EXPLORING INNOVATION IN TRAVEL AND HEALTH INSURANCE
TOBACCO DOCK, LONDON
13-14 September 2023

Innovate THIS – from the Travel & Health Insurance Series – is an in-person conference exploring the most important innovations happening across the travel insurance ecosystem.
Our packed conference agenda addresses innovation in product design and delivery; payments processing; data management; integrations; claims models; industry trends; and much more.
Technological evolutions are rapidly changing the way travel insurance is sold and serviced. From the way customers buy insurance to the way claims are settled – and at every point in between.
Join us at the next Innovate THIS to hear what’s new in the travel insurance arena, network with those enabling innovations in this space – and be part of the future of travel insurance.
If you’re interested in speaking at Innovate THIS 2023, please get in touch.
Thought leaders, disruptors, and enablers from the insurance, insurtech, fintech and innovation realms are brought together at Innovate THIS – to shape the future of travel insurance.
Join us for the latest industry thinking, insightful presentations, stimulating panel sessions, and fireside chats that deep-dive on trending topics.
Learn from those at the forefront of travel insurance industry innovation. Share your own insights with other attendees. Network, connect and drive positive change in the industry – through exciting new collaborations.
SUPER EARLY BIRD RATE – £645 – NOW AVAILABLE
Register NOW and save over £500 on the full ticket cost
Discounts for early-stage startups. Contact hello@this-network.com for details.
Individuals and companies dedicated to nurturing, developing and redefining progress in the travel insurance industry – through knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
Insurers, insurtechs, fintechs, payments specialists, investors – anyone working to accelerate growth and enable impactful innovation across the entire travel insurance value chain.
The Innovate THIS 2023 event app will once again be the hub for conference information and intelligent networking. Its AI-powered matchmaking allows for intent-based connections – providing relevant and meaningful matches to participants in seconds. All with the aim of facilitating meaningful conversations.
Keeping track of the agenda and managing your schedule can also be done in the app – all via beautifully clear graphics and snappy functionality.
We’ve partnered with one of the leading app suppliers to create a networking platform that delivers a truly elevated event experience.
Raise your profile at Innovate THIS with by partnering with us. Do you have a unique product or service you’d like to display? Looking for brand elevation? Want to gain more traction for your business in the travel insurance industry?
From not-your-average conference swag, to bespoke activations, we work hard to make sure each sponsored item has maximum impact.
Contact us today to talk through ideas – or request the Innovate THIS sponsorship deck.
DOCK GALLERY is at the end of the quayside walkway.
Location
Located in the heart of East London’s thriving enterprise zone, Tobacco Dock is a former trading post situated within walking distance of Tower Bridge. Now a Grade 1 listed building, it’s set among one of the city’s most charismatic areas – Wapping.
The nearest Tube stations to Tobacco Dock are:
Shadwell Station (5 min walk)
Tower Hill Station (15 minute walk)
Car parking can be pre-booked.
Take advantage of our exceptional room rates at The Gate hotel. Contact concierge@this-network.com for details.
The Tobacco Dock also offers very good rates on nearby hotels via its accommodation service.
After a full day of conference sessions and workshops, Innovate THIS attendees are invited to join us for an Evening Networking Party, as our guests.
Expect delicious food, a wide range of fine drinks, and plenty of sparkling conversation.
Additional tickets will be available soon for guests who are only attending the Evening Networking Party. Please feel free to invite your network.
ⓒ THIS 2022. All rights reserved.
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Gal Levy is Head of Engineering at travel insurance start-up Faye, where she leads a global team of developers building the future of customer-first, 100% digital travel insurance products. Gal has spent over a decade working primarily in consumer-focused, digital health companies, including Teva Pharmaceuticals and K Health, and boasts a background in both data analytics and software engineering.
Rosie Denée joined Lloyd’s in August 2020 following ten years as a broker in the international insurance market, specialising in risk management. She now runs the Lloyd’s Lab InsurTech programme, which is about to launch its ninth cohort. Her role covers all elements of the Lab programme – from meeting interested insurtechs and insurers, through to planning and running the ten-week programme with the support of the Lab team.
John Campbell founded Rabbit & Pork as the third agency and Voice Experience arm of TIPi Group. John has developed and launched several Google Actions and Skills, presented at various voice events globally, including Project Voice and Digital Marketing World Forum, spoken on the VUX podcast and authored multiple whitepapers. John is also one of the hosts of VoiceLunch UK.
Yuri Poletto has 20 years’ experience in the insurance industry, gained within insurance companies – including Assicurazioni Generali, Reale Mutua and Aviva – and collaborating with insurers, reinsurers, insurtechs, and research and consulting companies as an advisor on insurance innovation. He also founded an insurtech start-up and has amassed a global professional network through working in Italy, Ireland, and the UK. In 2021, Yuri founded the Open & Embedded Insurance Observatory, a global initiative with over 40 members from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The purpose of the Observatory is to build and grow the largest knowledge base on open and embedded insurance, and to promote and facilitate their adoption in the market.
Helen Briant is a partner in Trowers & Hamlins’ Dispute Resolution and Litigation team, specialising in civil fraud, investigations and complex commercial disputes. She regularly advises clients who are the victims of fraud and cyber breaches and deals with claims and recovery actions arising from fraud. Her work often includes delivering training and advice to clients to seek to prevent fraud.
Harvey Wade is passionate about making innovation better so that it delivers the impact organisations need. He founded Innovate21 to realise that passion. As an experienced innovation leader, he drives business impact from transformation and change programs across multiple industries, including insurance, utilities, healthcare and technology, and loves making connections across sector boundaries. Harvey knows what it takes to create, drive and sustain innovation in organisations, enabling better performance and success.
Ruth Polyblank is Vice President and Partnerships Lead for Insurance at Mastercard, with specific responsibility for identifying new opportunities in the global insurance market by leveraging Mastercard’s existing capabilities and assets to innovate through collaboration with the industry. As an insurance marketing and strategy expert, Ruth holds over 20 years’ experience and has worked with traditional and insurtech businesses to design vertical propositions and growth strategies, with particular expertise in the SME sector. Ruth previously held leadership and management roles at Chubb, CLS and Fusion. Ruth is a regular speaker, author, mentor and advisor within the insurance sector; co-author of ‘The InsurTech Book’; an Ambassador for the CII Insuring Women’s Futures programme; and was named by WeAreTheCity as a Top 50 Woman in Tech.
Manjit Rana is the founder of award-winning insurance innovation consultancy Ingenin and insurtech collaboration platform – InsurTech Scout. Highly regarded as an industry thought leader, Manjit is one of the pioneers of the insurtech movement. He has over 30 years’ experience of working in the insurance space, alongside co-founding a number of start-up businesses and driving internal innovation for large global corporates. Manjit is also a mentor and advisor to some of the most exciting insurtech disruptors and industry accelerator programmes, and is a regular speaker at insurtech and innovation conferences globally.
Deeply immersed in the world of insurance innovation, insurtech and intelligent automation, Chris Frankland has a rich history of bringing to market customer-centric solutions that leverage people, process, technology and data to elevate the customer experience across the insurance lifecycle. As the founder of InsurTech360 and InsurTech Innovators, Chris is a globally recognised innovator and technologist. He is a mentor to a number of insurance accelerators across the globe, most recently the LATAM Insurtech Accelerator, and a regular speaker at events that span the insurance, banking, health, travel and intelligent automation space.
Monique Hesseling is Managing Director of Insurance at Cloudera, bringing expertise in both business leadership and data strategy to her role, where she works with insurance clients to optimize their use of data, analytics, and machine learning across the enterprise. Monique’s career includes business leadership and data and analytics roles in insurance, working for companies including Aon, Chubb, Mutual of Omaha, and Zurich Financial Services.
With over 20 years’ experience in electronic payments, Phillip McGriskin previously founded and was CEO of Envoy Services, a business that was acquired by Worldpay. Following the acquisition, Phil became Chief Product Officer for Worldpay eCommerce and Managing Director of Worldpay Futures. Phil’s prior payments experience includes Commercial Director of Earthport plc and Director of Sales for PaySafe. He has also worked as a Lloyd’s of London broker, but he won’t tell us how long ago that was! Phil is currently CEO of Vitesse, a UK-based fintech focusing on being the payment partner of choice for the insurance industry.
Louise Robertson is Global Marketing Director for Pattern Insurance. She is a passionate marketer who has led the branding and growth of global platform businesses. With over 15 years of SaaS marketing experience, she has developed and implemented strategic go-to-market plans, built international teams and rolled out ABM plans at LexisNexis, Hubio and Localz. At Pattern Insurance, the team simplifies embedding insurance for businesses. She works hard to take this customer-centric insurance message to market.
Oliver Werneyer is the Founder and CEO of Imburse. He spends most of his time overseeing the overall operations of the company, but with a strong focus on powering international growth. Before founding Imburse, Oliver held various roles in the insurance industry, with the likes of Liberty Life, Swiss Re, and Genworth. He also founded Flynrate, an innovative flight tracking, and flight delay insurance app, and became a leading member of London’s start-up ecosystem, sharing his industry knowledge and passion for entrepreneurship with London-based start-ups.
Gibson Nascimento is Head of EMEA at Sensedia, helping businesses in their journey to an Open Experience. With over 17 years of experience in Software Development, Agile Methodologies and Architecture, he is an expert in APIs and has worked in multiple industries. Gibson leads EMEA operations and high-performing teams on the implementation of highly scalable and reliable solutions, to support companies in their integration strategy.
Graeme Dean is Vice President, Global Insurance Solutions for Cover Genius, the insurtech for embedded insurance that protects global customers of the world’s largest digital companies, including Booking Holdings and Intuit. XCover is also available at Amazon, eBay, and Shopee. In his role, Graeme has been instrumental in building the global underwriting and regulatory framework for Cover Genius. Prior to joining the company, Graeme led the Accident & Health division for Allianz and has held numerous other leadership positions across the insurance industry. Graeme is passionate about insurtech and is an advisor to multiple insurtech start-ups.
Katrina Beckwith heads up the European and UK sales division at Episode Six, focusing on wallet management and credit, debit and prepaid issuer-side processing and card management. Katrina is a sales director who has built deep retail and business-related payments industry knowledge over three decades, working for financial technology companies whose technologies have developed emerging trends and whose products that have now become mainstream. She is a self-proclaimed optimist, with high energy levels and an appetite to share knowledge and leverage her strong interpersonal skills to collaborate with others to find the best solution to satisfy requirements to a mutually advantageous conclusion.
Matt Connolly is Founder & CEO of Sønr and has worked across innovation for the past 15+ years. In his early 20s, he founded an innovation agency that worked with household brands around the world. It ultimately grew to become the UK’s #1 digital agency. He subsequently built, and invested in, a number of tech start-ups. Recognising the need to help insurers better adapt and innovate, Matt founded Sønr – a leading Insurtech Scouting and Open Innovation business. Matt is a regular public speaker and enjoys meeting people who share his passion for new and ground-breaking ideas.
Ian Kerr is Director of Business Development at Episode Six, and has over 30 years’ experience in financial technology in a range of organisations, starting with NCR and including IBM, payments and banking solutions providers. Prior to joining Episode Six in 2019, Ian was the CEO at Bolero, a Software as a Service platform for global trade, where he led new initiatives in digitisation, Supply Chain Finance and logistics. Earlier in his career, Ian was the COO at a payments gateway company and led a payments-focussed testing solutions division at Clear2Pay. He has been based in the US and Singapore, as well as the UK, and has been a regular speaker at international conferences and technology events.
Dan Roberts is a multi-award-winning serial entrepreneur, running start-ups across many industries including FMCG, Digital Outdoor Media, Smart Cities and Healthcare, the last of which was his introduction into the world of blockchain. He has worked in identity and geospatial analytics using this technology before working on Project Jellyfish, a research venture focussed on the marriage between insurance and blockchain for Insurtech Gateway. This partnership led to the birth of Nayms where, as CEO and co-founder, Dan is building the team creating a bridge between capital markets and over $1tn of uninsured risk.
Paul is Global Industry Principal, Insurance at Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code. With more than 20 years’ management experience within the insurance, financial and blue-chip sectors, Paul has built a strong reputation for introducing business change and Customer Experience strategies that expand operations and drive exceptional growth in the insurance business across US, UK and EMEA markets.
Tom Ross is a Senior Account Director with over 13 years’ multi-award-winning experience, working on customer-centric initiatives with multinational corporations, including Jaguar Land Rover, Danone, PepsiCo and McDonald’s. Tom’s wealth of experience in the industry contributes to his success at Armadillo, experts in customer-centric CRM. For over 25 years, Armadillo has put data at the heart of customer experience, delivering unparalleled ROI, technical ingenuity, and award-winning results to clients across Travel, Entertainment, and Food and Beverage. Working with travel leaders Cunard, P&O Cruises, Walt Disney Travel Company and more, Armadillo combines data and strategy with talent and craft, to stay at the forefront of CRM innovation.
Innovation is no longer a choice in today’s insurance world. Digitisation and rapidly emerging technologies allow insurers to create bespoke insurance offerings and bring to market ground-breaking protection products at an unprecedented pace. And this is disrupting the travel insurance marketplace in exciting ways. In this session, Innovate THIS chair Chris Frankland, Founder of InsurTech360, will be in conversation with Matt Connolly, CEO of Sønr Global, discussing insurtech and fintech trends, the importance of innovation, and how to start – or accelerate – your tech-led journey.
Low-code platforms have accelerated digital transformation in the insurance industry – reducing time-to-market for new insurance solutions and reducing underwriting and claims management costs through enhanced process automation. We’ll be exploring the concept of low-code, the benefits it offers, adoptions trends, and real-world use cases in travel and health insurance. And looking at how it can transform insurance businesses, while optimising customer experience and engagement.
Deliver Better Innovation Outcomes
Hosted by: Harvey Wade, Innovate21
This fast-paced, collaborative workshop will enable delegates to: recognise their innovation mindset, strengths and bias; understand how they show up in the innovation lifecycle, and determine the ‘job of innovation’ for their organisation.
Using the Six I’s Innovation model, attendees will identify their innovation strengths and when they best show up, understanding how their strengths help, but could hinder. Helpful for individuals, and incredibly insightful for leaders to drive innovation outcomes.
Attendees will then be introduced to three frameworks that move innovation from an outcome to ‘an enabler’. Using innovation as a strategic imperative, the frameworks identify and prioritise innovation focus areas, determine the innovation portfolio horizons, and introduce a 5-pillar approach to identify sources of the innovation required. Attendees will leave with practical approaches that can be immediately applied.
Navigating Payments in Travel Insurance
Hosted by: Ian Kerr and Krisitna Beckwith, Episode Six
A workshop to equip attendees with the skills to understand current innovations and trends in the global payments industry. This interactive workshop will discuss these broader trends in payments, the state of play in the travel insurance sector right now, what a ‘future state’ may look like, and potential strategies to navigate the way forward. Cut through payments jargon, learn about options for upgrading legacy technology, and navigate cross-border payments issues. What do travellers want and need when it comes to buying insurance and making claims? We’ll be exploring this – and discussing what’s possible.
For travel insurance, more than any other insurance subsector, payments are critical to an excellent customer experience and satisfaction. Customers can find themselves in stressful situations and need solutions and support immediately. This is complicated by the fact that support needs to change based on where the customer is and what exactly has happened. To meet customers’ unique needs, insurers must be able to offer a wide variety of payment solutions and technologies. We will be delving into specific use-cases, best-in-class customer experiences, the operational challenges these present, and solutions to overcome them.
Cryptocurrency payments and decentralised finance (DeFi) solutions are being harnessed by boundary-pushing travel insurance providers. Learn about the real benefits of utilising financial technologies based on secure distributed ledgers – as well as how experts in these fields have overcome the associated challenges and risks.