Tetiana George says time spent on the “front lines” of insurance gave her the drive to establish Curium
A tech treatment for pain of compliance
Our pitch winner seeks to change ‘ancient ways’
By Miranda Maxwell
Tetiana George was typically exuberant addressing the Insurance News technology seminar earlier this year after her start-up Curium was voted pitch competition winner.
“Our goal is to give you insurance professional superpowers,” she told the audience. “We want to give you time, knowledge and confidence. We have reimagined insurance compliance and we are very well versed in the problems that you’re facing – it helps to have been in your shoes.”
Curium’s 10 current clients are a mix of underwriting agencies, brokers and an industry supplier. It has tripled revenue since last year, catching the eye of venture capital firm Correlation, which recently invested in a minority strategic stake.
Correlation managing partner Doug Laburn says Curium is neatly addressing a “significant industry need at the intersection of ever-growing regulatory obligations, productivity pressures and digital enablement”.
Ms George, originally from Ukraine, tells Insurance News her journey began in the industry heartland of Zurich while working at Boston Consulting Group.
“Switzerland is home to the largest insurers in the world and it’s actually a really, really prestigious profession there,” the Insurtech Australia board member says.
“I worked for all the largest names in Europe and some in Asia. We did everything – lots of product launches, entries in new markets, cost-cutting, review of commissions, distribution models, product design, a lot of technology projects.”
In 2014, she moved to Oliver Wyman, and though based in Hong Kong she spent time in Australia working on the sale of NAB’s life insurance business. In 2018, she switched gears to head operations at Blue Zebra Insurance, with the aim of being “really in the trenches”.
“I always wanted to start a company, but all of my career I worked with C-suites and hadn’t really picked up … the real, almost dirty work, the nuts and bolts. I didn’t do that and that kind of showed, so I joined Blue Zebra … to build the entire claims operation from ground up.”
It was a baptism of fire: the Black Summer catastrophe of 2019-20 was soon followed by record flood claims in 2022.
“If you’re on the front line of that it’s very, very stressful. With all of this theoretical knowledge – well, I had to actually call the clients and apologise. It was very, very tough, but ultimately successful.
“That gave me even more drive – the barrage of problems that the insurance industry and its clients face, probably 50%-70% of those can either be fully solved or significantly improved with smart technology and slightly different ways of doing things.”
“We’re not pretending that it’s easy, not sugar-coating anything. We can do most of the work, but you will need to step up.”
Curium’s niche was found when Ms George was appointed as Blue Zebra’s regulatory responsible manager, tasked with monitoring licensing compliance.
“It’s huge – screwing up in your job under that title can have severe consequences on your life.”
She soon became frustrated. “Probably 70% of my time, instead of running the function and talking to clients, I was doing compliance-related stuff, mostly digging and searching for data. I had to produce something like 24 reports every month, all of them manual Excel spreadsheets, and I had severe doubts that the information I was getting was even correct, and there was no way for me to know.”
Manual audits were three months out of date, and Ms George concluded compliance had been ignored too long, and that businesses were used to believing “the pain was part of the job”.
“People got used to these ancient ways of how compliance was done and took it as normal, and we said, ‘It can be done better. Don’t accept it.’ ”
She says the regulatory impost is changing fast and warns generic spreadsheets and systems do not address the increasing complexity or the “cost and risk of what is coming your way”. Curium automates “major time-wasters” and uses technology as a “channel for our know-how”.
“We’re not pretending that it’s easy, not sugar-coating anything. We can do most of the work, but you will need to step up,” Ms George says.
“Every single person is the eyes and the ears of the business and we add compliance to people’s life in a way that is easy and understandable.
“We help people change their culture and take this whole fear out of compliance.”
