InsurtechLIVE 23

James is a Partner at AirTree Ventures focusing on early-stage and growth-stage investments in Australia and New Zealand with a particular interest in software and fintech. James has led AirTree’s investments in A Cloud Guru, DroneDeploy, Athena, Prospa, Secure Code Warrior and dGraph. Before joining AirTree, James spent 15 years working overseas. He was Vice President at Accel Partners, the VC fund behind Slack, Dropbox, Facebook and Spotify. James co-founded a SaaS investment research software platform, BipSinc, where he still serves as an Advisor. James holds an MBA from Stanford and undergrad degrees in Computer Science & Law from UNSW.

Nick is a Principal Architect at AWS where he has spent the last four years working with Australia and New Zealand’s largest insurance organisations; helping them with transformation, cloud adoption, and cyber security. His career in financial services spans 17 years covering insurance, banking, and wealth, with previous technical leadership roles in the likes of Macquarie Bank, Commonwealth Bank, and Colonial First State span operations, SRE, software engineering, and design. He is passionate about cyber security, is a member of the AWS Security Technical Field Community, and also holds a position in the AWS Customer Incident Response Team.

Simone is the Founder of Law & Cyber, specialising in cyber risk management, education and legal advice. With a passion for protecting Australians from cybercrime, Simone is the author and presenter of specialist online courses, webinars and face to face presentations providing cyber resilience education for law firms, other businesses and directors. L&C’s online cyber education courses have been completed by more than 6,000 Australians and endorsed or licensed by leading professional bodies in Australia including the LPLC, Lawcover, the Law Society of South Australia and PEXA. Simone has provided expert written opinion in Supreme Court proceedings involving allegations of email-enabled fraud and before founding L&C was the Senior Claims Solicitor and Manager, Strategy & Innovation at Lawcover.
Simone is a thought leader in legal liability and cyber risk and in 2022 she was named Innovator of the Year (Individual) at the Lawyers’ Weekly Women in Law Awards. In her spare time she loves sailing on Sydney Harbour and jogging through bushland in her local area.

Dr. Michael Neary is the Director and General Manager for Insurance. Michael is passionate about the industry and the role DXC plays in making a difference to our customers and the people they serve.
Michael has over 30 years’ experience in financial services, including numerous leadership and board roles encompassing marketing, strategy and sales. He has worked for a range of companies including Commonwealth Bank, Credit Union Services Corporation Australia Ltd (CUSCAL) and PMI Mortgage Insurance (now QBE). He was also a director at Intech Credit Union.
Michael has led strategy and implementation programs. He has launched new products in areas including insurance, retail banking, payments and mortgages, and successfully launched several new product innovations including Australia’s first public chip payment card.
Michael is passionate about innovation in financial services. In addition to his professional roles, he completed a Doctorate of Business Administration with a thesis on “Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship in Australian Financial Services”. He holds a Master of Commerce in Marketing and a Bachelor of Science.
Michael is a member of Sydney University’s Ethics Committee, and on a different note, is President of a not for profit film trust the “Wake in Fright Trust”.

Andy is a Sydney based Partner at EY and a leader in the Technology Consulting Practice. Andy has worked in financial services for the past 28 years across capital markets, wealth management and banking but with a specialisation in life and general insurance. During this time he has shaped and led complex business and IT transformation engagements for clients in the UK, mainland Europe, Asia, and Australia spanning business strategy, IT strategy, offshoring, outsourcing, and large scale software implementation. Andy has worked extensively with FinTech hubs to promote InsurTech within Australia and is a regular speaker on the topic of InsurTech and Innovation.

Tricia Wong takes passion in relationship building and it has now become a core function of her role at InsureTech Connect Asia. Playing to her strengths of being an extrovert and a great communicator, she finds herself enjoying making connections and fostering meaningful conversations with people. Before assuming her role as Director of InsureTech Connect Asia, she was an auditor and management consultant at PwC in the emerging tech space and has been in various process automation and RPA projects. She graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a Bachelor of Accountancy degree as a PwC scholar and has completed her Chartered Accountant (Singapore).

With more than 25 years’ experience in the insurance industry, Brad is a leader in operational areas and identifying new business trends and opportunities.
Managing RAC Insurance Business Model Innovation since 2019, Brad is responsible for leading a team to conduct research, build new business models, partner and invest in start-ups.
During this time, Brad has built a broad international network and provides advice and assistance to start-ups from around the world.
Prior to his current role, Brad managed numerous insurance operational departments at RAC, AAMI, Shannons and Suncorp. This experience has been invaluable when exploring disruptive vectors and identifying partnerships and investment opportunities.

Simone is the CEO of Insurtech Australia, a national not-for-profit organisation with a vision to create a world leading insurtech ecosystem which aims to foster a diverse community of insurance innovation and collaboration across the Australian insurance industry. An experienced leader in the insurance industry, Simone has held senior executive roles in both Australia and the UK and also has management consulting experience. Her previous role was that of Chief Operating Officer for Munich Re in Australasia. Additionally, she has been a Non-Executive Director of ANZIIF since August 2018.

Richard Kimber is the Founder and Director of daisee. He founded daisee in 2017 with a vision to create a world-leading AI software company offering significant value to clients by blending commercial best practice and data science to create intelligent products that learn and adapt. Richard has over 25 years of global leadership experience that includes several chief executive and board roles, and has extensive experience in financial services, marketing, social media, and capital markets. Prior to daisee, Richard was CEO of OFX Group, Regional Managing Director of Google in Southeast Asia (including Australia and NZ); Chief Executive of First Direct Bank in the UK; all which followed several international roles with the HSBC Group including being the first Global Head of Internet Marketing.

Luis is the CEO and founder of Digital Experience Labs and has spent over 20 years leading technology innovation and strategy across a wide range of industries including insurance, banking, contact centres and start-ups.
With a foundation in technology, Luis is intimate with the insurance lifecycle and has a personal passion to continue to see the industry evolve and customer experiences improve.
A self-confessed digital pragmatist, Luis is great at reading between the lines to find the hidden problems worth solving, and building skilled teams that deliver solutions with an edge.

Grant Peters is the Asia-Pacific Insurance Sector leader for EY and has been with the firm for nearly 20 years in various capacities. He is also the Oceania FSO Advisory leader and Insurance sector leader, roles held for the past 5 and 7 years respectively. Prior to these roles, Grant led the Actuarial practice in Australia for many years.
Grant has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry with his personal areas of expertise including strategy and organisational change, operational transformation, and actuarial capital and risk optimisation within the insurance and wealth management industries.

Kathryn Wood is COO, Co-Founder and Board Member of handdii – technology connecting insurance companies and their customers directly to local contractors to fast track the property claims process. Their clients include 4 prominent Australian and 7 U.S insurers including two top ten with a national contractor network in Australia and coverage across 14 states in the U.S.
Prior to handdii Kathryn led the Motor and Property claims division for QBE Australia with accountability for over 250,000 customer claims, $1.5B indemnity spend and over 600 FTE across Australia and the Philippines.
Other previous roles include Customer Experience, Claims Transformation; Workforce Optimisation and Contact Centre Leadership in the insurance and services industries.
Kathryn completed an Executive MBA at RMIT University in 2017 and is currently residing in the United States.

Graham is the Co-Founder of BCyber, a cybersecurity risk management firm established in 2018. He is a Public Accountant, Responsible Manager, Tax Agent, Governance Risk Compliance Auditor and Integrated Data Privacy Professional.
Graham has over 35yrs experience in accounting, taxation, intellectual property investment and technology industries. Focused on integrating commercial strategy and day-to-day operations with cybersecurity and intellectual property, he distils the technical into practical for easy understanding of everyday business practices.
He has worked in India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in Asset Management before starting his own business.

Jodi is a motivated executive leader who works hard and smart. She loves finding value, delivering consistently for her customers and leading teams of people to be empowered to move at pace.
She’s passionate about acting with integrity, honesty, consistency, fairness, and always puts people first.
Jodi has ~15 years experience in insurance and is known for delivering highly successful and large scale programs, getting things done well, having fun and creating a safe, high performance environment where her team can be their best, authentic selves.

David is a Melbourne based Associate Partner at EY and leader in the Technology Consulting Practice. David has over 30 years’ experience working in the insurance industry blending his unique combination of skills to leverage technology to solve and deliver complex business problems. After 10 years developing insurance software, David has spent the subsequent 20 years shaping and leading complex business and IT transformation engagements for clients in the UK, mainland Europe, Asia and ANZ. Whether it be business strategy, IT strategy , architecture or large scale software implementation. David focuses on innovation to deliver a business outcome.

Rachel Olney is the Founder and CEO of Geosite Inc. She has taught innovation frameworks and built standard operating procedures for the most elite US special operations teams and is an instructor for Technology and National Security at Stanford University. She has helped create and scale an international program in national security innovation and conducted research for the US Air Force on the Strategic Implications of Commercialization of Space. Her PhD work at Stanford addressed Innovation in Necessarily Bureaucratic and Hierarchical Organizations for which she studied engineering teams across US Cyber Command.

As the Founder and CEO of Geosite she leads a YCombinator backed startup disrupting the geospatial software industry, making it easier for large complex organizations, such as insurance carriers and the Department of Defense, to easily leverage spatial data (satellites, drones, IOT, cloud-enabled SCADA, and geospatial analytics) to increase operational efficiency. She was also a Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee for 2020 and a Gates Scholar.

Barney Pierce is the Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships – APAC at Cover Genius, the insurtech for embedded insurance that protects the global customers of the world’s largest digital companies world’s largest digital companies including Booking Holdings and Intuit. XCover is also available at Amazon, eBay, and Shopee.

In his role, Barnaby (aka Barney) is responsible for building strategic partnerships, and helping launch new markets and lines of business for Cover Genius in the APAC region across verticals such as retail, logistics, travel, fintech, property and business services.

Prior to Cover Genius, Barney spent over 15 years with Google where he held several Senior Go-To-Market and Sales/Partnership leadership positions for Google’s Media and Marketing Technology business across multiple markets at different stages of growth, including as Director, Go-To-Market for Marketing Platforms and Display Advertising, APAC, and Regional Director for Marketing Platforms in ANZ.

Barney holds a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from the University of Sydney. Barney is based in Sydney with his wife and two young boys. When he’s not spending time with his family Barney loves getting outdoors hiking, mountain biking, kayaking or playing golf. Barney is also active in the APAC technology, media and start-up community as an advisor and mentor.