How a Colossus Took a Duck and Turned it into a Unicorn
Swiss Re is a Reinsurer with 14,500 employees and an annual revenue circa $34B – their core business for most of their history has been insuring insurers (Reinsurance). In order to diversify, tap into new risk pools and provide a wider range of services, they have created a business unit (Life Capital) to give birth to, nurture and scale B2B2C digital insurance start-ups. In essence, providing digital and operational insurance platform(s) as a service to other large non insurance brands wanting to diversify into insurance but who lack the capability, license and expertise.
This is the story of one of those start-ups: iptiQ P&C EMEA and the first 2 years of its life starting out as a vision and business case all the way through to its launch into 3 markets with its first partners. We want to share our story with you so you can understand the dead-ends and wrong turns, the mistakes and how we ultimately overcame them, the transformation of the company, its culture and ourselves…and how we ‘went native’ and now cannot turn back.
We will tell our story in chapters, each of them describing a stage and key challenge in the journey and how it was ultimately overcome so that we can move onto the next chapter.
The stories' unlikely heroes are Victoria-Head of Compliance and James- Interim Head of Delivery–we will also hear how their lives changed and the impact on them as they progress through this journey. And, of course, we’ll have a few surprises on the way.
Chapters
Full transcript
The complete talk, organized by section.
Host Intro (Gene Kim)
Next up is Victoria Mayo, who is Head of Compliance for iptiQ EMEA Property and Casualty, which is a part of Swiss Re, the world's largest insurance and reinsurance company, founded in 1863. She is co-presenting with James Head, who was her counterpart as the interim Head of Delivery and also CEO of Rebellion Consulting.
I am so excited about this presentation because Victoria and James describe how the start of iptiQ P&C was built inside Swiss Re. They describe why and how this strategically important program was created, and how it has earned the highest levels of support from within the organization. They share the successes and lessons learned creating digital insurance offerings sold through new channels such as retailers. This is such a fantastic talk about how Swiss Re's Horizon One businesses created a set of ambitious Horizon Three initiatives to explore, innovate, and win in the marketplace. So please welcome Victoria and James.
James Head and Victoria Mayo
James Head: Hello, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to listen to our keynote for DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020. We're so excited to tell you our story. You can catch us on Slack throughout to ask us your questions. My name's James Head. I'm CEO and founder of Rebellion Consulting. I'm joined by ex-colleague and now close friend, Victoria Mayo. She's Head of Compliance for iptiQ EMEA P&C and part of the executive team.
Victoria Mayo: Hi, everyone.
James Head: Our keynote today is "How a Colossus Took a Duck and Turned it into a Unicorn," our story of transforming a 156-year-old reinsurer and ourselves in the process. We really hope you enjoy the talk and it gives you some useful insight and inspiration.
James Head
Before we dive into iptiQ, we wanted to first introduce you to its home, which is Swiss Re. Swiss Re is currently the world's largest reinsurance company, and its origins stem from May 1861, when more than 500 houses went up in flames in the Swiss town of Glarus. Two-thirds of that town sank into ash. More than 3,000 people lost their home. That fire really showed that insurance coverage in Switzerland simply wasn't adequate to protect people and businesses in the event of such a natural catastrophe. So in 1863, the Swiss Reinsurance Company was officially incorporated in Zurich.
Simply put, reinsurance is effectively insurance for insurance companies, and it's purchased to help insulate itself from the risk of a major claims event. Swiss Re itself is made up of three core business units. The first is reinsurance, and that's by far the largest. It makes up around 80% of Swiss Re's overall revenues, covering life and health, and also property and casualty, or non-life business. Then we have Corporate Solutions, and that's our corporate-to-corporate insurance arm that offers various insurance coverages for multinational and midsize firms. Last but not least, we have Life Capital.
Life Capital is where iptiQ P&C, the company that we'll be talking about today, actually sits. Life Capital is probably the newest part of Swiss Re from a business unit perspective, and its primary goal is to boost long-term revenues of Swiss Re by accessing new insurance areas. Reinsurance is a kind of shrinking, or a much smaller pool than it used to be, and so iptiQ is part of that strategy to access the primary insurance pool.
iptiQ is a B2B2C insurer, meaning it aims to offer a fully digital insurance proposition through the existing distribution channels of the world's leading brands, ecosystems, banks, and other insurance companies. We aim to do that in an efficient, transparent way in order to make that insurance more accessible and much simpler for end customers like you and me.
Victoria Mayo
Historically, the big player in Life Capital was ReAssure, and that was an insurance run-off specialist in the UK. It was a huge cash generator for Swiss Re for a number of years. ReAssure was sold to Phoenix Group this year, subject to regulatory approvals, and this will now bring iptiQ firmly into the investor spotlight from a global Swiss Re perspective. So it's an initiative that's super important at the Swiss Re board level.
Just to give you a sense of where James and I actually sit, or sat, in the organization: the group CEO of Swiss Re is Christian Mumenthaler. Reporting to Christian is Thierry Léger, and he is a member of the group executive committee and CEO of the Life Capital business unit overall. Reporting to him is Andreas Scherzinger, and he's our very own iptiQ EMEA CEO. We operate in a matrix reporting line in Swiss Re. James reported both to the Life Capital CTOO, who's another reporter of Thierry, as well as to Andreas. Myself, I report to the Head of Compliance for Life Capital, also as well as to Andreas.
James Head
Let's now talk a little bit more about iptiQ. iptiQ is key for Swiss Re. They really believe this is their future growth engine, as Victoria described: their way to tackle the innovator's dilemma and the third horizon. They're willing to invest in this over the long term. iptiQ is now in four continents of the world, and it's something the board take a keen interest in.
But it's not just a pure financial play for Swiss Re. Swiss Re are not just a reinsurer but a risk knowledge company. They want to further their intellectual capital, research, and data to become increasingly more of a risk tech company. iptiQ is their gateway into this new world of innovation and technology.
iptiQ's business model is uniquely built around digital insurance partnerships with the world's leading brands. iptiQ recognizes that insurance is not the top priority for most people, so bring it to the customer when they need it most, and to complement other products and services. Whether you're buying a car, a house, a kitchen, or an airline ticket, iptiQ want to be there to make sure you and your family are protected.
Traditional insurance companies are made up of a web of complex legacy ERP and mainframe systems, waterfall and outsourced processes, and outdated and siloed practices with a significant amount of technical, organizational, and cultural debt. All this needs to be paid down. This also results in a huge amount of paper, and it's a very manual, high-cost, brittle business that struggles to improve, let alone innovate. Because of all this legacy, the end customer experience is usually at the lower end of company priorities, behind cost-cutting, outsourcing, and the latest sales campaign.
To make matters even worse, insurance distribution is a mess of brokers, agents, intermediaries, and complex insurance products, everyone fighting for their commission or margin, again all at the detriment of the end customer.
At iptiQ, we want to do something completely differently. iptiQ was completely greenfield, has no legacy, no retail brand. It's a pure white-label model where each participant plays their part and brings value. The partner brings the brand, customer, and distribution channels, while iptiQ provides the insurance license, operation, and digital platform. Starting with a clean sheet of paper with cloud, agile, and DevOps built in, with a relentless focus on the customer and their experience, we tried to build the company around a culture of high-quality engineering and innovative insurance experience at the heart of everything we did.
Myself and my origins: I'm a self-taught engineer from a data and business intelligence background. I started my career in the mid-'90s with a company, a site called Talkland, that ultimately became Vodafone, that we all know today. After Vodafone, I founded my own consultancy business and was lucky to work with the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Mars, Royal Mail, BP, Shell, and typically working with the C-suite on technology strategy and delivery.
In 2014, I was asked to help the executive team at Swiss Re to rescue a financial initiative that was going badly wrong, and I was working for the COO as a technology advisor on M&A strategic programs and turnaround projects. The main focus was still relatively operational. I didn't feel like we were really going far enough on the technology or the ways of working. I was trying desperately to get the executive team to see things differently and be more innovative, but I felt like I was getting nowhere slowly, or at least so I thought.
Victoria Mayo
I'm admittedly a little bit of a Swiss Re baby. During university in the UK, where I studied law, I spent my summers working in Swiss Re's legal department in London. I was hired straight out of university in 2012 and started my career in compliance, looking after both Corporate Solutions and Reinsurance in EMEA for Swiss Re. I built up experience of different compliance risks and different jurisdictions. My focus has always been on the client-enabling side, really trying to support the business to achieve their goals and navigate obstacles in a compliant way.
In March 2018, Swiss Re's then Group Chief Compliance Officer asked if I would rotate into this iptiQ for P&C business that Life Capital was forming, and to keep an eye on them, essentially, was what I was tasked with. My first reaction was, "I don't do retail insurance." If a customer in reinsurance is unhappy, they pick up the phone to their lawyers. Retail customers are everyday people with usually no such safety net, and that responsibility to a compliance officer is quite scary. But I saw it as a great challenge, and I figured I'd help out for a few months, and then I simply never left. I think a big part of that was the tangible nature and immediacy of retail insurance is very intoxicating.
James Head
Victoria and I decided to talk a little bit around what our feelings were when we first met. I have to confess, I was pretty cautious around volunteering too much too soon and scaring Victoria with our crazy ideas. In financial services, compliance can be overbearing, extremely risk-averse, and very conservative. All of which makes sense, but I think technology offers us opportunities to be both fast and safe.
Victoria and I hit it off straight away and quite quickly became sparring partners, sharing our knowledge and expertise from our very different domains. Victoria never prescribed the how. This is where I think she's different. She always explained the regulations and their limits and boundaries so that we could then work together on how we could achieve the outcomes that we both wanted. This meant that we developed very high levels of trust, honesty, and a really pragmatic approach, and this then radiated to other members of the technology team and outwards across legal, risk, InfoSec, and the procurement communities. Given our previous roles in a central business unit level in our ivory towers, we're both now accused of going native in the new business, a badge we both wore with immense pride.
Victoria Mayo
In terms of my first impressions of James: when iptiQ was in its early stages, there was a lot of focus, of course, around the agile methodology. For someone like me, who knows insurance but does not come in any way from a technical background, some of the discussions I found myself in in the early iptiQ days, it was like I'd apparated midway through a conversation with people not only speaking a totally foreign language, but like they weren't even really talking about building an insurance company. Given I was responsible for making sure that this insurance company was compliant, I suddenly became very worried that I was missing things.
So I sat down with James for our first proper catch-up and really was prepared to be met with, yet again, another wall of agile and tech jargon. But to my great pleasure, James really connected the dots for me, and most importantly, in a very clear and non-patronizing way. From there, we really became each other's mutual guides: me for him through the maze of corporate governance and regulation, and he for me through that world of technology and delivery build. I think having that person that you fully trust to say, "Look, I just don't get this," is something that's hugely valuable in business, and I think often very underrated.
James Head
I want to talk a little bit around the technology and operations strategy that we defined that really gave birth to this business. In April 2017, the COO that I was working for was replaced by a new CTOO from Barclays. Her name's Pravina Ladva, and she was a champion for technology and enterprise agility. We immediately gravitated towards each other and began working on a new strategy, a North Star for the Life Capital business unit, really with operations and technology embedded together rather than separate silos.
The strategy attempted to shift the focus from more of a traditional top-down, waterfall, and vendor-led approach with on-premise and ERP systems, to a more modern agile, DevOps, cloud-native, open source model, with an added emphasis on repatriating our engineering knowledge and beginning to build technology rather than buy, particularly in those areas that we saw as differentiating.
We saw one of the biggest opportunities was to attract more diverse talent who had worked in technology and creative industries before. This meant foregoing the shirt and the tie and going out and pushing insurance as an exciting place to be, which is no easy feat. We started on a conference, InsurTech, and meetup scene to spread the word that we're doing something really interesting, and that with iptiQ, you get the best of both worlds: the opportunity to work in a startup, but with a big corporate background providing financial security.
Once the strategy was accepted and adopted by the business unit executive team and then the TCOs, I wasn't exactly clear what role I was going to have in making it happen. To start with, I operated as a central enterprise architect of sorts. From my ivory tower, I was telling the entities what to do but not really helping them with the how. I felt conflicted. I believed in the strategy and the need to change the organization, but I felt from the center, top-down wasn't me. I really wanted to roll my sleeves up and get involved, share in the pain, if you like.
In November 2017, I was invited into a new top-secret project where I was going to be one of the founding team of a brand-new digital insurer that was intended to be the embodiment of the technology strategy we'd written three months earlier. It was a chance to put all the theory into practice, and for me, it was going to be the most challenging and rewarding two years of my life. As I relaxed with my family at Christmas 2017, I didn't really realize the roller coaster I'd strapped myself into.
Victoria Mayo
One of the benefits of being part of a large group like Swiss Re is, of course, the financing. If iptiQ were a standalone, privately financed company, I think the pressure on very short-term return on investment would be really immense. Swiss Re offers a slightly more insulated playing field. But this, of course, comes with certain specific expectations. Senior management want to know how all of this money that we're giving you to build this is now translating into premium. Those expectations had to also be managed in light of the fact that it takes time to build those digital platform capabilities in a sustainable way. It also came with the expectation that we are adhering closely to Swiss Re internal standards and governance so that we didn't accidentally destroy a 156-year-old reputation before we'd even gone live.
iptiQ took the spirit of an agile tribe and created the control tribe. That was made up of the various Swiss Re governance functions like compliance, legal, data protection, information security. This tribe was really about educating those people whose day job was simply not iptiQ, unlike myself. That control tribe allowed those people to get closer to what iptiQ were really trying to achieve. I firmly believe that even as a second-line risk function, you can't identify what the real risks are if you are too closed off, if you're in your ivory tower. Being close with business and being objective is a very careful balance to be struck, but frankly, distance from what the business is doing will tend to make your enabling approach far more conservative, because the unknown always creates fear.
Once we moved out of that initial build phase for iptiQ, I dissolved the control tribe as a central body, and those requirements instead became integrated into the wider domains and delivery teams as part of BAU. One of the really interesting cultural challenges in iptiQ is that we have to balance this innovation and regulation. We hire motivated, smart, creative people into the UX team, into the marketing teams, into the tech team. I really had to balance not wanting to crush that fresh creativity with the balance that we are still a highly regulated insurance company. The fact is, to be truly innovative, you are always going to be one step ahead of regulation, in that it's not the job of regulators to account for all possible future developments that InsurTech could have.
To navigate that, transparency is just absolutely fundamental. Exploring together from that design phase, what is the sandbox that we can play in, is and was remains really important in iptiQ.
iptiQ P&C was officially approved to be kicked off in early 2018 by the Swiss Re Group executive committee and the group board of directors. That official kickoff began in a Zurich hotel conference room in May 2018. When iptiQ was just a vision on a PowerPoint, there was not even a legal entity behind it. We had our CEO on board, as well as our head of insurance and our head of corporate development, and of course, we had James as our interim head of delivery, and myself on rotation. The vast majority of the rest of those people were external consultants. iptiQ was officially granted its Luxembourg insurance license in November 2018, and very shortly after that, we were granted our Swiss branch license.
Looking back on that first encounter in May, one of the biggest lessons learned with some hindsight is that the agile methodology was and is the right way forward, but it came with far too much agile evangelism. Bearing in mind many of the first people in that room were completely new to this way of working, suddenly we're being told that if we're doing agile right, we don't need milestones for building this company. But we wanted milestones, and it felt like we were often trying to balance keeping with true agile methodology and the actual doing and management of an insurance company. A lot of that was we were trying to apply the agile religion to the letter and not necessarily to the spirit.
When I was looking back on this journey for this presentation, I also asked our CEO what he thought was the real turning point in this journey. When did he feel like the vision was really coming together? He immediately said, "When the executive team was almost complete." That was in January 2019, and that's really when it felt like the vision had a team to direct it. We had our very first offsite, and we had done one of those management self-assessments to assess personality types and working styles. We were really pleased with ourselves because we had such a diversely spread executive team. That is fantastic. But what isn't so often talked about when it comes to our diverse team is actually then the challenge that you have to take all these people with different ideas and perspectives and ways of working and form it into one functioning, coherent team. That can take time, and it certainly takes a shared vision.
James Head
As Victoria mentioned, we had quite a few changes through the first 12 months, and some interesting people kind of came and went, some good and some bad. When I look back, we spent too much time going round and round on making some decisions about how we really got going. For me, the key learning is you can get a really bunch of smart people together in a room, create a concept, a plan, and an architecture, but you need people who've executed and have delivered before.
Progress isn't always neat and tidy, and mistakes will always be made along the way. Too many large corporations fall into the trap of having a perfect plan, a thorough analysis, and above all demand a certainty in success. This isn't how the real world works. Real progress is messy and difficult. We're dealing with emergent complexity. It cannot be controlled and boxed in despite what we wish.
I have to confess, some of the agile and DevOps evangelism that Victoria mentioned was coming from me. I think I was overly scared that the big traditional corporate culture would be too strong and overwhelm us, which is why I think I pushed so hard on the concept of agile and DevOps. Ultimately, the principles are more important than the practices, and I think sometimes I lost sight of this. I was trying so hard to make success of this business. But for me, this is part of the learning and improving, both personally and as a learning organization.
What's not shown here is the long and winding journeys that Victoria and I were spending each week, moving from Heathrow to Zurich, earning our silver BA cards, the barista knowing coffee orders before Victoria had even arrived in Heathrow, and me having a personalized greeting in the same hotel room every week. We can't complain too much, though. Zurich's an amazing place, and I really miss the culture, the open spaces, the bars and restaurants, and most of all, my walk through the park in the morning to our office, which faced directly onto the lake.
Victoria Mayo
Speaking of the lake, our first real proof point came in April 2019, when we went live with our very first insurance offering, and that was a cyber protection available to our colleagues in the Swiss Re Munich office. There was no actual distribution partner involved for this one. In true Swiss Reinsurance fashion, I think we were striving for perfection. Looking back, I think I was too, to an extent. There were many eyes watching, and even with a small internal launch, we didn't want to damage our credibility before we'd actually built any.
We sat in our executive team meeting and officially approved the go-live. Luckily, we had a willing Munich employee over in Zurich who became our first official customer. I think his photo is actually sort of in our customer care center as a sort of mini-shrine. Watching the traffic on Slack pick up with numerous warnings from the tech developers to not touch anything in production, and then this explosion of celebration on Slack when there was a confirmed payment and that a policy had actually been generated in our back end, that was really the first time that I realized what digital truly means. The sheer machine that's needed to power it in the back end versus I could have just printed off a policy and asked Stefano, our colleague, to sign it there and then.
We headed to the lake to celebrate with some beers, and as you can see, with our new giant iptiQ duck mascot, which our own CEO had to apparently source from some far-flung Chinese distributor. I didn't really want to ask too many questions at that point.
James Head
See if you can spot Victoria in the photo. That's a challenge for you. After a year of hard work, I was excited and anxious about the soft launch. We had targeted the 1st of April for launch, but we were ultimately a day late, which I don't think is too bad. I was up at 3:00 a.m., and at the airport for 4:00 a.m., and landed in Zurich around 10:00 a.m. But I was so distracted on calls, Slack, and everything else that I left my laptop on the airplane. I didn't realize this until I was 15 minutes into my journey into Zurich. So I desperately fought my way back to the airport and waited over an hour and a half for my laptop to be reunited with me.
Upon reaching the office, I only had minutes to spare before the due go-live date. I realized my building pass had then expired, and I had to steal one from someone else, which I got a slap on the wrist from security, but I wasn't going to miss this for all the money in the world. I arrived with seconds to spare, and as Stefano arrived and started his onboarding journey on the new site. What Victoria doesn't know is I'd already onboarded myself four or five times and already ramped up a big credit card bill just to make sure this didn't go all horribly wrong during the executive showcase. When it finally happened, I was so relieved, and I was just desperate to relax and go and have a beer down by the lake.
Victoria Mayo
In order to continue iptiQ's successful journey in 2019, it became very clear that an emphasis on an internal model ramp-up was needed and a move away from an outsourced expertise model. It's been, and it continues to be, about building both our platform and people capabilities. People in Swiss Re often ask, when they see what we're doing, is it too much too soon? But in a large corporate, it'll always be too much. There's always a balance between focusing on back-end constraints, not creating legacy, but keeping your front end flexible and opportunistic for new partners. And then in the middle, making sure that management stretch is really equal. That is the inherent complexity of a B2B2C business model. You need to have an agnostic platform to be scalable, but enough capabilities to be tailorable.
We also continued to grow the team quite a lot in 2019, particularly on the technology side. Very unusually for an insurer, the vast majority of our internal headcount are technology developers and engineers. They're not insurance agents. Also with, to be honest, an overall demographic of a far younger age group than you might otherwise see in traditional financial services. Having such a huge volume of developers definitely raised a few eyebrows within Swiss Re, particularly before you've even launched your first partnership. But it's so needed from a platform build perspective to ensure that longevity and not create legacy.
2019 was also the year that iptiQ won the DIA 100 Top Insurtechs Awards, and most excitingly, in November, the combined global iptiQ brand was officially given unicorn status. Backing up, though, to June last year, here came our next major milestone, which was the launch of our first Swiss distribution partner, which James will talk more about. This year so far, we've launched an Italian partner with a flood property cover and, of course, our second Swiss partnership, which is IKEA, which I will talk more about as well.
James Head
As Victoria mentioned, our first partner delivery was with Allthings, and that launch came only three months after our initial friends-and-family launch in April. Allthings are a European proptech ecosystem platform. They provide an app to tenants all over Europe for them to access an extensive range of complementary services to living in one of their properties, for example rental deposit, maintenance services, laundry, and even bread orders. They wanted to partner with iptiQ to provide insurance services on their platform.
This is a completely different way of working for Swiss Re. Allthings don't have extensive resources and capacity. We were just another platform participant to them. This meant we did the majority of our interaction via Slack and engineer-to-engineer with a brief weekly call. But ultimately, we had to figure it all out.
It was amazing to see our proposition and brand come together with theirs and really test our white-labeling capabilities for the first time. I think the team did an amazing job and allowed us to practice and learn for the bigger fish that were coming down the road. The release felt like the first real time we began to grow into our own skins as a real business, with a real identity who could achieve anything we wanted if we just put our minds to it. The buzz of going live this time felt even more of a high for me, and I felt a mixture of emotions because I knew that I achieved what I set out to do. I'd been on the founding team and helped build a digital insurer from the ground up. There was no instruction manual. We'd done this ourselves, and we'd given our all to this endeavor and been successful. It still makes my hair stand on end when I talk about it.
I was immensely proud of what we achieved, but it was bittersweet as I knew that I couldn't stay forever, and in the coming months I would need to move on and begin searching for my next challenge.
Victoria Mayo
Our launch with IKEA sadly came after James had left iptiQ, but of course couldn't have happened without him laying down some really fundamentals. Our launch with IKEA in Switzerland came in February of this year. It's a household contents and private liability insurer called Hemsäker, literally translated from Swedish as home safe.
Hemsäker is a really great example of exactly why we created iptiQ P&C. It's an affordable, simple-to-understand insurance sold through a trusted global brand. It's a fully white-labeled, embedded insurance journey that's embedded within the existing IKEA customer journey. Getting to launch was by no means easy, and in particular we really had to ensure that a brand like IKEA, with such an excellent reputation, felt comfortable with insurance distribution. They have limited experience in a regulated world.
It was a co-development process. We wanted to have features that were unique to that proposition, for example a no claims bonus or claims reimbursements available to customers in the form of IKEA vouchers. There are also features that build on both iptiQ and the partner's core value. That is really the iptiQ mission.
The simplified digital journey doesn't just stop at the point of sale. Our online customer portal also allows customers to update their details or submit a claim and administer their documents without ever needing to wait in some long call-center queue. Although sometimes you can have the best intentions in the world when it comes to digital insurance propositions, market culture will always play a really huge role. We still get Swiss customers asking if we can please send their policy and quotation by the mail.
I'm very proud to say that I'm a Hemsäker policyholder myself since moving to Zurich, and I can tell you, you've really not experienced true customer centricity until you're asked to approve your own policy terms and conditions.
Now we want to give you the opportunity to take a sneak peek inside iptiQ so you can see what it is we built.
Video: Inside iptiQ
Meet the tech challenger of the insurance industry. iptiQ is a startup. Our people come from all over the world and from a wide range of industries. We work fast and flexibly. There are no tired routines here, but instead, a variety of work that's ever-changing.
It's a very collaborative and fun environment here. And we're shaping our culture a little bit more every day. Want to join the disruptors? Join iptiQ. We're transforming insurance from within.
James Head
I hope now you're tempted to have a look at iptiQ as a potential career option. What we're doing now: from my perspective, I'm continuing to build my consultancy practice. I still continue to work for C-suite of other enterprises, particularly in the UK, on their journeys into the world of digital, agile, and DevOps. Victoria mentioned ReAssure earlier, so I'm currently working for them on a new asset management platform and operating model.
How can you help? iptiQ is hiring all over the world: product and platform engineers, product UX design and delivery, as well as insurance knowledge. All over the planet, we're looking for more capability in the iptiQ brands. I'm always looking to foster new relationships with people in leadership and the DevOps community. I would like to continue to learn and expand my knowledge and help create extraordinary organizations.
Victoria Mayo
From my side, on a personal note, I've officially moved to Zurich as of this year, as I mentioned, in an attempt to shorten my commute from London to Zurich. Little did I know that that commute would actually turn into about 10 seconds from my bedroom to the living room, thanks to COVID, but such is life.
For iptiQ itself, 2020 is our year of growth and expansion, so also into the Italian and Dutch markets for 2020. It's also really about growing our capabilities and, of course, our people. I can only echo what James has said about if you want a career in tech insurance. I'm personally always really interested in hearing others who work in the field of legal and compliance in a tech sphere, and really listening to what their experience has been, whether it's in a regulated environment or not. Because I'd love to get insights into what is, I think, traditionally a very traditional role, like legal and compliance, and how it's adapting in different companies to new technologies and to new challenges. I'd really love to see what I could learn from you.
Lastly, we just wanted to say thank you very much for listening. I hope you found the talk pretty interesting and useful today. So thank you from me.
James Head
Thank you very much, everyone. It's been an absolute pleasure.