competitor playbooks and global disruptive tech, and to create new opportunities with ambitious organisations around the world.

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