Stay on top of the latest business innovations. Sign up for a subscription today. To remind you, our annual plan works out to a monthly rate of €24.99+ VAT. It will give you access to a archive of over 800 independently reported stories and some 200 new ones in 2022.
Enjoy this week's issue,
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker
|
|
- N E W S I N C O N T E X T - |
|
| Amazon announced this week that it is launching a portal for buying insurance in the UK, the latest example of how new intermediaries are embracing embedded finance.
Embedded finance, a new addressable market opportunity estimated to be worth over $7 trillion in ten years, is about abstracting banking and insurance functionality into technology and enabling any brand or merchant to rapidly and economically integrate innovative financial services into their offerings and customer experience. Newcomers still have to rely on licensed banks and insurance companies to provide the actual services but it allows those who are closer to customers to create personalized solutions that are more relevant, says Simon Torrance, Founder and CEO of UK-based consultancy Embedded Finance and Superapp Strategies. In addition to adding revenue from new services "embedded finance creates stickiness because it provides an additional way for your application or your proposition to be more comprehensive and more attractive to customers,” he says.
Traditional providers of insurance and banking products have a choice to make about how they play in this new marketplace, says Torrance. They can’t stop interlopers from offering financial services so banks and insurance companies can either place themselves in an orchestration role, helping newcomers create insurance or banking-as-a-service add-on businesses and manage them for them, or they can be commodity players lower in the value chain, he says.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
|
Up until recently Alban de La Sablière was Sanofi’s chief dealmaker, reporting directly to CEO Paul Hudson. In October he left to become Chief Business Officer at Owkin, a French AI scale-up focused on drug development and delivery.
For Dr. Thomas Clozel, Owkin’s CEO, the move is evidence of a paradigm shift in the industry, with power moving to smaller, more nimble companies.
The six-year-old company, which Clozel co-founded with computer science researcher Gilles Wainrib, specializes in AI and federated learning for medical research. It has inked deals with both Sanofi and Bristol Myers Squibb to help those companies improve their odds in drug discovery and clinical trials respectively. Now Owkin plans to evolve from licensing its research and technology to developing its own intellectual property. The company is a unicorn (firms valued at $1 billion or more) and its big ambitions are also helping it attract talent from Big Tech. Jean-Philippe Vert, a former research scientist at Google Brain, became Owkin's Chief Research and Development Officer in September.
Just as his parents Jean-Paul and Martine Clozel, founders of Switzerland’s Actelion, helped pioneer Europe’s biotech industry to research and develop medicines for unmet medical needs, Clozel, a trained oncologist, is intent on using AI to usher in a new era of drug development.
Medical regulators have not yet approved a drug that was designed using AI. But, says Clozel, the French doctor-turned-entrepreneur, the time is getting closer, and the results could be transformative for medical providers and patients suffering from hard-to-treat diseases. |
|
- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K - |
|
Who: Yobie Benjamin, a former Global Chief Technology Officer for Citibank's Global Transaction Services, is a successful entrepreneur, angel investor and futurist. His interests and investments span reversing climate change, robotics, longevity, AI/ML, finance, software, cybersecurity, space, healthcare, retail and consumer products. Benjamin, who is based in Silicon Valley, is currently a Partner at PA Consulting a UK-based consultancy, working on product innovation with multinational corporations. He is also the co-founder and CTO Emeritus of Token.io, a startup providing software to banks that recently named as one of the top five crypto/compliance/banking companies in the UK.
Topic: How to thrive in today’s digital era of disruptive technological change.
Quote: "Innovation is like a virus. It is viral in nature and changes and evolves so rapidly that if you don’t do the same, it is going to beat you."
|
|
- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K - |
|
| ATLANT 3D Nanosystems combines unique technologies to enable manufacturing of advanced materials and electronics at the atomic level. Its aim is to radically change the way microelectronic devices are made so that they can be produced locally instead of having to be shipped across the globe. The Danish deep tech startup says its technology will decrease the time and cost of processing from years and months to days, and give unprecedented flexibility for material innovation, prototyping, and production of micro and nanodevices, replacing the previous cleanroom-based complex process flows. The company's technology offers another major benefit. New technologies require special solutions “that the traditional semiconductor technology can’t provide,” says CEO and Founder Maksym Plakhotnyuk. Chips made with ATLANT’s 3D printing technology can power 5G/6G, IoT, curved displays needed for augmented and virtual reality headsets, and emerging technologies such as the metaverse and quantum computing, he says. |
|
- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K |
|
| Amount the world's top automakers are planning to spend through 2030 to develop and produce millions of electric vehicles, along with the batteries and raw materials to support that production, according to a Reuters analysis of public data and projections released by those companies. Automakers have forecast plans to build 54 million battery electric vehicles in 2030, representing more than 50% of total vehicle production.This will require carmakers and their battery partners to install 5.8 terawatt-hours of battery production capacity by 2030, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the manufacturers. |
|
Web Summit, November 1-4, Lisbon, Portugal
Puzzle X 2022, November 15-17, Barcelona, Spain
AI for Health Summit 2022, November 16, Paris, France
Slush, November 17-18, Helsinki, Finland
|
|
|
|
|
