Sabine L. B. VanderLinden

Sabine L. B. VanderLinden is the CEO and Managing Director of Startupbootcamp InsurTech, Europe’s leading early-stage and independent accelerator for insurance technology startups, Rainmaking’s corporate innovation and growth venture focused at the insurance and InsurTech spaces. She is also the founder of the Proposition Circle, an innovation advisory platform she uses to coach young businesses and advise investors. Mature startups in particular use this mechanism to get more personalized support and recommendations to grow their business.

At Startupbootcamp (www.startupbootcamp.org/accelerator/insurtech-london/), VanderLinden cultivates the expertise of a large group of leading insurers, investors, and mentors to bring the innovation of cohorts of promising startups across multiple geographies to market within a three-month period. At Rainmaking Innovation (www.rainmaking.io/), she leads corporate innovation within the insurance space to shape solutions to support insurers, brokers, and other insurance providers address core challenges and design innovation and execution initiatives that work.

Considered as one of the few leading women in InsurTech, VanderLinden ranks among the top 20 InsurTech influencers across a number of insurance influencer lists. She brings 20 years of senior positions and extensive operational and growth strategy expertise gleaned from her corporate innovation and startup acceleration activities working with global firms including IBM, FICO, Pegasystems, and SSP and hundreds of well-known financial services institutions for which she has developed unique growth strategies. She brings strong InsurTech expertise to these stakeholders, being one of the few influencers who identified InsurTech as a growth market in late 2014 and made InsurTech the de facto term to acknowledge new ventures in the insurance and technology space.

She writes on the topics of strategic execution, InsurTech innovation, digital business models, and experience design to challenge current market practices and optimize value creation, and she is an international keynote speaker at conferences and thought leader on the topic of InsurTech.

An alumna of Sir John Cass Business School, where she earned her MBA, among her accreditations, she was awarded an Ovation Award for Outstanding Achievement, Breakthrough Thinking and Execution by IBM. She undertook advanced studies in mathematics and acquired five insurance examination accreditations from the Chartered Insurance Institute. She sits on the FinTech technology committee of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and is an advisory board member for TIA Technology. She is fluent in French and English.

You can reach Sabine on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/sabinevanderlinden/ and on Twitter via @SabineVdL

Shân M. Millie

Shân M. Millie is a hands-on innovation and strategic communications specialist, focusing on growth, service/product design, and corporate storytelling. She is a highly respected, extensively networked connector and commentator on and for UK General Insurance. Shân created the role of Tech and Innovation Associate for the Association of British Insurers (ABI), is Communications Entrepreneur in Residence for Startupbootcamp InsurTech London, and Founder Advisor for the British Insurance Brokers Association (BIBA) Innovation Group.

Shân enjoyed a successful media and content career, building and leading award-winning products, teams, and brands for professional audiences, including Treasury, Derivatives, Asset Management, Retail Banking, and, as Publishing Director of Insurance Times (2008–13), General Insurance. She identified the InsurTech “wave” early, and was personally instrumental in developing powerful platforms for incumbents and startups to connect ideas and people at a critical time for the fledgling InsurTech phenomenon, including designing one of the very first content programs and market-leading conferences dedicated to Innovation and Disruption for Insurance. A trusted industry mentor, Shân founded Bright Blue Hare, in May 2016, to work with startups, scale-ups, and established firms on partner relationships, customer and internal engagement, and sales, using the power of strategic communications. Bright Blue Hare also works with early-stage startups on a pro bono basis, advising seed round and startup companies on business model and value proposition design.

Shân’s passion is to help individuals, teams, and firms work out and then tell their story – authentically, intelligently, and for maximum impact for customers, co-workers, and the bottom line.

Shân Millie is a board advisor, mentor, and facilitator, and a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge University, UK. www.linkedin.com/in/shânmillie/ //@SMMBrightBlueH//#WhatIsYourStory?//#Profit&Purpose.

Nicole Anderson

Nicole Anderson is a venture builder, investment (corporate venture, VC, family office and ICO) advisor. As a multiple time technology entrepreneur (CEO and Founder) and an innovation thought leader, she has gained an in-depth knowledge of crypto technologies, blockchain and digital identity. Passionate about technology business models that are challenging the status quo and providing greater inclusion for people globally, she has focused on the innovation intersection of emerging technologies and emerging markets both physical and virtual.

Voted Innovator of the Year 2017 by the South African Chamber of Commerce, Top 100 Women in FinTech 2016 by Innovate Finance, and included in the Power Women of FinTech 2015, 2016 and 2017, Anderson is also active in the London and European startup acceleration, incubation, and growth arenas working as an advisor and mentor to Level39, Startupbootcamp FinTech, London Tech Advocates – Women in Tech, and FinTech workstreams.

A founding member of FINTECH Circle Angel Network, the largest network of independent investors in FinTech in Europe, she has served as advisor to Microsoft Ventures London and been a multiple times judge for SWIFT Innotribe, the European and African FinTech awards, and BNP Paribas Global Hackathon.

Anderson serves as an industry thought leader and has featured on numerous panels and speaking circuits such as London FinTech Week, Rencontres Economiques (France), London’s African Technology Business Forum, and FinTech Africa’s annual conference. She is a contributing author to The FinTech Book, exploring the role of corporate venture as a catalyst for innovation in FinTech – www.thefintechbook.com – also published by Wiley.

She has an Honours Degree in Information Systems and Economics from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and graduated from the Institute of New Economic Thinking, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, specializing in the Economics of Money and Banking.

Editor in Chief

Susanne Chishti

(Twitter: www.twitter.com/SusanneChishti)

Susanne Chishti is the CEO of FINTECH Circle, Europe’s first Angel Network focused on FinTech, InsurTech, WealthTech, RegTech and Blockchain opportunities and the Founder of the FINTECH Circle Institute, a leading global peer-to-peer FinTech learning platform to acquire FinTech and digital skills. She is the co-editor of the bestseller The FinTech Book, which has been translated into five languages and is sold across 107 countries. Susanne is recognized in the European Digital Financial Services “Power 50” 2015, an independent ranking of the most influential people in digital financial services in Europe. She was selected as top 15 FINTECH UK Twitter influencer and as the UK’s “City Innovator – Inspirational Woman” in 2016. Susanne is a FinTech TV commentator on CNBC and a guest lecturer on financial technology at the University of Cambridge.

After completing her MBA she started her career working for a FinTech company (before the term “FinTech” was invented) in the Silicon Valley 20 years ago. She then worked for more than 15 years across Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley, and Accenture in London and Hong Kong. Susanne is an award-winning entrepreneur and investor with strong FinTech expertise. In 2017, Onalytica selected Susanne as the 13th most important FinTech Thought Leader globally. She is also a conference speaker at leading FinTech events globally.

FINTECH Circle is a global community of more than 100,000 FinTech entrepreneurs, investors, and financial services professionals globally. FINTECH Circle’s advisory practice services clients including leading financial institutions such as BNP Paribas and UK’s innovation agency NESTA, which appointed FINTECH Circle as partner for the £5 million Challenge Prize to work on Open Banking initiatives for SME Banking.

Susanne is a Non-Executive Director at two UK FinTech firms: Just Loans Group PLC (Alternative Lender) and RegTech Company Kompli-Global Ltd. In addition, she is on the Advisory Board of HandeFinMaker, a Chinese FinTech leader together with Nobel Prize winner Edward C. Prescott.

Acknowledgments

After the global launch of The FinTech Book in 2016, we met thousands of FinTech entrepreneurs, investors, and financial services professionals who all loved the book and wanted to learn more how financial technology will change the global investment/wealth management sector and private banking.

We came up with the idea for The InsurTech Book and spoke to our FinTech friends globally and everybody supported the idea. FinTech entrepreneurs across all continents were eager to share their powerful insights. They wanted to explain the new business models and technologies they were working on to change the world of finance. FinTech investors, “intrapreneurs”, innovation leaders at leading financial institutions, and thought leaders were keen to describe their embrace of the FinTech revolution across investment management and private banking. Finally, our InsurTech visionaries wanted to share their vision for the future.

The global effort of crowdsourcing such insights was born with The FinTech Book, which became a global bestseller across 107 countries in five languages. We are continuing this success with The InsurTech Book. We are aware that this would not have been possible without the FINTECH Circle global community, the Startupbootcamp InsurTech community, and our own personal networks. We are very grateful to our global FINTECH Circle, FINTECH Circle Institute and Startupbootcamp communities of investors, lecturers, startups, mentors and corporates for joining us on www.FINTECHCircle.com and www.startupbootcamp.org and to Startupbootcamp as a global multi-disciplinary accelerator. Without the public support and engagement of our global FinTech community this book would not have been possible.

The authors you will read about have been chosen by our global FinTech and InsurTech community purely on merit; thus, no matter how big or small their organization, no matter in which country they work, no matter if they were well known or still undiscovered, everybody had the same chance to apply and be part of The InsurTech Book. We are proud of that as we believe that FinTech and InsurTech will fundamentally change the world of finance and insurance. The global FinTech and InsurTech community is made up of the smartest, most innovative, and nicest people we know. Thank you for being part of our journey. It is difficult to name you all here, but you are all listed in the directory at the end of this book.

Our publisher Wiley has been a great partner for The FinTech Book and we are delighted that Wiley will again publish The InsurTech Book in paperback and e-book formats globally. Special thanks go to our fantastic editor Gemma Valler. Thank you and your team – we could not have done it without your amazing support!

We look forward to hearing from you. Please visit our website www.insurtechbook.com for additional bonus content from our global InsurTech community! Please send us your comments on The InsurTech Book and let us know how you wish to be engaged by dropping us a line at [email protected].

Nicole Anderson

Susanne Chishti

Twitter: @NicoleAnMo

Twitter: @SusanneChishti

Shân M. Millie

Sabine L. B. VanderLinden

Twitter: @SMMBrightBlueH

Twitter: @SabineVdL