1, 2, 3, 4.

Hello and welcome to beyond the Desk, the podcast where I take a deep dive into the careers of some of the most influential and inspiring leaders in the technology transformation and operations space within Global Insurance and InsureTech.

I'm your host, Mark Thomas, and every week I'll be sitting down with industry trailblazers who are driving innovation and modernization with within the insurance sector.

We'll explore their personal journeys, from their early backgrounds and the pivotal moments that shape their careers to the challenges they've had to overcome, the lessons they've learned along the way, and of course, the big wins that have defined their professional journey so far.

But it's not just about their successes.

It's about what you and I can take away from their experiences and the advice they have for anyone wanting to follow in similar footsteps.

Whether you're just starting out or looking.

To level up your career in the insurance or insurtech world, this podcast is packed with valuable insights and inspiration.

So grab your headphones, get comfortable and let's jump into beyond the Desk.

Darren, welcome to the podcast.

How are you doing?

I'm good, I'm good.

Yourself?

Yeah, I'm really good.

Thanks.

Thanks for making some time.

I know we've.

I feel like we've been talking about doing this for quite a while since I was doing the old podcast, but we've eventually got around to do it.

So good to have you on as always.

I'm going to go right back to the start and go through the career and pick apart that, but do you want to give everyone a bit of an intro to start with and then.

And then.

Yeah, like I say, we'll go back to the start and work our way through it.

Yeah, of course.

So, Dan Rudd, I lead the business technology teams in CGI for the insurance sector.

Amazing.

Right, so let's go back to my first question and I kind of semi know already know a bit about your background, but I always ask people like if they, how they first got into technology, was it kind of at school and stuff like that?

But your background's a bit different so.

So talk us through what that looked like kind of early years, pre, pre starting work and all that kind of stuff because I don't think it's the, the atypical route for kind of a CTO type of character.

No.

And again, it's probably been a bit of a fake calling myself a CTO for talking to proper CTOs, but.

So I grew up just at the point where home computers were coming out, which obviously dates me quite Badly.

But it was the time of, you know, being at home with a magazine and you'd program out of, out the back of that.

My, my dad went look, this is going to be something really, really big.

Yeah, I think you should be getting involved in this.

So he invested, he put, you know, we didn't have a ton of money but he just said look, we, let's go out.

And there were only a few computer shops at the time.

So I remember we drove all the way to Kent.

I come up born in Romford and we drove all the way over to Kent to this one place, still remember the, the name of it now.

And we went and picked up an Atari 800 which was quite an expensive bit of kit at the time.

But my dad said that I didn't want one of those stupid plastic ones.

Spectrum.

Yeah, he said that's just for games.

You need to learn how to use this properly.

And my dad's a driving, is a driving instructor.

So I was going to say what did you dad do?

So it wasn't like he was in kind of even mildly into tech or anything like that.

He just, he just had a, kind of spotted that this was a.

Yeah, this was a growth area.

It was going to be big and it would be good for you to get into it.

Yeah, it was always a bit woo, a little bit way and so would run his own businesses and stuff.

And he said I think this is going to be really big.

So.

Yeah, and I was always good dabble and.

Yeah, exactly.

And I would always dabble without.

I taught myself, you know, programming and BASIC and stuff like that.

So I was always interested in tech.

Right.

But I was also really rubbish at maths.

Okay.

Still am.

And when I was going into looking at university I wanted to go into tech.

That's what I wanted to do.

Okay.

It was, it was really weird actually.

I remember being in class once and someone had teaches up front, oh, what do you want to be?

I want to be a racing driver, blah blah, blah.

And I went, I want to be a systems analyst.

I didn't know what it was, but it sounded like it was cool and it was techy.

So I thought, okay, that's what I want to be.

Sad.

I know, but so I wanted to do that.

You may say sad, but you're probably one of the only people that are doing something mildly close to what they said at that, at that point.

Even though I had no idea what it was.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But I so wanted to go into do computing at uni.

But Everybody I got told no, you need need maths to be able to do that.

So I didn't do it.

I did geography course instead and then.

But I always had an interesting.

I always kept that, that going and I sort of read lots and if, if I find something that I don't really understand, I'll go and read about it as far as I can to try and understand it.

Right.

I had no career path whatsoever, so I came out of doing geography.

Then I went and did masters in environmental economics.

Right.

I was just really fascinated about, you know, how we leverage economics as a way of improving behavioral standards around pollution and stuff like that.

So that's, that's sort of the model got out the back of that though.

After a mastermind.

I'm done with academia, I need to go and get a job.

Yeah.

Again, no real career structure.

I'd done a couple of summer jobs.

Someone gave me a call and said do you want to come and work for me again?

And I did and ended up actually starting in marketing.

Right.

But for a battery firm.

A car manufacturing battery firm.

Right.

Why do you need marketing to do battery manufacturing?

But it was quite cool.

It was motorsport and stuff like that involved.

We even sponsored the guy that had the extra rapid Sinclair C5 C2 at the end of the electric.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He needed lots of battery so we, we sponsored that.

But so I did marketing for a while in there and then got a job at Hiscox in the marketing team.

Okay, but so your first role in insurance was.

So you went into insurance quite early, just not into technology.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, yeah.

And it was just at the point of again really dating me when the web was coming out, the World Wide Web.

So it was like we had an intranet site but it needed to be redone.

I went, oh well that's a marketing job.

Because no one really understood it.

And they threw that at me.

I got into it and the CIO at the time just said actually do you know what?

Come work for me.

You'd be a better BA than you would do working in marketing.

Wow.

And I sort of put the two pros and cons.

Am I going to throw away, you know, four or five years of being in marketing and all of the training I had or do I go and do something that's close to tech?

Yeah.

And I took the choice and that's it.

So that's the last 30 odd years now is been doing that.

So.

Yeah, so that.

So I didn't know actually you moved into.

So you moved into.

And has everything been in insurance since then?

Almost all of it.

There was a period where I moved into a small consultancy.

It was also.

It's in Stander.

So they were.

We were bootstrapping up the product development.

So I was leading the.

Being the architect for.

For the product.

But we were doing consulting at the same time to help pay.

Yeah.

And at that point I think it was a terrible time to move.

It was just the point of first financial crisis.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you just took whatever job you could get.

Yeah, of course.

So I worked across government.

We did haulage distribution over in Germany at the time for one of the.

Sort of his McDonald's haulage firm and then also did some stuff around training and education as well.

So did a bit of that.

But what I realized was while you can.

And I think this is quite influenced the way I think about what a consultant is, but I realized I was better.

Having had sort of 15 years of insurance experience, I was much better at helping the person at the other side of the table.

Yeah.

If I really understood their business.

Yeah.

I mean, because I'm not just the deep tech person.

Yeah.

I, I'm better at that negotiation.

Negotiation position between the two sides.

Yeah.

And I felt better that if I understood their business and where they were coming from, then I could do a better job.

Yeah.

So I, you know, I did that for a while and then I came back into.

I made a choice and then came back into consulting on the insurance side.

And that's been the last 15 years.

So.

So there's definitely some questions about that transition into the BA thing I want to go into, but to just quickly go through the kind of the progression there.

So.

So you started at Hiscox for a ba.

Were you there for quite a while?

Yeah, I did 10 years at Hiscox and.

And what did that evolution look like?

So you started as a B.A.

and then what.

What did that move to?

Yeah, it's good.

I think the BA is a really good career start, but people tend to sort of assume that, you know, the stage up from being a BA is you become a project manager.

Yeah, it was.

You did used to be.

And I, I think that's.

I was going to swear them, but I won't.

So I think that's.

That's rubbish.

I met some really good people who just wanted to be really good, experienced bas and I think that's just as valid as, you know, I don't think becoming a project manager is a progression up there.

No.

But I got pushed into that it's.

A totally different skill set really, isn't it?

It is, but when you're young and you know, no training and the rest of it and everybody sort of says that's what you should be doing, you sort of go into it.

Well, I also think kind of 15, 20 years ago, BAS would be paid kind of if BAS were on 50 grand, a project manager on 70 or something like that.

So whereas I think that's now, that's now even out.

Like you can, you can, you can be paid good money as a, as a kind of BA lead and a business architect, BA type person, can't you?

So you could, it works now.

Whereas before it was, it was, they were lower in the, in the kind of hierarchy in, in that sense.

But yeah, and I, and I went through sort of the career path was mainly because I asked why.

Yeah.

So good BA always asking you the five wise and the rest of it.

But I was, I was always curious as to, okay, why are we doing this?

What's the, the next level up?

Yeah.

And that's sort of when you asked that that sort of takes your progression up to the more strategic position.

So I went from sort of various roles, probably one a year really, because it was, it was a fast moving company growing really quickly.

But I took different roles, ended up running first off, one dev team, delivering an early extranet for one of our customers, one of our teams, and then worked up towards running the global development team.

Okay.

It was nowhere near the scale it is now, but it was in Europe and the UK and then ended up doing this, the IT strategy side of it.

Right.

So.

But it was always, you know, why, why are we doing this?

Give me the, give me the bigger picture.

So sort of working my way up through that.

Right.

But again, working closely with, you know, dev teams and developers and architects and infrastructure people.

Yeah.

But I'd always be listening to both sides, be working with the business about what they needed, but also understanding, you know, the tech side of it.

And I think the, the skill I learned at the time that's been quite useful is sort of almost spotting the.

Yeah.

So on both sides because, you know, the tech person's telling, dev person's telling you something and you think, well, I'm not sure I really believe you on that.

Why is it so difficult?

Talk me through.

Yeah, I might not understand all the complexities, but I know enough and if I didn't, I'd go and read about it and then come back and say, talk to me about that again.

Yeah, yeah.

Same on the business side.

Some say, oh, well, you know, it's, you know, it's just intrinsic to the way we work.

Really?

Why, why do you need to do that?

And again, just asking why all the time.

Challenging.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Curiosity.

So how did, how did that.

So there's a couple of questions in there.

Like, first of all, I'd love to get into a little bit about how.

What that transition was like from marketing to business analysts.

Did they give you.

Did you go through training and stuff like that or was it kind of more of a organic learn on the job type type thing?

Because there's, I'm sure there's plenty.

I mean, I, I think the perception is, is that if you want to become a technology leader that you, you probably have to come from, have done that typical route, computer science degree or something like something in that, in that realm.

And even if you haven't done that, you go into being an engineer or something like that, like that in order to make it to a.

A CTO is typically an ex architect or an ex engineer.

You've obviously done it a different, different way around.

So what was that, what was that transition like?

So from a training point of view, it was fairly limited.

I did a bit of BA course, but it was mainly you were just thrown in at the deep end.

So get on with it.

Yeah.

Again, you know, Hiscox, in the early, early years, we all fit on one floor.

It was, it was small business, small and you know, it was back in the early mid-90s.

So, you know, it's just nowhere near as professional as things are today.

Yeah.

That's not taken away from how his Cox was.

It was just the, the reality of where I just think.

And I know, you know, I've re.

I've worked with really good.

I want a class is real full technical CTOs, people that really understand it, great engineers and the rest of it.

I know I'm not one of those.

Yeah.

But I also think there's a real broad spectrum when you talk about being a technology leader.

Yeah.

In terms of, you know, what you need to, to lead and, and do that.

Yeah.

And again, you know, a bit of a cliche, but if you've got good people around you, you're really there to help them do the best that they can do.

Yeah.

You know, you've got to hold them to account and, you know, listen.

But again, you know, you've just got to walk them through what they're thinking and challenge them a little bit, but allow them to make the decision.

Yeah.

I mean, best book ever.

One of the best books I've read was at One Minute Manager early on.

Yeah.

Which I know it's a bit of an old school, but, you know, I can't solve the problems for the people.

But if I, if they come to me and talk to me about, you know, what they, what they're challenging, I help them think that through.

I don't need to be the technical expert.

They always know far better.

Yeah.

Just guiding them in the right direction.

Putting the right people together in the same right room and the facilitation of all that, isn't it?

But I get points now.

To be the best architect in the room or the best cto, you might have to be the point person.

Yeah.

And if I recognize that's what's being asked for, then I know that I'm not the one and I'll go and find that right person.

And one of the reasons good thing about working for a consultancy, particularly with the breadth of cgi.

Yeah.

Is I've got thousands of engineers much, much better than me.

So we can always find that right person.

Yeah.

But shaping the problem and understanding what we're trying to achieve I think is where I do add value and that's sort of where I try to shape my career over time.

So I have made conscious choices.

It's where I, where I want to go and I'm making those transitions again now in terms of where I spend, where I think I can add most value as I go through.

Yeah.

And then the second question about that, his question is it sounds like from what you said about running dev teams and stuff that you went into management leadership fairly early on in your, in, in your tech.

You mean.

I don't know when that was in that 10 year period, but it sounds like you did it for quite a while.

So, so quite quickly you were managing people and leading teams and stuff like that.

Was that something that kind of consciously you always wanted to do or was it again just a kind of a natural evolution in that, in, in that, in kind of what you were doing?

I suppose my entire career has been completely not really thought through very well or structured.

Know, some people really know where they want to go and.

Yeah.

You know, got five year plans and.

Yeah, I'm not.

That's why I was never a good project manager because I can't plan.

My wife will tell you I'm a nightmare on that side of it.

I.

But I like to work collaboratively with people to get the best out of it.

I'M quite pushy on myself in terms of achieving things.

Yeah.

Um, and I want to drive the best in me and then try and get the best out of others as well.

So it's sort of naturally felt like that.

But I think it was mainly because I was just curious.

So why.

Why are we doing this?

Where are we going?

Why are we doing it?

Yeah.

And I'm, you know, and those people that know me, I can imagine some eyes rolling now.

I'm not really the delivery person.

Yeah.

So I'd be much more interested in understanding, shaping why we're doing this and how it's going to, you know, achieve it.

Yeah.

Rather than actually building it.

So when I was a kid, I'd take my dad's old watches apart to understand how they worked.

I had very little interest in actually putting them back together again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're.

So for you it was more about the, the kind of.

The idea, the strategy, that kind of stuff and understanding the mechanics of it and coming up with a plan of what to do.

But the actual kind of delivery piece, you wanted someone around you to be able to kind of go and deliver that.

So that made sense to, to lead a team and then have the people around you, you can set the vision and then the, the kind of builders, as it were, go on and do that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And I think it takes a while to.

To recognize your strengths and yeah.

Other areas.

So I did try really hard to do the project management bit and the rest of it and learn Gantt charts and all the rest of it.

Microsoft project.

But I realized that wasn't really where I wanted to be and I wasn't.

I'm not good at it.

And I realized that there were much people better.

Again, I would, I like to play around with.

I'm coded for years, but I did like HTML and stuff in the early days web.

That was interesting.

But I knew again I wasn't really.

That wasn't where I was adding most value.

And I'm more bothered about where can I add value and then where can I find the other people to do, you know, add more value than.

Than I can do?

Yeah.

So what did that look like?

Post Hiscoxen and what.

And what made you kind of move on for that?

Did you go into consulting straight away from there?

No.

So I did, did about 10 years and we were cycling through some, some things in terms of, you know, where the company was going and I just realized I needed to make a.

A change at that point.

Ten years is A long time to, to be in one place.

So then took, did four years at Brit doing a similar role.

So that gave me a chance to come over and do more.

IT strategy.

Yeah.

It was going through a lot of churn at the time.

It was being reorganized and changed.

So that was quite a tough gig.

And I, you know, there were points where I was in the room, you know, we will talk about sort of imposter syndrome and stuff like that.

I'm not sure I necessarily believe in, in that as a term or a phrase, but I sat there thinking, how the hell am I actually going to do this?

I'm sitting in one meeting going, I'm trying to drive this forwards and I'm, I'm dying on my feet here.

Yeah.

And I had to sort of take a break, give everybody 10 minutes, come back out, try and reset myself and come back in again.

And that was panicky because I sort of jumped across to then say, I've done strategy for a few years now, I'm going to come in and do it again.

Yeah.

And what I hadn't realized is 10 years of working in one firm, you know, everything and then you move to a new one and wow, okay.

Yeah.

I know nothing here.

Yeah.

And I learned loads in terms of, you know, how you try and communicate with people as well.

I know, I know I annoyed quite a lot of people saying, but why aren't you doing it like this?

Because we'd done it before somewhere else a few years ago and all I was doing was just really annoying people in terms of saying, well, why?

What?

This is obvious answer, guys.

Just do it this way.

Yeah.

And the one, one of the big learnings I had from that, which I've sort of taken all the way through my consulting career now is there's almost you walk you brought in as a consultant to solve things.

Yeah.

And normally it's tough.

You know, no one brings you in a consultant when everything's going rosy and easy that they've got a problem to solve.

But there's almost always a reason why things look like they do.

Yeah.

So rather than coming in, I've got a solution and I've got the ready made canned thing.

Here is the deck is the strategy.

Yeah.

I realized you've got to listen and understand first in terms of where the problems are and why it looks like that.

Before you go, I'm going to make a change there or I'm going to make any suggestions.

So I'm just going to listen first.

And that happened with some really good Consultants who came in to look at our strategy.

I did at Hiscox, and I learned a lot from them, even though they never even realized they taught me that.

But they came in and they listened first, really good guys.

And they taught me a load in terms of.

Let me understand, why does it look like this?

Why have you made these choices and then work with me to sort of come to the right conclusion, to, to draw it out.

So I've tried to keep that, that going by listen first as a consultant rather than coming in, maybe brought in to solve things or help people do things.

But I think listening is important.

So what level are you at now in regards to kind of job title and level in the, in the business when you're kind of in that Brit role?

I was, I can't remember what the title was.

It was Head of IT Strategy or something like that.

So it's still very strategy focused and stuff like that.

Yeah.

I mean, I was reporting into the CIO and actually I added a split role.

So I reported into both the Head of Change and the cio.

Right.

Which was an interesting.

It made it interesting.

I would never make that career choice again because, you know, it's difficult to meet both.

Both parties.

Yeah.

Again, I think that was good learning for the consultant role because when you come in as a consultant, you've got multiple stakeholders, you don't know everybody.

Yeah.

And you've got to try and manage all of those areas as well.

Well, I suppose you've also got to figure out who, who really does control the, the have the power to get things done and, and, and who it really is, a decision maker, et cetera, et cetera, and what their, what their mindset is and all that kind of stuff.

And then adapting how you talk to people and, you know, the messaging you're given.

Because everybody needs a sort of different flavor of.

You've got, you understand what it is, but you've then got to give different people a different variation of it.

Yeah.

Because, you know, one person was the, the detailed person that wanted to know all of the financials and the numbers, where the other person was a bit more creatively led.

Yeah.

And you sort of just got to adapt it.

And then, you know, the, the COO at the time was, you know, just show me the numbers.

Drive, drive things through.

So trying to adapt to that.

Yeah.

Not saying.

Did a good job of it during the time.

It was, it was tough, but, you know, you learn a lot.

Yeah.

So when, so what.

So when did you make the move into consulting?

What Point was that.

Yeah.

So I got my redundant actually at Brit.

They were doing some of the restructures and I was one of the people go.

But I then went and took on the role at what was called F2X at the time, which is now in Stander.

And that was my first introduction to sort of consulting.

Yeah.

And I said we were sort of bootstrapping up by doing what I was doing internally.

And that was working with Tim and Derek who used to be the CIO and head of infrastructure at Hiscox.

So went worked for those guys for a while and we were reshaping the.

In standard platform and directing that.

So that gave me the sort of the technical side of it again.

Working some really good engineers.

I didn't do the engineering, but we sort of focused on.

That was probably my first introduction to.

Even though I didn't know really what it was product design and thinking about the problem you're trying to solve.

And at the same time then that was where we were out taking the work I'd done around the BA internal consulting side of it and turned it to the external consulting.

So that was the first piece.

Spent four or five years there.

And then that's our graph when you're bootstrapping and running at a small startup with minimum amount of investment.

So I made the choice then to go back into or to move into a larger consultancy at that point.

And was that cgi?

That was cognizant.

Right.

So we went in there as one of the.

The architects.

Yeah.

Ended up being sort of the.

The chief architect and principal architects, whatever it was.

But head of sort of the technology consulting part of the insurance division.

Right.

And yeah.

Loved it there.

Great team.

Seven years of doing a whole variety of different stuff.

And what was nice about that, it gave.

Gives you the.

Gives you the option to see lots of different organizations and then take those learnings and the experience and then apply them elsewhere.

So I worked across, you know, major brokers, different insurers did sort of ito.

So the.

The technology take on built stuff ran different systems.

So the whole variety of different things.

And what I liked about those type of consultancy because there's lots of different flavors.

You know, when people say consultancy they often think of sort of the management consultants that come in and do that.

Everywhere I've worked has been much more pragmatic than that.

You build stuff.

You need to come up the level to plan the strategy and ask why and what you're trying to do.

But it's much more about delivering something.

I was going to say a value.

That's not what I meant.

Delivering something that makes a difference at the end of it.

Not just the strategy on how you could do it, but you've actually got to deliver that.

And I like that.

Working with pragmatic engineers and architects and others and going I get the strategy, but how are we actually going to make that come?

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Now let's get back to today's episode.

Advisory stuff that just kind of comes up with a, with a strategy and then it's like you kind of leave it with them and they do what they're going to do or don't do anything with it.

Whatever you're actually going in, figuring out what the problem is is then actually building something to solve that problem and leaving them with something tangible that, that they use at the end of it, rather than a kind of a strategy that they can kind of take it or leave it.

Sometimes they do something with it, sometimes they don't.

Yeah, and it was a bit, it was a bit, little bit driven by working F2X.

At the time we were really small consultants, like 15 of us, we already knew our stuff but we had no way of then delivering on the back of that strategy.

Yeah, and I sort of felt that that was not a frustration but we, you wanted to be able to then deliver on the back of that.

So the larger consultancy gave me both sides of that.

You know, you can go in and do the advisory and the strategic bit but then you've got a whole team that you're working with to then actually put that into action.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I like that that's.

And I think that's out of all the flavors of places I've worked, I think that's the, the value of that.

There are disadvantages though.

And again, I know some people come into consultancy and then go back into industry.

You are moving around more.

So you, sometimes you.

And my role often is at sort of the front working and shaping and not always involved in the, the ongoing delivery that might last two, two years or so.

Right.

So sometimes you don't see the end of it.

You shaped it.

Yeah.

And I know some people come back to then into industry because they go and work for someone for five years and can really sort of transform and change organizations.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

So that, so that.

So talk, talk a little bit about what the.

I'd love to know a little bit about what the role looks like now and how that's.

Because so obviously that's evolved through analysis to kind of leading teams to being close to technology, then moving into kind of more strategic type stuff.

Now, now focusing on, then they're moving into consultancy and doing architecture stuff which I guess was more kind of strategy and shaping what technology looks like, platforms, etc.

How does it look now?

What does, what does the role look like kind of here and now?

That's a really good question.

So when I came to, to, to CGI it, I had the, I had the option, the opportunity to shape the consultant team, the, the way that I wanted to build it.

And what, what I'd seen at previous places is that.

And again we do this all the time anyway.

We've got this concept that business and technology are separate.

The tech teams, you talk to IT and they always talk about the business.

Yeah.

And they're going to talk to the business people and they say, oh yeah, that's the IT tech people.

Yeah.

But if you think about.

There's no, there's no business these days that doesn't use technology and is completely reliant and built into it.

And most of technology is around to deliver value back to the business.

Yeah.

So I had the opportunity to sort of bring a single team together.

When we put the consulting team together, it was designed to be a mix of both business and technology, but really closely linked.

Right.

Rather than trying to separate, traditionally you get the business management advisory teams and then you get the technology teams.

Yeah.

I felt that was not the right way to do it.

So bring Both of those teams together and get.

And pick and choose people that come to work with us that got that.

So, you know, you've got people.

I don't like the word digital, but if you think about what it really means, it's about how do I bring business and technology together.

Yeah.

To make things work.

So that's, that's the sort of the focus side of it.

And then what the role really looks like now is, Scott, I see it, it's got sort of three tiers of what we look.

Look to do.

If you're in consultancy, clients are buying your.

Both your experience, but also getting to their places faster.

Yeah.

So you've got to look forward.

So a lot of the work is looking ahead and going, okay, what are the trends in the market at the moment?

Whereas where, where's the technology going?

Where's the market going?

What are the impacts on insurance?

So that's the first bit.

Spend some time with.

And I guess they're coming to you because you've got that breadth of experience of working with lots of different clients.

You can bring the learnings from a much broader knowledge base and kind of different sample size, etc.

Etc.

And bring that together and say, well, actually this is what we're seeing in the market.

Whereas they're kind of a bit, probably a bit siloed in their kind of four walls of what they're doing.

Yeah.

And again, I think it depends a little bit on the size of the organization.

I mean, you look at some of the really major organizations, Swiss others, they've got massive teams just focusing on the future and the rest of it.

But the majority of, when I was working in industry, you head down, you haven't got time really to look up.

You've got a million things going on.

You don't really have time.

So being a consultancy gives you a little bit of that time.

Not a lot, but it does give you time to look ahead and spend time looking at that.

So you're right.

And then we do things like voice of client.

So we go and talk to all of our clients once a year, at least once a year and bring all of that insight together and then analyze it and say, well, you know, where, where are the pressure points?

Where's the challenges?

You know, what are other organizations?

What are the trends going on at the moment?

How do we share that and what does that mean for our clients?

Yeah, and that sort of takes into sort of the second part of the three areas, which is, so what?

Okay, so climate change is having a massive Impact on sort of the, the uncertainty for the insurance market.

Yep.

And what, how do, how do we as.

And we are a technology company, we're not, you know, I'm not gonna hear telling anybody how to underwrite better.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not business strategy, is it?

Yeah, yeah.

No, but how can I help them use technology and, and operational parts to, to make them work better.

Yeah.

And be more effective?

So the next bit is the.

So what, so what does that actually mean?

You know, we are going to talk, I'll have to talk about AI at some point, but.

Yeah.

What do those new technologies actually mean for the organization?

And pragmatically, you know, how do we, how do we make it easier for companies to understand what that's going to do and deliver it?

Yeah.

And then the final bit is then looking and saying, well, what have we got as an organization that can help customers get there faster?

Right.

So it's all good, having a nice chat.

And I did this a lot when we're doing sort of early innovation days, you can have great ideas and blue sky and talk about quantum computing, but if you can't actually deliver anything that's going to make a difference in quantum computing, you need to be aware of it, but focus in other areas where you can make a difference.

Yeah.

So the rest of the job is then working with the whole of CGI and everything else that it can do to bring it and say, right, I've got all of these challenges for the market.

Have I got anything over here in the toolbox that I can bring to help you get faster?

And in things like AI, we're looking at it going, all right, well, particularly gen AI and those type of things.

We've been doing traditional AI for years, 10, 20 years, but the newer stuff, you don't necessarily have anything sitting there.

So then the question internally is, should we be doing more here?

So again, part of the job of myself and others in the organization is looking ahead and saying, right, this tech's coming.

What are we going to do about it and how we're going to manage it?

Yeah.

And then what's the reality of that?

I also like to think about it, that.

And this is why I, like, I've been at CGI now for six years.

It's a pragmatic view.

There's no, there's no pretending or hype.

You're talking to a bunch of engineers.

So in a room, I've got the engineers looking at the other side of me, keeping it all grounded and real.

Can you really do this stuff, is it really going to make a difference?

And we've actually applied it to ourselves.

So we've got this concept of sort of patient zero at the moment.

How do you take all of the cool stuff, potential that's out there using Gen AI, the large language models and all the other stuff and saying can we make a difference with it?

Where are the pain points?

Where does it really work?

Yeah.

That then gives you the learning that you can then take to, to your back to your clients and it's pragmatic and real.

So, so that's kind of a two way, that's almost like the other way, isn't it?

It's like, well look, these are the problems that our insurance clients have got.

Let's find solutions for them using technology that understanding the business problem first, but understanding that we're not going to solve the business problem.

But actually we can provide you with technology solutions that make solving that business problem either easier or whatever you're planning to do with the business strategy, we can underpin that with technology equally at the same time seeing there's a pattern of these things that our clients need to solve, they can't solve it.

So, and we don't have a solution.

So what do we need to start building to be able to solve those solutions?

So you've almost got like an internal element focus of part of the role that is, is kind of taking what's out in the market and making sure you've got, you're ready to be able to solve those problems and then utilizing the toolkit that you've got within CGI to actually go and build stuff and solve the, the problems with stuff that you've already got if, if, if you've got it, I guess.

Yeah.

And, and that's much more succinct than I said it.

So it's, and then again you've got that ability that, so we work across again one of the advantages I suppose if people are thinking about, you know, jobs and careers in the future and who they go and work for.

When you work with a big global organization, you've got lots of capability spread around the organization.

So we, across all the industry sectors you can think about.

Yeah.

So I was chatting to our energy team the other day and you know, you talk to the teams around what's going on in Wildfire and you know there's a, there's an impact there in terms of how the energy companies are running their distribution networks.

Right.

We work in satellite, so we do tons of work with, with European space Agencies and stuff like that.

So we've got people that really understand all of the capabilities around satellite data.

Yeah.

So you can buy those services and you can get that.

But these guys are actually building the software that talks to the satellites and brings it down again.

So you've got all of these other capabilities that you have a chance to go, how do I bring stuff from different sectors and different industries and different insights to actually solve problems maybe we haven't worked out ourselves, but someone else has in another, another one of the industries.

So that keeps it really sort of fresh and interesting.

Yeah, yeah, interesting.

So what I'd like to just talk about a little bit about now, as you touched on it before, is kind of.

You're in that unique position, you're seeing lots of different clients.

We're obviously in a period, not, not just in insurance.

I think there is a period of insurance of massive modernization and change, which we've probably been in for a while.

It seems to be gathering pace, if anything.

There's obviously the AI stuff that you've mentioned.

So what, what are you seeing at the moment as the, as the kind of the key things that are on people's agenda?

And, and what I'd like to get into is really what that results in, like what the solutions are to some of those, those problems.

Because AI is obviously a big thing, but, but it is such a big thing that actually the challenge is always.

And it's the same in my business as anyone is like, well, yeah, there's, there's loads of great stuff you can do and if you watch YouTube long enough, you'll, you'll come up with a million and one different use cases.

But what can we actually do?

What can we implement quickly?

Yeah.

And what can start to move the, move the dial kind of next week, next month, in the next quarter or whatever, rather than like this massive kind of big play that, that, that maybe takes years to, to actually provide any real value.

So I think that's.

Seems to me from an external perspective to be like the main challenge with anything around that.

So it'd be interesting to understand what you're seeing in insurance is the kind of the things that are on the agenda that you're trying to solve at the moment, people.

Yeah, so I said that's a big, big thing to unpack.

So we've just, as I said, I think we mentioned the voice of client stuff.

So we've.

You say that's like a report.

I remember you saying that when we were talking before.

It's like a report, isn't it around about now?

Yeah, we've just, literally just, just finished doing the analysis.

We were presenting the findings to the rest of the insurance sector globally this week.

So is that like a written report that gets, gets published?

Yeah, so we, we provide that.

So 24s is obviously out and available.

It's on, on our website, but we share that with our, all of our clients and it just gives us a sort of a touch pulse on what both business and technology leaders are thinking about within the organizations and, you know, where they're seeing the opportunities, but also the big challenges.

Yeah.

And what, what's come really clear and I've been involved in this now, in looking at the results and sort of interpreting them and we actually used AI this year to help us sort of give the, give our clients more opportunity to tell a story, more to us rather than.

It's quite quantitative.

You know, you grade and talk about your numbers, but the numbers only tell one part of the story.

You've got to interpret that.

So it's been really useful being able to actually listen directly or read directly from all of the clients across the globe in terms of what they're seeing.

But the big things that have really come out is the uncertainty that's coming through and the pressure on insurance as an industry, but also on their clients, businesses that they're insuring around climate change, cyber risk, geopolitical uncertainty.

So when we've looked at it, that has come in as a real high priority, higher than we've seen before.

So there's clearly a lot of worry in the market about how we're going to handle things like the Californian wildfires, first conversations around uninsurable risk.

And no one business is going to solve that.

So how do we sort of come to look at that?

So you've got that side of it.

You've then got the table stakes that all insurance businesses, and it's fairly generic anyway, but, you know, how do they manage cost, how do they modernize their business?

We've constantly stuck with legacy going on and we're still in the market where we're trying to get legacy out of the business.

But we're also seeing this challenge around talent that comes out again and again in terms of how do I bring the right people in, how do I retain people?

The fact that I've got, you know, an aging workforce, there's going to be a lot of people because I've still got lots of legacy that understand these systems that are looking to retire.

So that's top of mind.

And then we've got the, the geopolitical shifts, the changing in value change.

Now the, the value chain itself matters less to insurers directly because it tends to be quite local.

But there are big changes in terms of the insurable risk.

So if, if you're insuring a large organization, Apple and others who are having to completely reconfigure their supply chains, that creates new risk to the organization.

Plus you've got all the geopolitical shifts that are going on at the moment as well, which is creating more uncertainty.

And then you've got on back of that, all the operational resilience side of it and particularly for the Europeans with dora.

So the Digital Operational Resilience act, the UK version of that critical third party acts, that's created a huge amount of additional time and effort that organizations need to spend on managing that resilience.

And all of that is, you know, you've got all of these million things you've got to try and manage as well as run a business, grow it and adapt.

Plus you've also got all of the technology shifts.

So you've got AI coming in.

How's that going to affect things?

Yeah, so there's a lot of different factors and we are trying to shape, you know, different sets of responses to, you know, how do you manage that from a operating model point of view or a, you know, what does your business model now look like?

What's the model of product and product responsibility that you, you need to have as an insurer to adapt to all of those.

Yeah, so I think the, to simplify that down, you've probably got two areas.

One, there's an awful lot more uncertainty at a scale and climate change, it's growing at, you know, the impacts of that.

Can't remember the exact figures.

You know, it's is into the hundreds of billions at the moment for the, the wildfire losses and the expected values.

But that's growing at about 5 to 7% a year according to, I think it was the Swiss RE Institute.

Yeah.

So that's almost outpacing potentially economic growth.

So how do you manage that level of growth and risk as an insurance industry and still be profitable?

Because it's not a charity, you've got to actually make some money.

So how do you protect on that?

So adapting and changing on that side of it is a really big thing for insurers at the moment.

Yeah.

While you're trying to run the rest of the business.

So uncertainty is a big one and the other one I think really is resilience against that uncertainty, whether that's external or cyber threats.

I was at a conference last week where someone mentioned that, you know, cyber risk is now the, you know, could be considered the sort of the Napoleon nat Cat or natural catastrophe risks of the digital age.

Yeah.

And you look at some of the impacts that have just happened on Marks and Spencers and Harrods.

Yeah.

Marks and Spencers did have insurance in place, but it only covered about 100 million of the loss.

Right.

The estimates at the moment is that's going to come in around 300 million.

Wow.

And then you've got the ongoing business disruption.

So.

And then I think the figure that I read was there's somewhere like 90 to 95% of insurable cyber risks aren't insured.

So there's huge risk.

So how does the insurance market adapt itself to, to deal with that?

We're looking at it in terms of how do we then help organizations prepare their, their organization both from a technology and operational point of view to be more resilient and adaptable to deal with that uncertainty.

It seems to me like.

You mean, do you get the feeling when you're out speaking to clients it's because even to me listens that is quite overwhelming like how much, how much stuff is happening all at the same time.

And, and, and it.

Look, I mean I'm, I'm a relatively new business owner.

There's, there's, it's quite overwhelming when, when you, when you want to stay ahead and you, and you.

And, and like I imagine even more so when you've got the pressure of, of shareholders, leaders, etc, especially on, on a, on a CIO of, of kind of current age.

They're, they're being expected to kind of understand things like kind of world events and, and that kind of thing as well as technology as well as probably the biggest shift that we'll ever see in.

In, in certainly in, in our lifetimes around tech with AI as well and the, and the pressure to be ahead of the curve on that, but also the risk that's attached to it.

Do you get the impression that there is a kind of CIOs are getting overwhelmed with too, too much to think about and figure out where they put resource because that from my perspective that's what I seem to.

It seems to look like from external looking in.

Yeah, I think, I think CIO jobs are tough gig anyway.

Yeah.

I think it's always been fairly overwhelming regardless of sort of the scale and magnitude of it.

There's always.

The topics are different yeah.

And you never have enough money to do all of the jobs you need and prioritization of what you need to do first is difficult, particularly when business is shifting.

Yeah.

So it, I think it can feel overwhelming but I also think you need to look at it from a positive point of view as well.

There's lots of opportunity to do things in a different way, to adapt to that.

I do think it does force us.

Though.

To look at things like legacy and you know, we can put so many band aids over the top of that over the years and another digital layer over the top of that.

Talking about AI, if you choose to just use AI as another layer to solve or to put over the top of leg again legacy systems and processes, I don't think you're really solving the underlying problem.

I do worry with things like let's call it Gen AI rather than AI because there's different structures where people are jumping on as they do with most technologies, as the silver bullet that's going to solve every problem or the difficult problems and it just isn't going to do that.

There's fundamental changes that have got to come in first before you can do that.

And actually I think we're going to find I might not win many friends here and most people don't really want to listen to it.

But the, the Gen AI has value.

The.

But it's got to be quite directed in terms of where it is.

It is not going to replace all of your staff problems.

It, you know, when you look at it underneath it and what it actually does, it feels really clever.

But I think it's, it isn't as clever as it feels like it is.

Yeah.

So you've got to be a bit mindful on that.

But it's like with any technology, you know, a few years ago it was all I've got a cloud first strategy.

All right, what does that really mean?

Well, we need to be in the cloud.

Why?

What is it you're going to get from that?

And what we've actually found is everybody shifted, lifted and shifted, put everything in the cloud and then went two, three years down like, oh, this has cost us a lot of money because they hadn't adapted themselves to it.

So now what we're doing is repatriating and bringing lots of processing back on prem or into different environments because it wasn't re engineered to take the advantage of that.

So if I'm just going to slap AI over the top of our current legacy processes and thinking am I really adding value if I'm just.

Is it just a cost option?

And then someone's got to pay for that at some point.

You know, there's been billions and billions invested in AI, so it's going to.

Turn around at some point.

Some PE company at some point is going to want to.

Want to exit and be paid.

If you've reconfigured your organization completely to rely on that side of it, and all of a sudden what was costing you £20amonth is now costing you 2,000 and you're committed.

We've seen that in some of the other software vendors out there at the moment that have been bought and taken over.

All of a sudden the costs have gone from a few thousand a month to ten thousands a month.

Yeah.

They've kind of got you then, haven't they?

Yeah, yeah.

And we're having to help customers work out how quickly they're going to move away from that license, that committed license, when it's really embedded in your business.

Yeah.

And that will be their strategy.

Get you like anything.

That's why the free trials and all these things.

And a really basic level exists.

Right.

Get you, get you using it, get you dependent on it, get you enjoying the experience.

And then when the price goes up, you.

You've kind of got a decision to make whether you go with it or not.

But what do you think?

The.

Because, because I think part of the.

I've interviewed quite a lot of chief data officers on, on the podcast and, and the kind of, again, summarizing the message in really basic terms from them is that AI is great and it will solve lots of problems at some point.

I think there is definitely a kind of a real hype around the fact that it's going to solve everything, like next week or something.

It's obviously not going to happen, but actually there's still a real issue in the fact that most businesses, data estates are not at a level in which you can actually really benefit from.

From a lot of the tech that's out now.

So actually, certainly in my world, you're seeing lots of people now investing in.

In the.

In kind of more traditional data stuff.

Yeah, I say traditional.

It's kind of fairly modern data stuff, but actually it's probably the stuff people should have been doing like three, four or five years ago.

And some, some were, but the, the pace of change on.

On modernizing data estate and data strategy and all that kind of stuff is, is now like absolutely front and center.

Because actually now that's not really.

It's not a kind of catch should we do that or shouldn't be?

It's like it's critical because if you, if you're going to be in any state to benefit from, from how tech evolves over the next couple of years, that that's like an absolute given that has to be in place.

Are you seeing that as well?

Yeah, I think I'd actually say that's been the case for a long while.

Yeah.

I mean, insurance as a business is always been about the data.

Yeah.

Well, no.

Notoriously bad at getting it in good shape.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I agree with you.

I've seen plenty of data warehouse into data lake, into data bogs or whatever they're called now.

Failures.

I think it's always been important.

I also think though, it's important to then sort of think about, you know, there's different flavors of AI and I think we wrap it all into one.

Geni has value.

Where actually, you know, I've got lots of unstructured data appearing from external sources that may help me deal with some of that.

I don't necessarily need to go internally to look at that.

I also think it comes back to that framing of, you know, rethinking the model.

So traditionally the value that you had was the data that you owned and was internal to the business.

So if you're one of the.

The major insurers, you've got millions of records.

Yeah.

The question I suppose that you've got to then take is the data that I have today, is it really that valuable?

And there will be elements of it, but not all data is equal.

So you can spend.

I've seen people take an awful lot of time trying to get all of their internal data structured in a certain way because they feel it's all got value.

We're actually.

There's pockets of it that have got real value that are intrinsic to you as a business.

Other bits, it's, it's commoditized data is available from a third party in a much better structured fashion.

Yeah.

So I think you've almost got to take a step back and rethink, you know, what, where is the data?

So I worked a while back on a single, single view of customer view.

But what the issue, cameras.

You've got different consumers of that data.

So the marketing team has a different view of what data from the customer is.

And also they don't need it in maybe quite as high quality as someone who's going to be making a claims adjustment or using it as an actuary for underwriting.

So there isn't one flavor of what that data needs to look like either.

So I think you have to almost restructure that.

And I actually think there's a problem with the way that we think about data and data quality in that where we're now looking at.

And if Helene listens to this, she'll be happy about it.

But we've got all of the Data coming from IoT enabled businesses, smart businesses, and we often sort of just assume that those guys are going to send us, you've got this data driven business and we're going to ask them to fill out a form and send it to us and then we're going to digitize that form and the clever stuff and wow, amazing is Gen AI will read the form.

We've asked that organization to fill in what the rulership need.

And that's it for today's episode of beyond the Desk.

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