Munich Has More Insurtechs Tied to It Than Silicon Valley Does

Roger Peverelli and his DIA co-founder Reggy started as strategy consultants advising the biggest names in European insurance — Zurich, Allianz, Munich Re among them — on digital and data transformation. Their founding observation: banks were structurally years ahead of insurers in understanding and applying fintech, and insurance had a genuine gap to close. Rather than just advising individual carriers privately, they decided to build something that directly connected insurance executives with insurtech leaders — the first event ran in Barcelona and clearly struck a nerve, which turned a consulting side project into DIA (Digital Insurance Agenda) as a genuine business.

By this recording, DIA had run its fourth Amsterdam edition and fourth Munich edition, with a planned return to Barcelona for its 10th edition the following year — closing the loop back to where it started. Days before this Amsterdam event, Clarion Events took a majority stake in DIA — the same company that owns ITC.

In Episode 80 of InsurTechTalk, Roger and I covered why Munich has an outsized concentration of insurtech activity relative to its size, the four distinct “waves” of insurtech theme he’s tracked across a decade of DIA events, and how the Clarion acquisition is expanding DIA’s footprint across Europe and beyond.

About Roger Peverelli

Roger Peverelli is co-founder of Digital Insurance Agenda (DIA), a European insurtech conference series he built with Reggy de Feniks after years as a strategy consultant advising major insurers (Zurich, Allianz, Munich Re among them) on digital transformation. DIA’s flagship events run in Amsterdam and Munich, with plans to expand to Barcelona, London, Paris, Milan, Tel Aviv, and Dubai following Clarion Events’ majority acquisition of the company. DIA is based in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Why Munich, Specifically

I asked Roger to explain something genuinely surprising he’d mentioned: that Munich, by some measures, has more insurtechs connected to it than Silicon Valley does. His explanation centers on geography and concentration: Allianz and Munich Re are headquartered on the same street in Munich, and both invest heavily in insurtech — not just financially, but through active presence across global insurtech ecosystems, including Asia and the US. His broader point: these two institutions aren’t just deploying capital passively — they’re genuinely committed to using insurtech both to improve existing business lines and to build entirely new business models, a commitment that concentrates real insurtech activity around Munich in a way that isn’t obvious from outside Europe.

The Festival Vibe, By Design

Roger was specific about what attendees consistently cite as DIA’s differentiator: it deliberately avoids the generic hotel-ballroom conference format. Venues are chosen specifically for atmosphere — a former factory space, or in Munich’s case, an actual film studio complex — precisely to create a different energy than a standard industry event. He and Reggy also position themselves as genuinely personal hosts rather than distant organizers, spending real time in direct conversation with attendees about their actual challenges — which, in turn, directly informs which insurtechs and speakers get invited on stage the following year.

His own measure of engagement is telling: across a typical two-day DIA event, Roger estimates he spends roughly one hour total actually sitting in session content — the rest of his time is spent in the networking areas, which he considers where the real value of the event actually gets created. His framing of DIA’s real success metric: the number of genuine smiles on attendees’ faces, not attendance figures alone.

Four Waves of Insurtech, Tracked From the Stage

This was the most substantive analytical framework in the conversation, built directly from a decade of watching what actually got discussed on stage and in the hallways at DIA events.

• Wave one: Challengers. Early DIA events featured startups explicitly positioned to disrupt incumbents. The effect Roger observed in the networking areas: genuine urgency among insurance executives — a real sense that they could no longer “hit the snooze button” on digital transformation
• Wave two: Enablers. The natural response wave — insurtechs shifted from positioning themselves as disruptors to building technology explicitly meant to help incumbents change, rather than replace them. Roger’s current estimate: roughly 95-99% of the insurtechs in DIA’s database today fall into this enabler category. The dominant hallway conversation during this wave, still ongoing: how do we actually scale past pilot programs? He shared a pointed quote from an insurtech that told him directly it no longer wanted to participate in additional insurer pilots — describing some incumbents as being on a “pilot safari,” running numerous parallel pilots primarily to build internal skills rather than genuinely committing to scale any specific partnership
• Wave three: Ecosystem thinking. Borrowed and adapted from a trend Roger and Reggy had already observed in banking — insurers exploring collaboration with adjacent industries, not just insurtech vendors directly. This produced a genuine split in the room: some incumbents insisted they already had an ecosystem (brokers, claims assessors, body shops) and saw limited additional opportunity; others saw ecosystem thinking as a genuinely massive opportunity to create new customer value
• Wave four: Social purpose. The most recent wave Roger identified, where insurtechs are increasingly positioned to help incumbents address broader social and environmental challenges — waste, energy, climate change — not purely as a compliance or CSR exercise, but as genuine product and business opportunity

His important caveat: these waves haven’t been sequential and discrete in practice — waves two, three, and four are all happening simultaneously in the current environment, which is part of what makes the space genuinely complex to track right now.

Three Structural Trends Shaping the Next Incumbent Generation

Roger identified three specific, tangible forces he believes should shape how insurers think about product and relevance going forward:

• Health awareness accelerated by the pandemic — reflected concretely in rising Fitbit and Apple Watch adoption for personal health tracking, a trend he expects to remain durable rather than pandemic-specific
• Where and how people live and work — the shift toward hybrid and remote work has driven real investment in smart home technology, and correspondingly changed personal auto mileage patterns, both with direct underwriting implications
• Elevated geopolitical uncertainty and misinformation — Roger connected this directly to insurers’ role during the pandemic specifically, noting that many health insurers were functionally “silenced” toward their own customers during COVID, unable to proactively guide policyholders on what to do or where to go — a gap he believes accelerated internal recognition that digital transformation urgency was real, even though most insurers remain mid-transition, with the gap between customer expectation and actual delivery still widening rather than closing

A Direct, Local Look at the Cost-of-Living Crisis

Roger grounded the broader economic uncertainty conversation in a specific, sobering local statistic: in the Netherlands — a wealthy nation by any standard — the number of people expected to fall into poverty was projected to nearly double the following year, driven by rising energy and living costs, with inflation running above 10% (a level unseen in roughly 30 years at the time). He noted the disproportionate exposure across Europe specifically: the Netherlands itself has relatively low direct dependency on Russian energy, but Germany’s dependency ran above 50%, with similarly heavy exposure in Italy — meaning the crisis Roger describes as increasingly “tangible in people’s wallets” varies sharply by country even within the EU.

His pointed framing of insurance’s role in that environment: insurers obviously can’t cover the underlying cost increases themselves, but rising awareness of genuine financial fragility is increasing recognition of the need for protection — with independent contractors across Europe (a population he flagged as historically underinsured) specifically named as a group needing more attention as conditions worsen.

Cyber as the Clearest Case for Incumbent-Insurtech Collaboration

Asked where collaboration between incumbents and insurtechs is most clearly necessary rather than optional, Roger pointed directly to cyber. His reasoning: certain insurtechs have spent years building deep, specialized competency in this single narrow category, accumulating skills and assets most incumbents simply don’t have in-house and can’t reasonably expect to build from scratch fast enough to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape. His blunt framing: collaboration in cyber specifically isn’t optional — an insurer trying to go it alone in this category risks becoming genuinely outdated.

Investment Maturity: From Startup Excitement to Scale-Up Discipline

Roger connected the funding environment shift directly to the same “enabler” maturation he’d described earlier. Venture capital in the space has visibly shifted from broad early-stage startup investment toward scale-up and consolidation-focused capital, prioritizing keeping existing portfolio companies healthy over funding new, unproven ideas. He drew a direct parallel to what incumbents themselves increasingly want: insurers, having gone through their own pilot-heavy phase, are now similarly gravitating toward mature insurtechs with genuine track records — because, in his words, you simply can’t let a core operational process depend on an early-stage startup’s continued survival. His honest acknowledgment of the tradeoff: this maturation makes the space somewhat less exciting in terms of novel, scrappy ideas emerging from someone’s garage, but it reflects an industry genuinely maturing rather than declining.

The Clarion Acquisition and What It Unlocks

Roger described the Clarion Events majority stake, announced just days before this Amsterdam event, as a deliberate scale decision — recognizing that reaching the next level of impact required capabilities DIA didn’t have internally. Concrete near-term benefits he named: five new UK-based colleagues joining immediately (bringing the team to 18 total), and access to competencies across marketing, website conversion, and event formatting drawn from Clarion’s broader portfolio of 200-plus global conferences. The expansion roadmap: beyond the existing Amsterdam and Munich flagships, DIA planned events across Barcelona, London, Paris, Milan, and — notably — Tel Aviv and Dubai, extending well beyond DIA’s original two-city European footprint.

Advice: Meet People, Reassess Your Strategy

Asked for a closing recommendation, Roger’s answer circled back to the same theme underlying the entire conversation: the real value of attending isn’t the stage content, it’s meeting people — old friends and new ones — since peers across the industry are generally wrestling with the same underlying challenges. His practical framing: attending an event like DIA is a genuine opportunity to reassess your own strategy and adjust plans for the year ahead, informed by conversations that happen far more candidly at the bar than in a formal session.

Key Takeaways

• Munich’s concentration of insurtech activity stems directly from Allianz and Munich Re’s shared physical proximity and genuinely committed investment posture, not coincidence — a data point worth knowing for anyone assuming Silicon Valley or London dominate insurtech geography by default
• Roger’s four-wave framework (challengers, enablers, ecosystem thinking, social purpose) offers a useful lens for tracking how insurtech’s value proposition to incumbents has genuinely evolved, though the waves now overlap simultaneously rather than proceeding sequentially
• Roughly 95-99% of insurtechs in DIA’s database now position themselves as enablers of incumbents rather than disruptors — a structural shift worth internalizing when evaluating how any given company frames its own market positioning
• Scaling past pilot programs remains a persistent, unresolved challenge years into the “enabler” wave — some incumbents run parallel pilots primarily to build internal skills rather than genuinely committing to any single scaled partnership
• Cyber insurance represents one of the clearest cases where incumbent-insurtech collaboration is structurally necessary rather than optional, given how deep and narrow the required technical competency has become
• Venture investment maturation toward scale-ups mirrors incumbents’ own shift toward preferring mature, track-record-backed insurtech partners over early-stage bets for core operational dependencies
• Real geopolitical and economic uncertainty (the 2022 European energy crisis, near-doubling poverty projections in wealthy nations like the Netherlands) is a genuine, near-term driver of renewed insurance relevance and protection awareness, not an abstract industry talking point