Nigel Walsh: Making insurance loveable

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nigel Walsh, formerly Managing Director, Insurance at Google and now global head of insurance at ServiceNow. Nigel is on a mission to make Insurance loveable. He spends his days helping insurance carriers unlock the power of Google Cloud and Alphabet, supporting startups, building communities, creating MGAs, writing papers, and more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• In the last 15 years, I’ve truly fallen in love with insurance. I think it’s got a huge purpose, it’s massively misunderstood and misloved. You only have to step out of our little bubble of friends to your everyday friends, who don’t work in insurance, and ask them their perception or impression of insurance, and it’s not good. My desire is to turn that into something as joyful, delightful, and exciting as an experience of buying something online or engaging digitally in different ways.
• I love that the organization that I work for is so inclusive, beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life. We have 9 products with over a billion active daily users, so you have to be able to manage, understand, and design for everyone when you do that. Through an insurance lens, we have some of the smartest people on the planet thinking about things and helping stretch your imagination in so many different ways. 
• The platforms that we’ve got that surround our core technologies and cloud – like being able to look things up on YouTube, not just Google – give us the ability to help educate the world in a very, very different way. My ambition is to string those pieces together, not just to close the protection gap, but also to close the education gap, so everyone has access and an understanding of what we’re doing going forward.
• Big corporations and individuals are physically transferring money into this new world (the Metaverse – which could be a fad like SecondLife and Clubhouse), then you’re also automatically creating risk, and that risk could be or should be protected. The most obvious threat in the Metaverse is cybercrime, which costs the industry billions of dollars year on year. And now we’ve opened up a whole new world and a new level of risk. We should now also spend some time exploring and understanding what these risks mean for customers and insurance carriers alike. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘Our ability to enable large insurance carriers, small startups, and everything in-between with what we have, I felt like a stronger opportunity to be a force for good as we go to support consumers, corporates, and so much more.’

‘Over the last couple of years, especially in lockdown, I found solace in the InsurTech community, who were sharing their success stories, especially in their exercise schedules. They’re always striving to move forward.’

‘I don’t read as many books as I used to, but I love listening to podcasts because you can listen and learn while going about your day. We, as tech providers, service providers, and insurers, have to recognize how people choose to learn more and more today.’

‘Never before have we moved this quickly, but never again will we move this slowly. People will never want to go back, given our access to video conferencing and online food delivery. The question is, how do we take more giant steps forward now?’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Nigel Walsh served as the Managing Director for Insurance and Financial Services within the Google Cloud division. He is today the global head for insurance at ServiceNow. He is on a mission to make insurance lovable.

He worked at Capgemini as Vice President, Head of UK Insurance, where he was responsible for building and developing the UK insurance operation, and was a partner at Deloitte. 

His interests include: Supporting startups. Creating communities. Building MGAs. Scouting new startups. Writing papers. Creating partnerships. Understanding the future of insurance. Deploying robots. Co-hosting podcasts. Creating propositions. Connecting people. Supporting projects in London, New York, and Dublin. Building a global team. 

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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