Scouting for Growth

Gwen Yu: The world of sustainable finance

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Gwen Yu, an expert in sustainable finance with a background in transfer pricing, who helps international ventures understand the best way to expand internationally. Sabine talks to Gwen about how she made her way into sustainable finance, and how her past business and personal experiences have shaped her decision to support a better future and a better planet. During the course of the discussion, Gwen shares her vision, mission, and goals with regard to shaping a more sustainable future.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
There is so much variety in everything that I’ve done in my career. It’s only looking back now that I see how all the different pieces fit together. If you take sustainability in a broader sense, you’re looking at ESG in general, and transfer pricing is relevant for understanding governance and how everything fits holistically within the puzzle. Everything from understanding your supply chain to figuring out where demand goes. 
Early in my career a manager came to me and said: “The younger you, is most of the options you will have and it’s going to be really hard to make a decision to shut certain doors offered to you. But you shouldn’t look at it that way; you should look at it as that’s the path you’re going to go down eventually. And maybe you’ll circle back around. But early on, you must define what’s important to you as a person. It doesn’t matter what that is, but you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and recognize the person you are.” That has fuelled my path. I want to have a positive impact in whatever I’m doing, and I want to leave wherever I’ve touched enhanced and better than before.
To get a loan from a bank, you would go through a credit committee, which traditionally would check if the person is risky, has defaulted before, where they are positioned, and if they have a sound business plan. To incorporate sustainability into what financial institutions are doing now, they’re looking at the sustainability rankings in terms of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) of whoever it is they’re providing a loan to. Typically, it’s mostly for big corporations because that’s where the data is available. Do they have proper supply chain governance? Are they doing something harmful or positive for biodiversity? How are they funding new projects? These are now becoming standard practices and will be rolled out so that, when you go to the credit committee to get a loan, how sustainable you are will play a role in the interest rate you get. If you’re not sustainable, you are likely to become a riskier client.
Technology will be a critical part of driving change in sustainable finance. From the decision-making process, the required data analysis inputs will need to be pushed out, and quality controls will need to be put in place to ensure it’s actually sustainable. I don’t think the big guys are going to be able to do it alone. The innovation will start with small pockets and groups with great ideas. This will be pushed through to ensure that tech is doing well and serving a diversified community rather than a one-dimensional one.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I think transfer pricing gets a bad rap because one of the most important parts is trying to figure out the actual market price you should be paying for services as opposed to the negative connotation where you’re doing tax evasion.’
‘I believe the universe comes full circle somehow, and I’m not at the end of my circle, but I can see where all these interconnections happen.’
‘Purpose and impact have become much more important, much more than just what people want to say in their marketing brochures, but actually drilling down to see how what you’re telling is true? Are you doing what you are saying you’re going to do? Am I investing in companies that I feel are in line with my values?’
‘Sustainable finance is just adding another lens to ensure that your money is invested in what’s necessary or good. Is your investment making a negative or positive impact? Is it going to serve an underserved community or causes that you want to see addressed?’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Gwen Yu is an expert in sustainable finance, with experience in transfer pricing, and has worked with renowned companies, including Sherpa and BNP Paribas. She also worked with the European Commission as a member of the data and usability subgroup.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Sam Evans: InsurTech, Sustainability and ESG

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sam Evans, Partner at EOS Venture Partners, a Strategic Venture Capital fund and an InsurTech investment specialist with offices in London and Philadelphia. This is their 2nd interview as Sam appeared in episode 6 of Scouting for Growth. Here, the pair discusses sustainability and ESG, the impact of urbanization, climate risk, and supply chain risk. Topics that have become increasingly important for many sectors of the economy, with over 2.2 trillion searches on Google's search engine for the term ESG (as of May 2022) 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
As a global economy, we’re facing a number of pivotal challenges. These include major weather-related events linked to climate change and other natural catastrophes, significant population dynamics in many parts of the world, including aging populations, as well as the development of the right urban infrastructure to support people. With current urbanization trends, a significant proportion of the population is moving into cities, resulting in challenges with housing and logistics. Insurance and InsurTech have a key role to play in supporting these major macro shifts.
Equality of access to healthcare is going to be critical as we face growing populations. Here we’re looking at the ability to leverage different ways of thinking about insurance, making it less about a pure protection-driven product and more about a protection-focused approach to help them live healthier, longer lives.
We’re going to see a lot more gig economy workers, and we’re already seeing that traditional insurance solutions aren’t fit for purpose because they’re generic, not usage-based, and don’t align with policyholders' underlying behaviors.
Responding to natural catastrophes is an area where the insurance industry as a whole is already doing significant work, and there are many initiatives to reduce the protection gap, but clearly, a large proportion of vulnerable economies and populations still lack insurance. So, closing that protection gap will be important.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Clearly there’s a lot that can be done to make healthcare more affordable, easier to access, but also a lot more efficient.’
‘Close to 50% of the US population score badly from a credit risk perspective and are therefore penalised through the cost of their insurance. The ability to tailor usage-based coverage that switches seamlessly between personal and commercial usage – for example, if you’re using your vehicle for a ride-share scheme, this becomes very relevant for individuals.’
‘Energy usage and efficiency gains are going to become a lot more important. We have to be much more focused and smart around how we use resources. Technology can play a key role even from a home perspective on energy usage by using IoT, sensors, and smart AI to improve behaviours, enhance efficiency, and lower energy usage.’
‘Insurance touches every single part of the economy, so it’s a natural enabler for driving these initiatives.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Sam is a partner at EOS Venture Partners, a Strategic Venture Capital fund and an InsurTech investment specialist with offices in London and Philadelphia. EOS invests in Series A and Series B growth ventures with emerging business models and new technologies that will impact and transform the insurance industry.
Today, EOS provides financing and advisory services to leading entrepreneurs building innovative insurance businesses. In partnership with RAW Capital Partners, EOS offers a unique solution for growth-stage InsurTech companies.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures
 

Andrew Cons: Building an international unicorn

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Andrew Cons, who was the CEO of Bolttech’s European operations at the time of the recording. Now leading Bolttech in Indonesia. He discusses his leadership journey, including acquiring expertise over the years in strategy, business improvement, and founding his own venture.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Bolttech has grown from a PowerPoint deck to a unicorn in just two years. It was different from the outset from anything I’d ever done before, and that’s what really attracted me to the business. I had set up my own business before, but this is unique in what we’re trying to do here. It’s a results-driven business, and I’m a results-driven person, but I really love driving innovation and seeing that through to fruition, so when Bottech came to me, I couldn’t really say no because it was such a great opportunity. 
The two big experiences where I’ve experienced great growth have been, obviously, here with Bolttech, building it from the ground up has been an amazing experience, and leading it from the front, setting the example, and building the culture in your own image is both exciting and a very privileged position to be in. Secondly, it was building out Asurion across Asia/Pacific, another major growth path I pursued. Both paths bring a lot of pressure, but the pressure of growing a mature, stable business at lightning speed while simultaneously identifying and converting growth opportunities to make that happen is a privileged position to be in.
We connect insurers with distribution partners and then end customers. We’ve made a pretty good start on that mission so far, and we achieved unicorn status with the largest ever Series A funding round for an InsurTech. To date, we’ve raised over $247 million from some key strategic investors. At the center of our business is the largest insurance exchange in the world, and we now transact over $44 billion in quoted premiums annually. 
We see the digital ecosystem and ourselves as enablers for our partners and customers to gain the right protection at the time of need, which is really important. As a platform, we are the gel that enables insurance carriers and distribution partners to deliver great insurance products on demand.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I fell into insurance, but I’ve really enjoyed all the roles I’ve had as well as starting up my own venture, and whether it’s leaving transformational change to building successful businesses from the ground up, I’ve certainly learned a lot on the way.’
‘I’ve been really lucky to build an amazing leadership team and organization that I believe is the best InsurTech business in Europe.’
‘We’re a many-to-many ecosystem for our partners and customers; we bring them together.’
‘Our mission is to become the world’s leading technologically enabled ecosystem. To deliver on that mission, we’ve developed the world’s largest insurance exchange, but on top of that, we offer 5,000 insurance products – and growing – and we work with over 180 insurance providers to give that choice and quality of experience to our end customers.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Andrew Cons leads the Bolttech teams in Indonesia, providing strategic and dynamic leadership as Bolttech builds the next generation of insurance services, protections, and ecosystems for Bolttech's existing and new partners in the European region. His experience spans a portfolio of businesses and a track record of results, including extensive board-level leadership across technology, operations, and digital transformation. 
Andrew leads an agile, future-ready team that is focused on expanding Bolttech’s reach by driving sustainable growth in Europe. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, golfing, and spending time with his family.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Dr Robin Kiera: What is attention hacking?

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Robin Kiera, the most renowned European FinTech and InsurTech influencer. He set up Digital Scouting in 2017 as a platform that now has 400,000 followers, which is not insignificant in this industry. Robin is a thought leader, an entrepreneur, and a senior leader who has worked in finance for years and gives practical tools and techniques around lessons to learn in the FinTech and InsurTech sectors.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Life can be ironic. I don’t like marketing agencies' guys, and I really despise consultants! I started as an insurance sales agent, from the ground up, on commission for selling insurance policies on the streets of Hamburg. I always said that between me and the CEO of Allianz are 27 different levels of hierarchy; between me and the one below me was just the street. I saw a huge gap between what insurance can be: helping people, protecting them against risks in our lives, and the reality of selling insurance, which didn’t have a lot to do with the desire and the demand of the buyer. 
At the beginning of the month, we had a list of clients to call, but the lists didn't include any information about their situations. We were not on our clients' minds; they were going to banks and building societies. When I founded Digital Scouting years later, and we were crushing it on social media, we found our clients were standing in line. I remember thinking this was quite a different way to sell than I had been doing previously. We started a blog with thought leadership pieces, attended conferences around the world, and brought ideas back home from entrepreneurial start-ups so we could sell our policies like an iPhone or other Apple products.
We have very good, brilliant people working in the insurance industry. But it seems to me that most insurance ecosystems – in countries like Germany, France, Britain, and the US – have nothing in common, no exchange, yet there are so many interesting use cases in Britain, France, and the US that I really wanted to get to know what’s going on. I wanted to see the international trends. That’s what made me want to bring these great ideas back to Germany.
When I announced that I was leaving Allianz to join an online gaming company that had been around for only 3 years, people were calling the company doctor to see if I was feeling OK. How could I leave that security? Sometimes you lull yourself into a false sense of security. Once I decided to start my own business, I just had to do it because you can still go back to great stable and corporate jobs in this industry or another sector. I don’t want to regret anything when I lay my head on the pillow for the last time.
BEST MOMENTS
Everybody says: “We don’t sell products, we consult”. Yeah, alright, let’s talk at the end of the year.’
‘People tell me “Robin, you’re the rebel of the industry”.’
‘I think everybody likes frictionless transactions, not just Generations Y and Z. And their tolerance when it comes to incompetence and friction is certainly getting lower, which I think is just right.’
‘There were no downs in building my business; we always grew organically. Any downs were brought about by my own stupid mistakes, like keeping a bad tax advisor for too long... things like that.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Robin Kiera is the Founder and CEO of Digital Scouting, a consulting and marketing agency based in Germany. Robin is an author, renowned speaker, entrepreneur, and top-ranked insurance and finance influencer.
He started Digital Scouting as an after-work hobby that grew into a multimedia B2C, B2B, and B2B2C consulting and marketing agency – supporting entrepreneurs, c-suite executives, and start-ups in their digital transformations, market entry, and in hacking the attention of customers and partners through digital media.
Before being recognized as the “Attention Hacker” in the insurance and finance industry, he was labeled the “Rebel of Industry,” radically exposing the elephant in the room through targeted topics he tackled in his on-stage rants, videos, and blogs. Being genuine in his contributions, he was recognized in top industry rankings and supported by more than 140,000 followers when he started generating 16 million in monthly reach.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Minh Tran: Introducing Venture Capital as a Service

In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Minh Tran, founding partner of Mandalore Partners (and also her co-founder at Alchemy Crew) about the world of Venture Capital Funds. He has worked in the Corporate VC world for 30 years, most recently in financial services, and founded Mandalore Partners 10 years ago.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
When you are a Corporate Venturer you have two models, one is to invest in VC outside – that’s not really a corporate venture, but you have that option, the second is to create your own team internally, for many reasons, this model hasn’t worked in the long run. I came up with a third model: externalizing corporate venture funds to reach out to startups with both financial interests and strategic alignment with corporates. This is Venture Capital as a Service.
Resilience comes from lateral thinking, too, when investing. You can enter the market of your core industry, but you can also reach out to new industries that can impact your core industry. If you’re a retailer, you invest in your core business, but FinTech could disrupt retail finance, so you could reach out to FinTech ventures, not just retail. So you’re prepared for disruption.
SIDE – Source, Invest, Develop, Exit. Each step of our process has been optimized. Source is the ability to source better than a corporation; we combine public data (Crunchbase) with private data (corporate assignments) to compile a list of startups. We then invest like a VC. We develop a portfolio management plan like a VC, but I do things differently, more hands-on than VCs. Then Exit, again I use VC techniques to exit at some point with or without the corporate. 
Like any VC I look at if the market is growing, how the product would fit in the market, what is the business model/plan, and what is the team? I also look at a fifth element: The leverage we can access from the corporation. This could help accelerate the startup or its valuation.
BEST MOMENTS
‘The Mandalore Partners name came from a planet from Star Wars because I wanted to look to the future, and I found out it was a good name to have because it was about mobility, globality, tech, and now The Mandalorian TV series.’
‘There’s a bad reputation to having a corporate venture fund in the market that has the same name as your corporation, this is why externalizing VC activities and having a different name is attracting more startups to our fund while also providing the returns the corporates want.’
‘When we talk to corporates when they’re looking to InsurTech, and they want to be exposed to another tech, an external model can help you assess the new industries you seek where you have, or you don’t have expertise.’
‘I focus a lot of work on where to invest to have the best impact tools and platforms.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Minh is the Managing Partner of Mandalore Partners, which seeks to create an innovative framework that enables early-stage firm investors to achieve scale exposure to a range of traditional, alternative, and tech venture capital assets.
In addition to his experience as a founding team member at AXA Ventures, Minh was also an integral part of several other VC firms, including Nokia Ventures, Bertelsmann Ventures, and Truffle Capital.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Elisa Vlerich: 9.5 Ventures the VC for corporate venturing

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Elisa Vlerick, a partner at Ninepointfive Ventures, the Venture Capitalist dedicated to Corporate Venturing. Elisa loves removing syntax complexity from the proverbial crap, applying creativity and execution to everything she does.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Corporate Venturing differs from traditional VC activity in that you have the power/leverage of a corporation to scale faster and gain what we call an unfair competitive advantage in the market. That really attracted me to Ninepointfive.
Often, there’s a lot of resistance within companies to cannibalize their own business or start new ventures that are often very small. For billion-dollar companies, it’s hard to start something new that doesn't fully fit into the existing company. They also don’t always have the skills or the right people to implement a new business model, and there’s sometimes not the appetite because the new business would be so small compared to the main business, so it wouldn’t get the attention it deserves. 
We built the venture with the corporation because it aligns with the corporation's strategic interests. What we want to build together with them is a successful company with financial returns. If the strategic interests are not aligned with the financial objective we have, we’re usually not the right partner. 
The assumption is that tech-y people aren’t female. It’s like doctors, 20-30 years ago, 90% of doctors were male and 90% of nurses were female, nowadays it’s 50/50, if not more female doctors. I think it’s a matter of time, 1-20 years, and it will even out in our industry. It’s said women are more risk-averse or less daring – and maybe there’s something in that – but once this idea that it’s really challenging and daring to start a startup is gone, I don’t see a reason why this wouldn’t go up to 50/50.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Our team is very interesting because we come from different angles and that makes our decision-making and investment processes more interesting and, hopefully, better.’
‘Taking the whole activity outside the corporate, with our knowledge of building startups, fuelled by the resources from the corporate, makes a startup better placed in the market than a regular startup.’
‘The key to our success is finding the right people to make it happen. You can have a great financial plan, but it needs to happen, and it can only happen if the team is there.’
‘Surround yourself with people that are better than you and will dare to go against the tide, or criticise the prevailing opinion, they’re going to make better decisions.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
When complexity threatens to get the upper hand, Elisa picks up her pen. With that pen, she cuts through the proverbial crap and to the bone. Elisa is resolute in her belief that strong business ideas can only prosper when ambiguity and prejudice are left at the door. When things are clear, creativity can flourish. From there onward, she’ll tell you: “le bonheur est dans l’action”.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

David Kwon: A decade of societal change

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews IBM’s David Kwon about how insurance companies have had to navigate a decade of societal change. From the financial crisis and the rise of digital technology to changing consumer expectations, insurers face challenges that are fundamentally altering the very core of our industry.
Does the question remain whether property and casualty insurers will be able to keep pace with societal changes over time? Are they focusing on the right priorities? And what about life insurance – is BigTech making any headway here to challenge established practices? 
In this episode, they discuss these trends and examine how insurers can best position themselves for success during this period of rapid transformation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
To remain relevant, insurers must find ways to embrace change while ensuring profitability amid blurred competitive boundaries. While some insurers have embraced the new environment with open arms, others seem reluctant to adapt or even acknowledge potential growth opportunities. 
Mass-personalisation is the goal of every large insurer, not just for consumer products, but also for insurers targeting B2B customers as well. The technology has evolved to a point where videos on a website can be personalized to each person, not just seeing your name on a website, but addressing you by your first name, referencing your family, etc.
There are many new risk pools, including self-driving cars. There are six levels of autonomy here, ranging from cruise control to full autonomy. Up to level 4, the liability is still with the driver, but as AI takes on a bigger role in driving, insurance writers now have to start thinking of AI as a risk, just like the driver. At level 5, where there’s no steering wheel, it becomes a product liability issue, and the responsibility shifts from the driver to the manufacturer, which is a completely different business. It also impacts home and auto bundling. The overall auto market will start to shrink as more people buy autonomous cars.
For insurers, this is an interesting time; we’re beginning to see new risks emerging as the foundations of risk are getting more attention than before. There are 3 big disruptive technologies: IoT, AI, and hybrid cloud. 
BEST MOMENTS
‘Covid has exposed the vulnerability of the interconnected world, the western world was hit first and suffered faster before it spread to third world countries.’
‘Science and technology are key to solving the toughest challenges in our society.’
‘The days of easily targeting users by buying third-party data are passing us quickly. Insurers must now focus on first-party data by engaging directly with the prospects and policyholders and getting the data themselves through deeper engagement and better experience.’
‘Covid accelerated e-commerce by about 2 years. All businesses, even small ones, are relying on technology more than ever before.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
David Kwon is a sought-after Digital Reinvention Executive for IBM’s largest US and international insurance and banking clients. David is an associate partner within IBM Business Transformation Services and a member of the IBM Industry Academy.
David has delivered over 60 strategy and transformation projects as an engagement leader and in executive strategic roles, ranging from digital strategy, customer experience, and business case for change.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Tanguy Touffut: Redining Parametric Insurance

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Tanguy Touffut, founder and CEO of Descartes Underwriting, a top of its space InsurTech company which is recognized as a top-grade growth venture in its category, parametric insurance. It recently raised $120 million in series B funding with the likes of Mundi Ventures, BlackFin, Cathay Innovation to name but a few.
 
KEY TAKEAWAYS
After graduating I really wanted to launch a company shares Tanguy, but lacked some of the skills and I wanted to increase my purchasing power, so I started in the corporate world. There are plenty of benefits when working for a large corporation: the resources, expertise, strong colleagues and you have less skin in the game. But the scope of things you can do as a startup is much wider. The venture capital market is quite bullish about the insurance industry, even if the valuations are decreasing. There’s lots of capital available and you can have a long-term view, compared to large groups who have a short-term view on profitability. 
There’s a lot of confusion about parametric insurance. It’s not a line of business or a product, it’s an approach to improve product features. It’s the result of years of frustration about insurance that opened up new ways of thinking within the corporate realm. Customers are poorly served in this space and the economics don’t work that well and there’s a lack of transparency, which was increased by the Covid-19 pandemic. "Parametric" has become a way to address these challenges by offering better product features to customers and improving the insurers' trust by making things more true, and more transparent.
When you launch your own company with your co-founders, the team is the most important part of the equation: The most precious asset. You need to convince enough people to believe in you in order to build the best team that works well together. The first years aren’t that easy, you have to work extremely hard and be able to step back and criticize your own way of working. This is something you can’t achieve if you aren’t motivated and resilient, or able to take hits. But you always need to be surrounded by the right minds, energies, and beliefs.
Brokers are definitely dominant in the corporate sector. They are very useful for clients to understand how insurance for corporates works. This is why we only want to work and ally ourselves with brokers for them to better serve their clientele.
I believe that every link of the insurance value chain will be disrupted in the next 5-10 years. Think banking un-bundling and re-bundling! This is happening to us too right now. Some companies are going direct to consumers or corporates with their strategy (don't be fooled). At Descartes Underwriting, we think this is a mistake...
 
BEST MOMENTS
‘Working as an insurer in the sector of natural catastrophes and climate change is extremely rewarding.’
‘As a corporate employee, I used to use data to model the risk and process payments. Looking at wildfires – which is one of the fastest-growing risks in the world today due to climate change – we use AI neural networks to understand the locations and figure out how badly damaged the locations we analyzed were.’
‘Parametric covers can be based on the number of casualties, the number of shops that must be closed in a specific location due to a lockdown, and much more. Still, the goal is to use parameters to make people whole faster.’
‘There are plenty of conventions within the insurance sector. Most of all, insurance has a good reason to exist. Still, the industry was created 338 years ago. As an entrepreneur, you must evaluate and identify the rules that make no sense at all, break them and rebuild them better.’
 
ABOUT THE GUEST
Tanguy Touffut was the CEO of AXA Global Parametrics and Head of Security & Agriculture where he worked for 8 years before becoming an entrepreneur.
In 2019, Tanguy set up Descartes Underwriting, an InsurTech and MGA working with brokers with offices in New York, Houston, Denver, London, Paris, Singapore and Sydney.
Descartes collaborates with brokers across the world to protect their corporate clients & governments against natural catastrophes, weather, and emerging risks, through a unique data-driven approach.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanguy-touffut-584b202/?originalSubdomain=fr 
 
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

David King: Using AI for algorithmic underwriting

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews David King, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of fast-growing InsurTech startup, Artificial Labs or Artificial.io to discuss the company's strengths and how sport influences David's choices and business outlook.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Artificial is focused on facilitating algorithmic underwriting in the insurance sector. That means the Artificial team works with brokers and underwriters to get the data into the right format so it can be shared between the two and, once it’s been shared, define the process, pipeline, and fundamentals to improve decision-making and customer experiences and interactions.  
Insurance is an industry where data AND relationships are really important. We use technology (and algorithms) to help automate the decision-making process. The number of variables a human can take into account to make a decision is between 5 and 7. If you keep adding more to the decision-making process, then the accuracy of models and algorithms starts to decrease. If a business is supported by the right technology, one can make a decision that’s either automated or informed by a detailed, risk-based assessment. This enables human actors who would make key decisions to make the right commercial risk decisions, even if partly automated. 
It’s not just about the ability to train a model to assess risks to improve your underwriting performance and make it efficient; it is also about the ability to operate within ecosystems. Part of our secret sauce is a domain-specific programming language that allows us to codify an underwriter’s appetite and leverage and integrate with any data source or service to make a decision. 
More data will be available in the future. It is a fact. Are underwriters going to have to be more sophisticated in the way they make decisions? Definitely. Is the market going to become more efficient, and therefore, does the operational cost ratio need to be lower? Even more... Yes. I think underwriters will need to work closely with portfolio managers, people with more maths skills – I don’t necessarily think that means machine learning/ data scientist type skills will become closer to the underwriting decisions on a day-to-day basis, but I do think that you may have a multi-disciplinary team that understands where the data is coming from and what’s driving true decisions.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I’ve always been quite competitive and love "sport." I like team sports probably because my own abilities are quite poor. If you’re a team player, you can leverage the abilities of other people, and I look to elite sport to understand what cultures drive performance and how people operate too.’
‘Technology won’t take over and make all the decisions. Still, you’ll have strategies that are set by very data-informed people, and you can execute that across a broad spectrum of products, services, and classes.’
‘The models are only as good as the data you provide to them, but the models don’t exist in isolation; they also exist in a business that needs to be operationally efficient.’
‘You now need to operate while understanding that you’re not going to have all the components end-to-end, so you need to be able to play nicely with others. This will lead to greater efficiency, providing a better experience for customers. This also means you keep them longer and can then sell them more things.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
David King has worked in digital media and technology since graduating from Nottingham University Business School with a degree in Industrial Economics in 2005. After a gap year as a troop commander in the British Army, King worked as a Digital Planner at Carat, where he worked with global brands such as Yahoo!, British Gas, and Santander.
King moved on to become Director at Sure Insurance Services in 2009, where his knowledge of the digital space helped to bring innovative insurance products to market in the medical and health insurance sectors. It was here that his understanding of the insurance market grew, setting the stage for his later foray into space with Artificial Labs. 
Following his time at Sure, King founded his own digital services company, Data Stripes, in 2011. The company delivered highly polished, data-intensive, digital applications for some of the world's biggest brands. 
In 2013, the success of Data Stripes led King to merge with Johnny Bridges' company, ConceptMill, to create Artificial Labs. The company provided high-quality, data-led design to global clients such as BMW, Levi's, and Betfair. 
In 2016, Artificial pivoted into the insurance space, building partnerships with firms such as AXIS and Ambris. King's existing industry experience, combined with Bridges' previous work in insurance companies, enabled the company to capitalize on a growing need for high-quality data and digital platforms within the insurance industry. 
Since 2017, King has been steering the commercial ship at Artificial, helping to develop partnerships with global insurance brands such as Convex, Chaucer, Aon, and TMHCC. With years of experience in technological innovation now under its belt, the company is prospering as a provider of algorithmic underwriting technology to the London market and beyond.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures

Nick Pester: Growth Ventures and the Role of The Legal Counsel

On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Nick Pester. Sabine has known Nick for over 4 years. They met when Nick showed a strong interest in the tech startups accepted into Sabine’s accelerator programs and was willing to mentor them with his advice while he was leading the Financial Services, Insurance & InsurTech practices at Capital Law.
Nick moved from legal advice within a legal firm to becoming the group general of one of the leading InsurTech growth ventures in the UK. He is also an Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance. On this podcast, they catch up to understand what the past 4 years have brought to him in terms of lessons learnt.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
I fell into insurance. The firm I applied to for a training contract was a media and entertainment specialist, which was something I was interested in at the time – advising big bands on tour around the world! But they had a really strong insurance practice, and I really enjoyed the fact that there was a dual-layer to all the legal aspects we dealt with: The insurance layer and the underlying subject matter. 
My day tends to be partnership-focused; there’s always something going on in the partnership front. There are claims to deal with, but otherwise it’s running around responding to the fires as and when they arise, dealing with them as best you can, and trying to have the headspace to look more than a week or a month ahead and think strongly about the strategy of the legal function and the wider business.
Law firms and some other businesses tend to be far too fixated on the granularity of academics and qualifications. Of course, you need to be qualified, but actually, what turns a good lawyer into a really great lawyer is personality and character. People who can roll with the punches, take something on the chin, and move on, most importantly for lawyers, people who can accept being wrong. I don’t think lawyers as a profession are very good at admitting when they’re wrong,  but in a startup environment, you need to be prepared to make mistakes; it’s part and parcel of learning.
One of the biggest challenges in the insurance market with respect to data and its use is ensuring transparency and fairness, while balancing commercial interests and protecting sensitive information. The most obvious example of this is pricing. The balance between using data to improve our products and services, and to drive greater revenue and growth, against how much customers want to know about them. With AI, it’s a very difficult area in the context of regulated activities, because you need to have explainability, why someone has been priced in a certain way. It’s going to be very difficult to build a genuinely self-managing, machine-learning-intuitive system with the necessary explainability and insight that goes with it.
BEST MOMENTS
‘I like flying by the seat of my pants. I like a challenge, I like disruption, I’m very passionate about trying to improve things within the sphere of influence that I have in the legal and tech areas.’
‘Bringing a commercial eye to partnerships is incredibly important as a lawyer in-house.’
‘To build a sustainable growth venture, you need three things: A very clear mission of what you’re trying to solve/address, spend money on getting the best people, and focus on one thing/the key offering before moving on to something else.’
‘The trends I’m seeing are a greater focus on existing portfolio companies and investors looking after their existing stock. Lots of aggressive investment in already trading, sustainable businesses. People are finding it harder in Seed capital, which has been a bigger challenge in the last 18 months.’
ABOUT THE GUEST
Nick Pester was responsible for the Legal and Compliance functions at Wheely, a luxury ride-hailing service offering on-demand professional chauffeuring at the touch of a button. He then decided to go solo and launched Beyond Legal to work closely with the founders of tech startups.Previously, he has been responsible for the Legal & Regulatory functions at the Zego Group, a market-leading InsurTech business focused on commercial motor, where he oversaw a period of growth from 80 to 600 employees, during which the business achieved unicorn status and completed a $150m Series C fundraise in early 2021.Prior to that, he was Head of the Financial Services & FinTech practices at Capital Law, providing a more niche/specialist offering, grounded in a highly commercial approach.As well, he was Advisor to the Chartered Insurance Institute and the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation on Digital Ethics and the use of Artificial Intelligence in Insurance, and also acted as an advisor and mentor to a number of individual FinTech & InsurTech businesses in the past, as well as wider accelerator/incubator programmes.
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.
If this episode sparked your thinking, follow Sabine VanderLinden on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for more insights.
And if you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out to the team at hello@alchemycrew.ventures