{"id":6314,"date":"2023-11-20T08:47:33","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T08:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6314"},"modified":"2025-04-04T05:12:02","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T05:12:02","slug":"new-podcast-with-tom-hoad-head-of-howden-ventures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/new-podcast-with-tom-hoad-head-of-howden-ventures\/","title":{"rendered":"Innovation focus: Howden Ventures\u2019 Tom Hoad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep189 Tom Hoad Howden Ventures: Professionalising Innovation\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=3kjhd-14f909f-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=0&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>At Howden Ventures, Tom Hoad has a brief to innovate and facilitate insurance innovation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Innovation is not something that comes easily to the insurance industry. As the Voice of Insurance podcast host Mark Geoghegan emphasised in his introduction to a recent episode, featuring Tom Hoad, Head of Howden Ventures, the sector has found it notoriously hard to do, not least because insurance tends to incentivise the direct opposite \u2013 stability and predictability \u2013 that can be drawbacks as well as qualities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite this legacy, insurance has started to invest more in people with a focus on innovation, and in assessing performance measured more on whether they can bring forward the next generation of products, rather than merely keeping a lid on initial loss ratios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tom Hoad has a background as an underwriter but he is accustomed to being tasked with encouraging innovation. At Howden Ventures he is combining seed and venture funding with distribution and the ability to underwrite through the Howden Group\u2019s DUAL MGA underwriting platform. Or, to put it another way, Mark describes him as \u201ca real expert in innovation and a master of herding the cats of the market behind a common vision\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat I&#8217;ve found in my career is that this market needs to inject a lot more entrepreneurialism into it,\u201d Hoad said. \u201cThat&#8217;s from our own staff, but it&#8217;s also from entrepreneurs that come from outside our industry, who have a new fresh perspective on how to look at risk, and what kind of tools techniques and technology they have to try and evaluate and understand risk in a novel or a client-pleasing way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Howden Ventures was \u201cborn from this necessity\u201d, he suggested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think it&#8217;s an important step that the market needs to make, to ensure that we&#8217;re professionalising how entrepreneurs can work with us as a community, and how we can evolve our own ecosystem to do a better job for our clients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He thinks the market has turned a corner to being more innovative with a longer-term focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve been making incredible progress,\u201d he said. \u201cAs I look around the market, I couldn&#8217;t be more proud of some of the other initiatives that frankly, I&#8217;ve had nothing to do with, but I think there&#8217;s a real culture now, in and around Lloyd&#8217;s, and around London. We&#8217;ve got a big and growing community of people who really understand the value of the longer term.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He explained the theory behind \u2018Ventures\u2019 and how it works to progress innovation, through MGAs specifically, which links to the Dual part of Howden Group\u2019s business, as well as partnering insurers providing capacity at the ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cVentures is a professionalising of the innovation space. What Howden Ventures does is it takes into account a certain tranche of innovation and really tries to professionalize the way that we bring that together,\u201d Hoad said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe&#8217;re interested in working with external entrepreneurial talent who want and are creative enough and have the tenacity to start their own business. First of all, they need money, and we have investment funds to deploy, to take a minority stake in their business, to help them build out the technology or their proposition,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAlongside that, we have a platform that incubates their idea with them. It&#8217;s very unlike a traditional VC model. We are \u2018in the weeds\u2019 with what these entrepreneurs want to do and how they want to achieve it,\u201d Hoad continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cFundamentally, it&#8217;s an investment strategy, looking to build MGAs, that are too nascent and too early in their journey to become MGAs. The way we do that is that we&#8217;ve worked with our markets \u2013 our partner insurers, we call them \u2013 to set up a platform where we immediately have underwriting capacity to deploy,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Howden Ventures, Tom Hoad has a brief to innovate and facilitate insurance innovation. Innovation is not something that comes easily to the insurance industry. As the Voice of Insurance podcast host Mark Geoghegan emphasised in his introduction to a recent episode, featuring Tom Hoad, Head of Howden Ventures, the sector has found it notoriously [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[25,14],"line-of-business":[20],"class_list":["post-6314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-ecosystem","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6314"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}