Ep217 Tanguy Touffut Descartes Underwriting: Physics over Statistics

Today’s guest runs a business that this year is set to quadruple
in size since the first time he was on the show just over two
years ago.


What’s more it is looking to more than double again in the medium
term.


Tanguy Touffut CEO and co-founder of Descartes Underwriting is
one of the indispensable leaders in the burgeoning parametric
insurance sector.


Descartes is probably the best-funded and certainly most
ambitious of a cohort of peers to emerge in the last 5 years on
the back of the insurtech boom.


It has made a large strategic bet on the sector, building a
global network of offices and now employing over 200, with more
offices and hires still likely to come.


Now that the sector is beginning to mature and the field of
start-ups begins to thin out and parametric products are joining
the day-to-day toolkit of major brokers and commercial risk
managers, it was great to catch up.


Much has changed since we last spoke, not least a huge shift in
the state of the reinsurance market and the emergence of
artificial intelligence into the global psyche, so we had an
awful lot to talk about.


In an industry where conservatism and scepticism are not only
endemic but often valued character traits, Tanguy has a clear
vision of how the right parametric solutions applied in the right
places are going to transform insurance for the better, in
consistency and transparency of pricing and coverage as well as
in speed of claims handling and payment.


My job for large parts of this podcast was to play devil’s
advocate and challenge Tanguy on this new modus operandi of
insurance and whether it is a genuine disruptive challenge to the
commercial insurance sector as a whole or something of a passing
fashion.


Tanguy came though extremely convincingly.


He may be a visionary, but Tanguy is also a realist who knows
that if this relatively new method of risk transfer is to succeed
long-term, it must have a genuine technical edge over traditional
indemnity insurance in terms of its understanding and pricing of
risk – hence Descartes’ huge investment in scientific and
technological talent.


This is someone who has thought deeply about the whole insurance
value chain and knows where it might be improved and that’s what
makes this a fascinating conversation.


Listen on for a grand tour of an exciting and fast-moving new
insurance sector with one of its principal architects.


LINKS: We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:


https://www.advantagego.com