The pilot episode of FS Brew runs through four unconnected news items, but read together they describe the same squeeze: a platform player moving in from above, a well-funded digital entrant pushing from below, and regional incumbents responding wit…
Four separate developments out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia this cycle share one design principle: don't wait for consumers to opt into cover, build the mechanism that makes going without it awkward or impossible. A savings scheme, a licence-plate ca…
Midway through a wide-ranging fireside conversation, Symbo co-CEO Adrit Raha posed a question he left deliberately unanswered: "What's stopping Google or Apple from becoming the world's biggest insurance company?" Neither he nor his co-guest, insura…
Siddharth "Sid" Iyer, Head of Digital at AXA Gulf (now part of GIG), runs his team toward a KPI stated plainly enough to fit on a wall: a motor insurance quote in one minute, a completed purchase in three. "That was our concept. That was my motto," …
A UAE motor book running at a 60-70% loss ratio sounds, to most people inside the market, like a portfolio under real pressure. Rachel Al Mughairi, Chief Engagement Officer at InsuranceMarket.ae, offered a useful corrective drawn from 13 years worki…
When the UAE's unified motor policy came into effect in 2017, most insurers priced somewhere between the regulator's minimum and maximum tariff bands, and the result was a genuinely strong couple of years -- 2017 and 2018 industry profits were drive…
Pet insurance has a documented failure in the UAE market: a launch roughly a decade before this conversation that, in the words of Royal Trust Technologies co-founder Matthieu Etourneau, "did terribly bad." Before building their own pet insurance pr…
Lavanya Mundayur, COO of New India Assurance's Dubai operation and the first woman to head a GCC operation for the company, offered a striking structural observation about the market she now runs: the UAE has roughly as many insurers and brokers as …
A claims fraud statistic surfaced by Tanja Magas, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at UAE insurtech Democrance, is stark enough to be worth leading with: some estimates put the share of UAE policyholders engaging in some form of fraud at 30%. "This …
Frederik Bisbjerg, Executive Director of Digital & Innovation at Daman, one of the GCC's largest health insurers, was present for a specific, instructive failure: the region's first motor telematics product, launched at QIC around 2015-16, that cust…
Julien Condamines, co-founder of Novo AI, didn't set out to fix insurance claims. As a consultant, he pitched an early GPT model to an insurer shortly after OpenAI's first public release; the insurer said no. He called a former Google colleague, a m…
In a separate FS Brew conversation, Daman's Frederik Bisbjerg raised two specific, skeptical objections to reward-based health insurance in the UAE: that rewards arriving too slowly kill adoption, and that the region's transient expat population mak…
Asked to place the Middle East insurance industry on a data-maturity curve running from 0 (basic reporting) to 5 (full AI deployment), Varghese Skariah, regional head of data at RSA Middle East, didn't hedge. Data-native insurtechs like Lemonade, he…
Most insurance marketing in the region, in Wilson Varghese's own assessment, competes on price or speed -- a quote in under five minutes, the lowest premium on the page. Zurich Middle East, where Varghese is General Manager and Head of Operations, h…
Andy Ann, CEO and co-founder of Hong Kong-based YAS MicroInsurance, describes his company's core innovation in a single reframe: instead of insuring a person, YAS insures a unit of activity -- kilometers run, rides taken, minutes on a mountain trail…
Walid Daniel Dib, co-founder and CEO of Hala Insurance, describes his company's regulatory structure in a phrase precise enough to double as the episode title: "We are regulated onshore and we innovate offshore." Hala holds an insurance agency licen…
At a special FS Brew episode recorded in collaboration with MEECON 2025, six insurance and energy leaders working across the Middle East's clean energy transition converged on a theme none of them stated outright but all of them kept circling back t…
Most insurtech pitches don't fail because the founder is weak. They fail because the market was never going to produce a venture-scale outcome in the first place, according to Shwetank Verma, co-founder and managing partner at Leo Capital and co-fou…
Corporate venture capital arms at large insurers typically play a passive role -- writing checks into promising insurtechs and letting the ecosystem develop on its own. Lars Gehrmann, Group Chief Digital Officer at Qatar Insurance Group and head of …
When Chubb decided eight years ago to go after the wave of digital-native platforms reshaping distribution -- think early Uber, Airbnb, Amazon -- it faced the classic incumbent's dilemma: spin the effort out as an independent, fast-moving unit insul…
Nicolo Robba co-founded LifePal, Indonesia's largest B2C insurance aggregator, after a career at Lazada -- Southeast Asia's dominant e-commerce platform -- with no prior insurance background at all. The founding insight was simple: he and his co-fou…
In 2023, every single insurer operating in Saudi Arabia turned a profit -- the first time that has happened across the whole industry, according to Hasham Piperdy, GM for KSA and a director at Badri Consultancy, the GCC's largest actuarial firm. The…
The UAE's decision to mandate minimum professional qualifications for insurance staff was never going to stay a UAE story. According to CII's regional lead for the Middle East and Central & South Asia, it is the first in a chain reaction: Sri Lanka …
If you work in insurance or insurtech, podcast recommendations are easy to find and hard to trust. A lot of “best insurtech podcast” lists quietly mix together independent voices, media brands, recruitment firms, insurers and software vendors as if …
