Beyond the hype: building sustainable innovation with Hayley Budd

Most insurance facilities thrive in a soft market and quietly disappear when conditions harden. In this episode, host Georgie Simister is joined by Tom Squires, head of distribution and digital trading at AEGIS London, and Dan Prince, CEO of Augentic Underwriting, to explore why that cycle keeps repeating itself and whether it has to. The conversation covers the new AEGIS and Augentic partnership, how multiline digital consortia actually work in practice, and what it really takes to build a follow market proposition that brokers will still want to use when the hard market returns.

Mark Geoghegan has been watching the London market from every angle since 1992, first as a broker, then as a journalist at Insurance Insider, and for the past six and a half years as the host of the Voice of Insurance podcast. In this episode, host Georgie Simister turns the tables, pressing Mark on one of the market's most persistent myths: that if you build something and make it compulsory, adoption will follow. From Blueprint Two to the broker consolidation wave of the nineties, from insurtech hype cycles to the promise of agentic AI, Mark shares what he's learned about how change in this market actually happens, and why the game, as he puts it, is never really over.

Large organisations are often seen as too slow, too cautious and too weighed down by process to innovate. But is that actually true? In this episode, Georgie Simister is joined by Dominic Wate, Head of IT Enablement and Acceleration at TMHCC International, to challenge that assumption. They explore how governance and compliance can be a foundation for experimentation rather than a barrier to it, what safe AI adoption looks like in practice at a global insurer, and why quantum computing may be the next thing on everyone's radar whether they like it or not.

James Benham, CEO of JBK and co-founder of Terra, has spent 25 years helping insurance organisations modernise their core systems, and he has some strong views on why so many are still stuck. In this episode, he and host Georgie Simister dig into the real barriers to technology adoption, from shadow AI use and legacy system debt to the role of company culture and leadership in getting innovation off the ground.

In this episode, Georgie is joined by Gina Gill, Chief Information Officer at Apollo, whose career spans UK government and the private sector, including time at the Ministry of Justice. Having only joined the Lloyd's market a little over a year ago, Gina brings a refreshingly outside-in perspective on where the insurance industry stands when it comes to technology and transformation. Together they explore some of the biggest topics in insurance tech right now, from legacy systems and data quality to the real meaning of augmented underwriting and whether the tension between moving fast and staying compliant is even real. Gina also shares her thoughts on what organisations should stop doing, why she believes technology and business strategy should be one and the same, and what the industry risks if it doesn't ask harder questions about the future it's actually building.