Dr Dietmar Kottmann: The InsurTech Radar

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Dr. Dietmar Kottmann, a Partner of Oliver Wyman in Munich and a member of the insurance and digital practices. Dietmar has more than 20 years of experience in management and strategic consulting. During this time, he has led numerous projects on strategy, IT, operational strategy, organisation, and digitisation. He leads insurance in the DACH region and is the lead author of the “InsurTech radar” series.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• One of the most negative examples I had in my consulting career was in the .com days. We did a large ecommerce strategy project for one of the large travel players and the core strategy we recommended for them, we know today with hindsight that it was the right strategy because it was later executed by a startup, but the client was unable to execute it. Even though it was intellectually spot on, we were unable to set the client up for success. That keeps me awake at night. Consulting is not R&D, or what you do at university; it’s generating real impact for your clients.
• Oliver Wyman – more or less – has three kinds of clients 1) financial sponsors who want to invest in (digital) insurance businesses, 2) customers who want to build something new in the InsurTech space, 3) helping our incumbent clients transform and become more successful in the digital world. This last one is our bread and butter.
• There are always three kinds of innovation: 1) efficiency innovations – reducing waste, 20 sustaining innovations – making the product better every year with features, coverages, engagement models, 3) market creating innovations – where you think about how the market is changing and where you position yourself for future success.
• When you think about a problem, you have to start with someone whose life you might want to improve – a company or an individual. What progress are they seeking – functional, emotional, social? All three must be considered to help the customer. That is the most fun part of the business, really thinking about what we’re doing in a fundamental way, going much, much deeper, being much more interesting, and playing to my curiosity than “how can I advance the next generation of my product”.

BEST MOMENTS

‘I started my career on the nerd side of the universe, playing with computers and programming on a Sinclair Zx81. Since then, I looked for a career that allowed me to combine my passion with technology and computer science with affecting something in the real world: Strategy Consulting.’

‘There’s one big theme in my life: Curiosity, like a child. That’s the big driver that gives me energy and drives me forward, so I don’t repeat things and am open to new things and new developments.’

‘Thinking about impact from day one, and embedding that impact into how you run your consulting project, I think that makes a difference.’

‘When you look at what makes InsurTech business successful, it’s one of two kinds of business: 1) those who are looking are actually working on an inefficiency in a market and launch something that improves that by a large factor, 2) platform business models, a technology-driven business model that rents market access to customers like Amazon.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, Dietmar worked at the Boston Consulting Group in Munich and New York, where he led major strategy, IT, and operations projects across a range of industries. Before working in management consulting, Dietmar held a number of technology roles in IT project management, system integration, sales, and education.

Dietmar graduated from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with a diploma and a PhD in computer science with honours and from the University of Hagen with a diploma in business administration.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

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