Sebastian Pitzer: Building InsurLab Germany

In this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler – managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne.

Before moving to the other side of the coin (meaning becoming an InsurTech startup enabler), Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary company of MunichRe. He also has a background in IT strategy, he is a board member and a digital lab development expert.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Within our industry, there has been a great mind shift within the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the Ergo Lab in Berlin, in the beginning it was hard to talk with the procurement department to create a contract between a startup and an incumbent.
• The insurance industry was coming at it from an IT background that was focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software like Microsoft, and SAP, and finally, then they were open to working and collaborating with startups.
• It’s great to have seen the volume of InsurTech startups increase steadily over the past few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: 1) The willingness and acceptance to support startups and corporate management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. 2) The ability to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to major problems in a very short time period, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create a lot of win-win situations and success stories where we could demonstrate that a startup solution could help to overcome, for example, the bottleneck of internal IT capacity.
• Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: To build a strong and reliable network for all parties, including enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalization. From the beginning the design of the initiative was that we needed to bring together insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities, all with different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation.
• By setting up the InsureNXT Conference, our goal was clear. We wanted to ensure that the focus was not only on insurance, startups, and tech companies. We also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical if you want to develop innovation and digitalization for insurance in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see how cross-industry partners are joining companies as networks like Garmin, Volvo, and Lufthansa Systems, all collaborating with our startups!

BEST MOMENTS

‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’

‘During the past six months, we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow. We’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our insurance and expert networks. Those connections helped develop over 40 projects. And some are already up and running as products on the market.’

‘Corporations want to innovate but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’

‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers besides the member network that we have created and our partner network.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sebastian Pitzler is Managing Director of InsurLab Germany, and this since March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pitzler/ 

Website: https://insurlab-germany.com/en/insurlab/ 

ABOUT THE HOST

There are over 140,000 FinTech ventures out there, including FinTechs, InsurTechs, HealthTechs, and WealthTechs. And the number keeps on changing every month. One statistic remains the same: 25% of these ventures have received investment and support from the financing world. 75% of these businesses still seek financing support from institutional and corporate investors alongside value-creating commercial collaboration opportunities with Global Fortune 500. 

Through this podcast series, I would like to demystify the world of corporate venturing, including how corporations collaborate with growth ventures, how venture capitalists and corporate venture capitalists make investment and collaboration choices in ventures and give tech founders and entrepreneurs, the strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques to build, grow and scale their business by understanding how those with financing power think. So, listen in, share and comment as you see fit.

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