The Grid team of Deloitte Digital tries to connect startups and corporates to help both improve their ability to innovate. “From our own personal experience and what we see with our clients, we recognize that innovation is mostly only concentrated on within the company. But you get much better results if you try to create an open ecosystem, allow innovation to be generated outside and then try to capture that value. That’s what we believe is really important and why we encourage our clients to do that and why we help them with it.” says Joykutty. A Problem he describes and that many companies can identify with is that companies spend much money on developing strategies to be innovative and develop them internally but don’t always end up with the success they wished for. It is more important, according to Joykutty, that they can plug into an innovation cluster outside. That’s why Deloitte runt eerie Digital Studios and accelerators like the “Deloitte Digital Disruptors” for what’s the new buzzword of insuretech in Lisbon. (http://www.deloittedigitaldisruptors.com)
Talking about insure tech, Joykutty states that he rates opportunities in insurance as actually bigger than in finance, as there are many existing technologies that have the capability of disrupting the insurance sector. “When we run hackathons and accelerators, we find that a lot of technology has the potential to be implemented in the insurance sector.” he says and refers to a study of Deloitte and the World Economic Forum on financial technology that confirms that the insurance sector is most open for disruption and innovation. Klick HERE for the study
According to Joykutty, the definition of fintech needs to include insurance, or insuretech as a subset of fintech, as the financial services industry includes banks and insurance. Speaking of a potential bubble he says: “Is there a bubble in fintech? It’s very hard to say. What I can say is: Will there be disruption in the industry? Will there be rapid changes in how consumers access financial services? Absolutely! What exactly they will be, I cannot tell you.” We looked at what happened to other industries, for example the telco industry, where there used to be very few players and now there are many companies that have totally changed how the industry works and made telcos worry that they are going to be irrelevant. Joykutty argues that it might just be a matter of time before the same happens to financial services.
Asked about a future of the insurance industry and whether or not big insurances are going to stick around, Joykutty answered that “it’s gonna be a mixed bag. Some will survive, some will not. Some [fintechs] are more successful when partnering with insurances or banks because of their huge customer base and infrastructure. This is also why it’s going to take a long time before banks might become dispensable.” Established banks and insurances need to be very agile and intelligent about how to partner with fintechs and organizations. “One model is cooperation, but if, on the other hand, I was to advise a fintech, I would consider to tell them to compete directly with the banks and insurances. There are examples of fintechs that are doing this today in both models.”
