The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Tetiana George, a founder and the CEO of Curium, about the potential for InsurTech enablers, why nobody has solved the biggest challenges in claims management yet and how Curium is planning to make a difference.

Michael Waitze 0:04
Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Asia InsurTech podcast. Today, I’m guessing this is gonna be a good one. We’ll see. Today we are joined by Tatiana George, a founder and the CEO of Curium. There are just so many landmines there when it comes to pronunciation. I’m trying to get all of this right, Tetiana, it’s great to have you on the show. How are you doing? How did I do by the way? Before we get into the main part of this conversation, we like to ask our guests, what do they think is the biggest trends in insurance and InsurTech. So what do you think that is right now?

Tetiana George 1:13
Wow. I’ve been watching InsurTech for the last probably 15 years intensely into all of the different theories, first wave, second wave, whatever it is. And I personally feel that it’s like death of the disruptors sound drastic, but I’m sure you know, a lot of people saw the journey of big non insurance, guys, men trying to you know, come from different industries and say, Oh, this is so so big, so bad. I’m just gonna totally, you know, do something absolutely fantastic here do some amazing customer experience. And while they were doing that they forgot the loss ratio, the marketing expense, the shareholder value. I don’t need to name names, but there are a lot of them listed. And they’re basically below the IPO price is in a lot of the cases, right. And I feel that the biggest trend is like they’re not dying yet. But there’s a big question overall, what what is what is the future, how they’re gonna, how they’re gonna survive, and they’re gonna find some other angle. And, and in my personal view, I think, you know, old school stuff like insurance, p&l and technical excellence is kind of reviving itself, and transplanting more into the, like the the enabler type of technology and startups that are kind of taking over in big numbers.

Michael Waitze 2:46
I want to get into this difference between disrupter and enabler in a second. Let’s get some of your background, though. You said you’ve been looking at this for 15 years. Let’s get some of your background for some context. And we’ll come back to that if that’s okay with you.

Tetiana George 2:59
Yeah, sure. So the funny thing is the only constant thing in the last 15 or more years in my life is insurance, everything else is a variable. I’m Ukrainian, and I live in Australia. And it’s my country number seven that I live in. I speak six languages. And I’ve worked in 20 something countries. I’ve lost count at some point. I don’t know anymore. And I did many jobs, that many roles. But the only kind of, as I said constant was that it always had to do with insurance.

Michael Waitze 3:38
And what got you into the insurance industry when I talked to you? So there are two groups of people, right? A lot of people say, I just kind of fell into insurance. And if you dig a little bit deeper, you know, somebody in their family ran a brokerage or somebody in their family needed insurance, something like this, but what happened to you?

Tetiana George 3:55
It didn’t happen. I chose it.

Michael Waitze 3:56
But that’s what I mean now, right? So when I was when I was graduated from college, there were really two big choices to make. Right? It was consulting or banking.

Tetiana George 4:05
I made the consulting choice.

Michael Waitze 4:09
So what does that mean? So you did consulting for the insurance?

Tetiana George 4:13
Yeah. So I all of my family are basically like five generations of doctors. I was the first one to do something else. And I started my degree is in theoretical economics, like it’s hyper mathematical. And insurance is one of these kind of intangible industries if you look at it, and I loved it, you know, I love the risk. I love the intangible thing, like what is the cost? What is the exposure? I liked it from the very beginning that I saw it and then other things explore. It seems like I’m good at it as well. So

Michael Waitze 4:51
yeah, and it’s also very mathematical. I think this is something that people external to the insurance industry don’t really understand. Not a lot of people talk about actuaries in actuarial math, and also about risk management, right? And the uncertainty that’s around it. So this stuff from a mathematical standpoint is fascinating. I want to go back to this idea of what do you think creates the environment where people think they can take some experience that’s not related to insurance, kind of rock up to the insurance industry and just say, we’re going to disrupt it, even though we don’t have any of the technical excellence, which you referenced before.

Tetiana George 5:30
All right, do what it is.

Michael Waitze 5:33
But what is it? In other words, what’s created this environment with that was some people think that that’s okay.

Tetiana George 5:39
I’ve been thinking about this. And I think throughout all the countries that I’ve always worked and lived in, there’s this one thing I’m sure you’ve heard about. It’s called the pecking order. And so if you’re looking at, if you’re looking at that, like the world and types of professions or industries, there is usually like some sexy stuff, like right now. It’s like web3, and gaming and NF T’s, this is like the cool thing to do. And then you’ve got all of these other things, then, you know, kind of on the decline, in terms of sexiness, and some are at the very end, there’s like a thing called financial services. But in that thing, financial services, usually banking, and what I see a lot of the times, especially bankers get hired into these high, you know, exact jobs of insurers to the view of like, oh, sold everything. And insurance on the outside, anyone who’s not, you know, done on the underwriting pricing or things like that seems very kind of stupid and dumb. And, and it’s like, and it’s also an it’s not a great experience in any country, which really, there’s no country where insurance customers get a great experience. So there’s a lot of people think, well, I can definitely do this better. However, the this that they see is a tiny, tiny element of the big machine, right? And they don’t see the whole thing, and definitely not the inner workings of the balance sheet that, that the data models or whatever else actually makes the complexity. Right.

Michael Waitze 7:07
Right. But what about the way that these companies get funded? Because I want to get to this as well, right? There are plenty of companies out there that have been funded, you know, massively, right. So what is it about this environment that says, I’m going to take somebody who doesn’t know anything about the insurance industry? And like you said, they say, I can fix this. But the this is really only the tip of the iceberg. And it is the iceberg part that’s really the difficult, right? I mean, we say, the devils in the details. Why do you think that that’s so easily fundable? I feel like and I’ll tell you what my opinion is, I’m curious what yours is my opinion is this is that? There is an industry out there that funds ideas that they think can get funded by the next person? Right, so I have a million dollars, but I think if I give you a million dollars, I can create some kind of buzz around you that then is going to let somebody else give you $10 million? If I create the right story around it. So this is the this is what I’m asking right is, even though you have no experience in this, like I wouldn’t let you drive a truck cross country unless you had a truck driver’s license.

Tetiana George 8:10
Absolutely. You know, I’m going through the fundraising myself. So actually, I can tell you, it’s a joke, which is not a joke. So I’ve got many, many years of, you know, experience and hustle in all kinds of areas. And yet, I have not formally started and failed a startup. So let’s imagine I could run like, I don’t know, eBay business, and then and then got into like a few 100,000 and failed. But if I came with that profile, which is called a repeat founder, and said to the VC or whoever else, I want 15 million for seed or precede. For my PowerPoint idea how I’m gonna disrupt insurance, I’m very likely to get it. Oh, it’s a repeat founder, and some kind of cool idea fancy stuff. If I’m coming to them with like, deep expertise and all of this. Yeah, sometimes they’re like, oh, have you found one? I said, no, like, oh, sorry. It’s too early for us.

Michael Waitze 9:09
There are many ways you can look at this VC funding thing, right? And I look at I try to look at all of them. I think a lot of it is silliness. We talked a little bit about right? How if I give you a million, I just want to create a story that’s gonna get you 10 million.

Tetiana George 9:20
Generally applying to every industry, it’s not just insurance.

Michael Waitze 9:23
Absolutely, absolutely. And the idea is that there’s a whole bunch of people out there that are just looking for gaps everywhere and saying, Well, no one’s use this technology to attack this thing. So if I can do that, and convince someone to pay me for it, well, then I can raise the next round and raise another round and make a lot of money as opposed to actually fix this thing. That’s another story altogether. But I do think that there is this idea. I think people should explain why an investor VC are not wants to invest in somebody who’s failed once or twice. And I think part of the reason why and this is my own personal experience, when I left my job in the finance industry, I had built businesses inside of Morgan Stanley inside of Goldman Sachs. And I thought I knew how to build a business. But the difference is that if you do it inside of a big and I did and didn’t, but if you build it inside a big company, you have all these resources and all these. Yeah, just all these things you don’t consider. And then if you think that that’s the way you’re gonna build it externally, you can run into some issues. Because you’re like, I’ll just have my you know, because when I’m a Goldman, I just say, I’ll just have my IT guy work on it. But when you’re building your own business, you don’t have that team, kind of

Tetiana George 10:38
You don’t have an IT guy, you don’t have an assistant, you don’t have anything,

Michael Waitze 10:41
so you don’t know how to do it. And I think that’s the that’s the one part of that story that is actually super relevant here is that you need to know how to put all those things together. Right? On top of the technical expertise that you have that you can’t buy, because the reverse always happens. And Tetiana, tell me if you disagree with this. Some person male, female, I’m kind of indifferent says I’m going to attack this in the insurance industry. Yeah. But they don’t know that. So get the money, they raise the money, they raise the next round. But then what happens?

Tetiana George 11:21
Then the loss ratio goes through the roof.

Michael Waitze 11:23
And their marketing costs go through the roof, and then they fail. But this is the thing is that, but they fail spectacularly. And not because they didn’t know how to hire the IT team, but because they didn’t understand the thing that they were really trying to fix. Sorry, go ahead. What do you think is gonna happen though? In this context? Yeah. What do you think, now,

Tetiana George 11:42
I’m an interested party, because I did loose some money in the hype. So I can tell you what I hope is gonna happen. I hope they’re gonna spin off the, all of these, the list of guys and everybody who was trying to replicate them, I hope they’re gonna spin off the tech and the insurance business. And be very honest with themselves. If the tech is good, they should monetize the tech and keep their hands off the core insurance or get somebody to basically run the license for them as an someone who knows how to do this.

Michael Waitze 12:19
So what does that mean? Suppose so you thinkincumbent insurance company, pick anyone you want, is gonna build tech and then spin that off for you think that these inshore tech companies should just take the tech that they have and say instead of disrupting the industry, we’re going to enable it. Is that fair?

Tetiana George 12:33
Yeah, the second one. Yeah. So basically, somebody like Lemonade, at least from what they say they’ve got amazing tech. And for example, when, you know, I’m the expert on all kinds of things claims. And if you look at any kind of tech out there, you could that you can buy or that you run in house, they say they can do 30% of claims as a straight through, right, no one else can do this, like this. No tech out there that claims that can do this. So if they can do it for their own business, and I’m pretty sure it would be a lot more profitable to run this as a separate tech as a SaaS or some kind of tech solution. Because they would not then, you know, be threatened by this crazy over 100% loss ratios.

Michael Waitze 13:18
This is the problem is that they’re attaching. It’s not the only problem. But this is an issue, right? Essentially, they’re trying to run an insurance business the same way somebody was trying to run a ride hailing business will lose all this money to facilitate again, the funding of the next round, but also potentially, to figure out actually how the business works. And then later on when we acquire all these customers, because our loss ratios was through the roof. And our marketing spend is ridiculous. We’ll figure out later we’ll turn off all of these things will lower our loss ratios, lower our marketing expense, and then boom, we’re profitable. The only problem is that insurance actually has people involed. On the other side, I mean, there are plenty of other issues, right. But it’s not like like a ride hailing business where no one gets hurt.

Tetiana George 14:06
It’s also not like an incumbent, right? Because what they’re essentially trying to run is two businesses. One is a tech and one is an insurance. And if you know how to run or seen how insurance businesses run, they have very thin margins. Their profits are unstable. One one year you can be you know, something and plus the other year, you’ll be multiples of your revenue in minus. You haven’t done a good reinsurance thing. But essentially, tech, running a tech company is expensive, is very, very expensive. You want to run a good tech stack and maintain and develop and so on running both, I don’t see how that works like on the p&l.

Michael Waitze 14:49
So I want to get back to that in a second. But tell me this because you’ve introduced a really interesting concept to me. If you take and because you brought up Lemonade and says that they can do 30% of their claims straight through So let’s just call them a great claims expert, we’ll get to Curium him in a bit too. But if every one of these insurtechs in has built some great tech, but isn’t great at insurance, right, but is a better enabler than they are a disrupter. Do you think that there’s a way to then take this bit tech that bit of tech and this bit of tech, combine them together, consolidate? Because I think consolidation happens in every industry, and then create the enabler of all enablers? You know what I mean, but then works with every incumbent insurance company that creates a gigantic business? No,

Tetiana George 15:33
That will happen in banking already. Like that’s, that’s the story of banking. And I think insurance is a few years away from that, essentially,

Michael Waitze 15:43
Really interesting stuff. I mean, to me, I see, I see all I always see the same sort of pattern, right? And if you’re old enough, and I’m way older than most people I know. But if you’re old enough, you see these patterns. You see individual pieces get built, then you see the value chain combined, right, and merge and consolidate. And then you see people say, again, too big, I need to rebuild, like some of these components. As the tech changes, the market changes. And as the environment changes, then you start that whole circle over again, right. And you think that that’s we’re at the beginning of that in the insurance industry, in the InsurTech industry.

Tetiana George 16:15
I think insurance is maybe 10 to 15 years behind the banking and banking saw exactly that right. All the big big guys incumbents were basically sitting on their butts and saying, Oh, we’ve already spent so much money on tech, we’re not gonna do anything until that smaller, you know, that the challengers, equip themselves with really, really good tech, and basically came and started chopping off their market shares. Then they woke up.

Michael Waitze 16:43
And had to change. So what is the idea around Curium? And how long has it been around? And where do you think it’s gonna go?

Tetiana George 16:53
Curium largely fits into this into this idea of enablers. And not necessarily, I don’t necessarily intend to enable the big incumbents anyways. Enables somebody who is really, really good at insurance and doesn’t want to run a technology company on the side to basically kickstart on on something really, really quickly, I, you know, I’ve done my homework, there’s a lot of outstanding high quality technology for basically the front part of insurance, everything that is customized, product, distribution, policy admin system, I think this part of the value chain has moved to kind of very quickly and developed a good level of there’s a lot of good players, I think claims and especially compliance to like, the hairy beast, and everybody’s just keeping their hands off there. But this is the gap that I’m filling and saying, I can actually do a good job for you with like a pre made, easy, easy to use and intuitive solution to step in and fill the blank. And kind of create, as you said, How did you said this mega super something, tech stack.

Michael Waitze 18:12
I think I said value Chain, but okay, I’ll take the mega super something anytime.

Tetiana George 18:17
Tech basically, that that allows you to run a 21st century company as opposed to 1700 or 1800.

Michael Waitze 18:25
so for people that don’t know, necessarily from the, from the back end view, what makes claims so turn heart like, why is this such a hard thing to do?

Tetiana George 18:37
It’s not hard at all.

Michael Waitze 18:39
Why does it seem so hard? I mean, if you’ve ever had tried to make a claim. Go ahead.

Tetiana George 18:46
So, you know, a Swiss watch, right? Like a typical Swiss watch has multiple 10s of 1000s of small parts. Each part is a no brainer. But that but the combination, the number of them, the variations in which they come, and the smooth process that literally, you know, takes like a Swiss clock is really really hard because it’s just that you go into the multiple scenarios even if you do like, first notice of loss or lodgement. I have this like, you know, system of like no codes, questionnaires that basically you write yourself, you can end up with like 500 questions with some 25 different ways they can go, I can becomes very, very complex very quickly. And, and the secret is to just basically like a red line that you know, runs through and connect everything. And ideally, that red line is a customer. This is where you focus,

Michael Waitze 19:55
Can I just run you through a kind of personal experience and make an equivalency I think to a claim. And jump in when you feel like I’m going down the wrong road. I worked on it, I ran a portfolio trading desk, which means you trade multiple stocks at a time. But you also trade multiple stocks in multiple countries on multiple markets that have different back ends that have different currencies, different rules, different regulations. I once did a $4 billion trade in 56 markets and 25 different countries with different settlement rules. But one of the things we did is we spent months mapping this out, and then building the technology so that to do it was relatively seamless. And once we built that we built this machine that then could handle any of those things, front to back, trade to settlement, trade acceptance to trade settlement. Right. And if trade acceptance is signing, an insurance policy and trade settlement is making a claim. All those little Swiss watch pieces in the middle seem very similar to me to what you’re talking about in the claims process. Why has it taken so long? Because in the investment banking, not really. But in the trading business? We did this 15 years ago, more 20 years ago? Why do you think it’s taken so much time in the insurance business to just solve this problem that everybody has?

Tetiana George 21:13
Believe me or not, I’m getting this question multiple times a day.

Michael Waitze 21:18
I’m sure you are. But I but I want to know, but I’m I’m asking because I’m personally curious, right? In other words, I hear about all this innovation, and I think this type of technology innovation is really just sitting down, well, just sitting down and making, you know, a three or a three dimensional matrix on how all these you know, it’s just process automation in a way, right?

Tetiana George 21:39
Yeah. Look, I literally I am hearing this question multiple times a day, and I don’t think I have a great answer that would cover it. But what I’ve noticed, right, because almost two years ago, claims the department or function, I actually went and contacted every single provider of a claim stack in the world. And I told them, guys bring it bring it up, I I’m a buyer, I made you know, I didn’t even need multiple vendors. I only needed one. And yet, none of them, you know, stood up to the challenge. So what I noticed, and nobody gave me this answer. But what I noticed, I noticed the problem actually, about the people who run these companies, one tendency that I’ve noticed is there are people who do not come from insurance, but understand tech, and maybe have done this for banking or Salesforce or some somebody like that. And they’re like, well, insurance is fat in terms of revenues. So and there’s a lot of opportunity, and clearly a problem. Let me solve this the way I know. So they try to hire experts, and they try to hire people. But it’s really hard to hire somebody. Somebody who ran claims in the 70s.

Michael Waitze 23:04
Yeah, fair enough.

Tetiana George 23:06
So, so there’s a very clear gap of vision, right, you can have excellent technical capabilities in terms of technology, but really, really poor an absence of vision in terms of in terms of claims, there’s one type of people. And then the other type of people is those who basically no insurance, but they’re literally replicating or solving the only one problem, that kind of hard coding for a specific problem. And they think they can hard code a million times, but then they don’t realize that once you leave your country or your whatever life, non-life, it’s different. However, there’s always a common denominator, because you can still solve it at scale, it’s just a lot more intellectually challenging.

Michael Waitze 23:55
So how does Curium do this?

Tetiana George 23:58
Essentially, so the good thing, as I said, I’ve worked on like 20 something countries, right. And essentially, the times, and insurance are all are all the same, that people use different words in different languages or even in the same language. But essentially, the concept behind is still the same. So you need to find this common denominator at the bank that you kind of hard code. And you need to find where to draw the line of everything else that is variable, that is your product or process, your regulation, your service level agreements, your jargon, that you then put, or at least I put in the no code layer that is essentially free to for anybody who’s not who cannot code that say okay, this is this is how I want things to run, right. Short story.

Michael Waitze 24:54
Well, so is there a no code, low code aspect to the Curium business where the basic things are fixed is probably the wrong word but less variable. And then a low code part of it where I can say, Wait a second, well, I’m in Greece, and in Greece, this is different. So I need to change that variable or change this title or change something else with this process looks like this. And that that’s possible, you building that in as well.

Tetiana George 25:18
It’s yeah, it’s there. So as one of the examples, I can, myself, and I don’t know how to quote, but myself, I can write down business rules that would flag any breaches of local regulation. So I can write down, I can sit down half an hour, if I know what those are, I can actually write them into the, into the system and say, these are my top 20 rules for regulation, please flash red, if I’ve breached or flash orange, if I’m about to reach.

Michael Waitze 25:51
So I want to talk about regulations for a second. Because I want to understand this, from your perspective. There’s a regulatory authority for insurance in every country. And they don’t necessarily align. Right. So some of the regulations in Thailand are different than those in Vietnam, and are different, again, from those in Australia or New Zealand or wherever, right? Is there a business? Or has this been done yet that works with the regulators globally, to codify those regulations, right, and API them, but think about it, right? Think about how much easier this would be. And then makes an API connectivity to those so that as the regulations change, you don’t have to know anything new, you just get some kind of message that says Regulation A is now regulation B or whatever. And for a system like yours, that then just trying to use the regulatory environment to know when you’re violating or when you’re in accordance with those regulations. You program those API’s into Curium, and then makes it even more seamless for people to understand, does that exist already? And if it doesn’t, should it?

Tetiana George 27:07
I don’t think it exists. Otherwise, I would be all over it.

Michael Waitze 27:12
Well, let’s build that to into Curium. You understand the point, right? I mean, because

Tetiana George 27:17
That’s all and you know, when I was on the other side running claims. Last year, Australia went through like a massive wave of change of regulation. And to give you an example, one little RG whatever thing resulted in 17 extra fields that everybody needs to collect. And then you go to your your providers for any technology that you’ve got, and you’re like, Guys, I’ve got a problem. And they’re like, well, that’s not my problem. It’s your problem. And I’m like, what you will provide, like, essentially, right, like, like, I bought a car, and suddenly, you know, that I live in, changed the rules. And then the car manufacturers are telling me sorry, it’s your problem to fix your car the way you want. That’s absolutely the point. At the moment, it’s not happening. I’m trying to step in without the global APR zone. But basically, every regulation wakes roughly on the same principles, right? It’s either conduct, which is much harder to quantify and to track, or it’s something in your transactional way that they do business. And banking is very famous for this. So everything that’s transactional, and that can be quantified. I can pick it up. Everything that’s conduct is slightly more difficult, because people know how to, you know, tweak things, and so on.

Michael Waitze 28:45
What are the data implications of this? So I’ve had tons of conversations about, you know, artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I’m as allergic as you are to these buzzwords. Not the least of which because most of the people that talk about using artificial intelligence and machine learning, just have a bunch of mice in the background running on spinning wheels to make things go faster, which really means just hiring a bunch of people to do stuff and make it look like it’s artificial intelligence. But again, that’s sorry, that’s a conversation for another day. But but but just this idea of data. The data, like you said, comes in so many forms. It’s not standardized, right? So you can’t have like this catch all solution to the data either. What is the angle for you for dealing with I guess we’d call unstructured data as opposed to structured data to then be able to go ahead and solve some of these issues. Yeah.

Tetiana George 29:36
So the claim is the single richest point of data in the entire insurance value chain. So you’ll get to know so much. At the point when you start interacting with your customer, the intermediary, the supplier, that whatever you you just get crazy, crazy amount of data which is very deep enrich. Now the problem is, and to give you an example, if you ran an underwriting process, and for example, in my previous company, we were buying property data, property description. I’ve learned that through the claim that half of that data was incorrect. Like just flat out wrong?

Michael Waitze 30:19
Wait a second, let me let me just confirm this. Let me just clear this up. So what you’re saying is, in a one piece of, you know, one building universe, you would buy the data for that building, right for that real estate. And what you’re saying is that if somebody then at that building had an insurance policy with you, and then they made a claim, you would find that that data that you bought about that building was wrong. Okay. Just wanna make sure that I understood this. So it’s not the data that you get on the claim is wrong. It’s just that the data that you got from the data provider?

Tetiana George 30:49
Yeah. Yeah, the claim is your is your chance to verify. Claim is, that is the point of truth for so many reasons. And in terms of data is the absolute point of truth. Also, if you think about like life insurance, and what people told you, you know, 30 years ago, when you sold them the policy, and what you see now is like, oh, never smoked or something, you know, straightaway,

Michael Waitze 31:14
He died of lung cancer.

Tetiana George 31:15
So, but the problem is, it’s like, my thing is so rich, and so big and so deep, and if you only could use it, and the problem is that it’s not used, and it’s not used, because it comes in all forms and shapes. It comes in like a PDF that somebody printed out, and then wrote in there and then scanned back in, or it comes into some phone conversation, or the worst thing that happened is a person managing the claim made some decision in their head based on some mental checklist that they went through, for example, for validation or something they just went through in their head just like, Okay, does that work? Does that work? And then turn the button and said claim accepted. You’ll never know why? Or how or what led them to do this, right. So this is where there’s 80 to 90% of data gets lost. So you can only see a very scars documentation of what actually happened in the traditional system. What I’ve done is I flipped this, basically I said, Okay, let me try and make everything that comes in a piece of structured data. It’s not perfect, it’s not 100%. But at least for all the transactions and things that happen, Curium can actually timestamp quite a lot of things and categorize what happens. And this is, again, this comes in, this no code, you can say I there are certain elements of the claim that I want to happen automatically. Like all the communications, all the notifications, all the reports, all of that it’s it’s simple, essential, but you can just say, done done done done. Like a system that does this for you, you’re not actually doing anything, right. And based on that, you can then say, okay, I can make this decision because all of these three reports are here, right? Or, because I’ve done these steps before I validated something, the system actually knows what happened. So you can justify and track this is the main thing, transparency and tracking that essentially due to automation data, because you know exactly what’s going on.

Michael Waitze 31:19
There’s so much here I want to go back to I want to go back to my days sitting on a trading desk. And I’ll tell you why we already talked about how all the market microstructure is could be different all the currencies could be different all the settlement dates could be different everything about you know the way the stocks trade in Taiwan is different than the way stocks trade in Japan. But there are some things that are similar this basic information there’s a buy sell, there’s a price there’s a number of shares all these things right there’s a settlement date even if that settlement a protocol is different, but the financial services industry in which I existed created something called the fixed protocol which was the financial information exchange protocol. That we did and that may not have meant that every order that I took regardless of which market it came from, and regardless of which customer it came from, if they were fixed compliant I could trade with them electronically boom they sent me an order I could just straight to STP it straight through processing it no problem at all. And they did it on their side because it made their lives so much easier. And again when they came to make the claim which meant that at the end of the trading day and that could be anytime during the day if they’re trading multiple markets meant that the all that information would flow directly back into their systems as well and that they could literally probably just have a cigarette and like just go done. Thank you very much and things would be confirmed. This past this has to be possible in the insurance industry. Because again, the basic layer and I think I mean tell me if you disagree with this, but the basic layers the same there’s a person, there’s price. There’s a timeframe. And there’s an incident, whatever it is, but they all have action. Yeah, action. They have categories, which means that you have tags, which means the all fields happened. Yeah. Why isn’t this happened?

Tetiana George 34:24
Don’t get me started. So in terms of the back end, I think some countries are a little more advanced. I think Germany started doing something like this in the policy space a few years ago. Starting to categorize. I don’t know, if you ever read a policy op eds in, it’s a disaster, whatever is included on page five is exported partial and page 27 and added back on page 63. So I’ve done I’ve coded them. So I actually went through a two by two matrix identifying those overlap. And that’s for one company and one country, if you take that multiple countries multiple products. I personally think it’s a little bit of an oligopolistic structure problem. That because insurance is a very big like a take any country is highly concentrated, there are three four large players sure that that wants to profit from the oligopolistic pricing model, right and kind of charge, the comfortable buffer. And, and unless there’s a regulator like EU, like Bafin, or whatever the you know, the like Bafin is a German regulator, for example, right? Unless they’re forced by an external force to standardize, they have little incentive, because that allows them to cash in a higher premium. And if you make product non comparable it’s like gaslighting. Your clients don’t know. You know, it’s basically a competition of who sells best not whose product is best.

Michael Waitze 35:21
Sounds like the mattress business to me.

Tetiana George 37:03
It’s unfortunately the reality in insurance like I’ve seen in say, single countries, there might be some standardization on certain levels. Definitely not across countries. And in some countries like Australia, there’s like zero. Mind blowing.

Michael Waitze 37:26
Kinda. Okay. I’ve taken up a ton of your time today and learned a lot if people want to get in touch with you. Are you fundraising now? Yeah. That should be fun. If people want to get in touch with you. What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Tetiana George 37:41
I guess LinkedIn is the best way.

Michael Waitze 37:43
Okay, I’ll put a I’ll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes for this Tetiana George, a founder and the CEO of Curium. That was awesome. Thank you so much.