Ep217 Tanguy Touffut Descartes Underwriting: Physics over Statistics

Today’s guest runs a business that this year is set to quadruple in size since the first time he was on the show just over two years ago.

What’s more it is looking to more than double again in the medium term.

Tanguy Touffut CEO and co-founder of Descartes Underwriting is one of the indispensable leaders in the burgeoning parametric insurance sector.

Descartes is probably the best-funded and certainly most ambitious of a cohort of peers to emerge in the last 5 years on the back of the insurtech boom.

It has made a large strategic bet on the sector, building a global network of offices and now employing over 200, with more offices and hires still likely to come.

Now that the sector is beginning to mature and the field of start-ups begins to thin out and parametric products are joining the day-to-day toolkit of major brokers and commercial risk managers, it was great to catch up.

Much has changed since we last spoke, not least a huge shift in the state of the reinsurance market and the emergence of artificial intelligence into the global psyche, so we had an awful lot to talk about.

In an industry where conservatism and scepticism are not only endemic but often valued character traits, Tanguy has a clear vision of how the right parametric solutions applied in the right places are going to transform insurance for the better, in consistency and transparency of pricing and coverage as well as in speed of claims handling and payment.

My job for large parts of this podcast was to play devil’s advocate and challenge Tanguy on this new modus operandi of insurance and whether it is a genuine disruptive challenge to the commercial insurance sector as a whole or something of a passing fashion.

Tanguy came though extremely convincingly.

He may be a visionary, but Tanguy is also a realist who knows that if this relatively new method of risk transfer is to succeed long-term, it must have a genuine technical edge over traditional indemnity insurance in terms of its understanding and pricing of risk – hence Descartes’ huge investment in scientific and technological talent.

This is someone who has thought deeply about the whole insurance value chain and knows where it might be improved and that’s what makes this a fascinating conversation.

Listen on for a grand tour of an exciting and fast-moving new insurance sector with one of its principal architects.

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