Episode description

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Leadership in Insurance Podcast. 

In today's episode, we were lucky enough to be joined by Amrit Santhirasenan.  Amrit is Co-Founder and CEO of hyperexponential or HX as it's affectionately known.

HX is the company you get when you take 2 actuaries with computer science degrees and they find the software landscape lacking! HX provides software solutions for insurance companies with their flagship, next-generation modeling platform, Renew.  

In this episode we talked about:  

• Creativity in actuarial science 
• Why open-sourced solutions are by nature better – many minds make light work 
• Googling solutions is a good strategy! 
• Knowing where to look is as good as knowing.  
• Good documentation is a competitive advantage 
• How the tech stack of old insurers hinders their tech teams 
• HX started because Amrit kept waiting for someone to solve his tech problems – they didn’t so he had to do it 
• The parallels of starting a business and starting a family – plug for Amrit's excellent podcast “start-up dads” 
• The gritty reality of start-ups – you HAVE to want to do it. But it can be fun 
• As co-founders how do you decide who has what role?  
• We discuss my “less than average” leadership skills 
• The value of every component of the business – a business as a system and striking binmen! 
• Why take investment? 
• The huge importance of trade backing and referrals for a new business 
• Bootstrapping – is it useful? 
• How the CEO works for the team, not the other way round! 
• Sales teams – when to hire one? Do you need one if the product is strong enough? 
• How the new digital insurers have a huge leveraged advantage – new tech – no legacy  
• CTO roles at legacy insurers are not incentivized to change  
• Culture drives change and insurance suffers from Fiefdoms 
• How it's legitimate for profitable insurers to resist change – it's working why change it!  

Thanks to Amrit for being a great guest  

This podcast was brought to you by FinPro an executive recruitment business that works in the Insurance and Instech space   

Our host is FinPro Director, Alex Bond   

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