With a keen eye on emerging technologies and a passion for encouraging groundbreaking ideas, he is steering Zurich’s innovation efforts, most notably through the prestigious Zurich Innovation Championship. Insurtech Insights sits down with Agard to delve into the 2025 Championships mission, and to find out which trends are shaping the future of insurance and Zurich’s strategic vision for change.
What are the top insurtech trends you see shaping the industry in 2025, and how do you think they will impact insurers, brokers, and policyholders?
AI has reached mass market adoption, enabling startups to uncover new use cases by addressing existing problems with this new “superpower.” Technology remains a key driver in transforming our industry. However, only those startups that focus on solving specific needs for insurers and enhancing the customer experience, as well as how they work with brokers and other partners, will thrive. We are looking to collaborate with insurtech startups that share our passion for customer focus – having top-notch technology alone is not enough.
With the growing influence of AI, how do you see generative AI and automation transforming underwriting, claims processing, and customer interactions in insurance?
Different forms of AI will solve different problems along our value chain. AI is not new to Zurich – we began our AI journey many years ago and have successfully adopted many traditional machine learning solutions globally. Gen AI, in particular, is supercharging the way we work. It can assist in various parts of the insurance value chain, such as claims and underwriting, enabling our people to focus on adding value for our customers. Moving forward, agentic AI may help us reach the next level, becoming even more effective, simpler, and faster in our operations, and most importantly, further enhancing the customer experience.
What are the biggest challenges facing insurtech startups this year, and why?
The challenges for insurtech startups are not new, but they are more present than ever. Over-regulation and changing regulations, especially in Europe, can create significant hurdles through higher compliance and administrative costs. Additionally, the funding environment is becoming more cautious, with investors increasingly looking for proven business models and sustainable growth, making it harder for startups to secure funding.
Zurich has built a portfolio of over 50 startup collaborations, providing them with market traction and strong partnerships, which in turn puts them in a more favorable position when raising capital from traditional VCs. Moreover, insurance remains a people business. Building customer trust is crucial for insurtech startups to convince customers to utilize digital platforms and channels. Insurtechs that choose to partner with incumbents often find themselves in a more favorable situation compared to those that compete directly with traditional players in the market.
The funding environment is becoming more cautious, with investors increasingly looking for proven business models and sustainable growth, making it harder for startups to secure funding. Zurich has built a portfolio of over 50 startup collaborations, providing them with market traction and strong partnerships, which in turn puts them in a more favorable position when raising capital from traditional VCs.
Joel Agard
The Zurich Innovation Championship has become a key platform for fostering new ideas in the insurance space. What are the biggest changes or challenges for this year’s competition?
Zurich has recently presented its new three-year plan. As part of that, we aim to identify the right business opportunities and assess the need for startup collaboration to help accelerate these ambitions. A common challenge I have observed in the past is our tendency to become overly focused on the impressive technologies that startups bring to the table, attempting to retrofit them into our existing environment.
Moving forward, we will focus more on identifying pain points first and then seeking out the very best startup to address and solve those specific issues. We provide much more than just funding for pilots with Zurich. Startups can draw on the expertise of our colleagues in various markets, have access to our most senior leaders, and benefit from our global scale with customers in more than 200 countries and territories. This allows us to start small but think big. Ultimately, everyone involved in the process benefits, including our customers, our businesses, and, of course, the startups.
What specific types of startups or solutions is Zurich looking to support through the 2025 Innovation Championship? Are there particular themes or problem areas you’re prioritising?
Our focus will not be limited to insurtechs alone. Our scope extends from insurtechs and fintechs to proptech, enterprise-tech, and marketing startups. A startup that collaborates with us must be willing to collaborate and, in some cases, even co-create solutions for specific business needs. This approach will enable them to quickly go to market with us and then scale across the many markets in which we operate.
Last year’s winners tackled areas like sustainability, AI, and digital health. Can you share any success stories or key learnings from past winners that have influenced Zurich’s approach?
Our collaboration with KorrAI in North America is a strong example of the success of our startup program. KorrAI leverages satellite data, IoT and AI to monitor critical infrastructure, aiding in maintenance decisions to combat climate change. Our collaboration has enhanced how we evaluate properties for subsidence risk. By providing high-resolution, property-level data, they have supported us in improving risk assessment and identifying new business opportunities.
What advice would you give to startups looking to collaborate with Zurich through the Innovation Championship? What makes a solution stand out?
Startups need to understand that large corporates operate at a different pace and should collaborate closely with our local business sponsors and respective project leads to ensure the best outcomes possible. It is important that the success criteria are understood early on and that they focus on the joint business impact from the very beginning. Additionally, we want to see that they are passionate about the challenges they aim to solve with Zurich and that they are bold, not shying away from proposing unconventional solutions.
Looking ahead, how do you see Zurich’s innovation strategy evolving beyond 2025, and what role will partnerships with insurtechs play in that vision?
We have transformed our Innovation Championship program every year since its first edition in 2018, and I expect us to continue evolving it to meet the needs of our businesses and customers across the globe. While focusing on today’s challenges, I believe the program also helps us uncover the “unknown unknowns” and tackle our challenges in ways we haven’t thought of before. Technology, including AI, will continue to accelerate the transformation of insurance, but it’s our job as innovators – both startups and the Zurich Innovation teams alike – to consistently connect business needs with startups, allowing room for experimentation and desirability testing.
Any solution that enables us to address systemic risks, protection gaps, and evolving customer needs will be considered. I believe that to build the future of insurance, we must continue to collaborate with startups, insurtechs, and startups from adjacent industries.
