With over two decades of experience spanning traditional insurance giants and agile Insurtech startups, Simon Glairy has a unique vantage point on the industry’s evolution. His expertise in AI-driven risk assessment and digital transformation makes him the ideal voice to deconstruct one of the sector’s most significant recent leadership moves. In this conversation, we explore the strategic implications of Tide’s appointment of a new insurance CEO, touching on the fusion of banking and insurance, the challenges of global product localization, the transformative potential of embedded AI, and the metrics that will ultimately define success in the competitive SME protection market.
From your perspective as an industry analyst, the appointment of Dan McNally, with his background spanning RSA, brokers, and the AI firm Cytora, seems incredibly deliberate. What specific market gap do you believe Tide is targeting with this hire, and how does this unique blend of experience potentially give them an edge that other players lack?
It’s a masterstroke, really. For years, the SME insurance space has been caught in a frustrating tug-of-war. On one side, you have the legacy insurers like RSA, who have deep underwriting knowledge but are often hampered by clunky technology and a one-size-fits-all product mentality. On the other, you have insurtechs who are brilliant at user experience but sometimes lack the deep industry relationships or the data to price risk accurately. McNally has lived in all those worlds. He understands the institutional mindset of a major carrier, the distribution challenges from his broker network days, and crucially, the power of data from his time at Cytora. The gap Tide is aiming for is the seamless, intelligent integration of insurance into the daily workflow of a small business. They’re betting that by having someone who speaks all three “languages”—insurance, distribution, and AI—they can build a protection model that isn’t just another tab in an app, but a core, value-added part of their business management platform.
The announcement emphasizes integrating “connected insurance” directly into the Tide app. Can you walk us through what that ideal user journey might look like for a small business owner, and what specific data points could be used to make the coverage both tailored and genuinely less of an administrative headache?
Absolutely. Imagine you’re a freelance graphic designer who uses Tide for banking. The traditional journey involves filling out long, tedious forms, often guessing at your annual revenue or potential liabilities. The “connected” journey flips this on its head. The Tide app already knows your verified income, the nature of your transactions, and even the clients you work with. When you go to get professional indemnity insurance, the application could be 90% pre-filled. It might ask you to confirm a few details, but the heavy lifting is done. The key data points would be transaction volume, industry classification codes from your payments, and perhaps even business spending patterns. For example, if the app sees you’ve just purchased expensive new computer equipment, it could proactively suggest increasing your contents insurance. This transforms insurance from an annual chore into a dynamic, real-time safety net, dramatically cutting down the time and mental energy business owners have to spend on it.
Tide has vast, distinct member bases in the UK and India, with plans for Germany. How can a company create “region-ready” products that feel local while maintaining a unified global strategy, and what’s a specific challenge you foresee in that adaptation process?
This is the billion-dollar question for any global fintech. The key is building a flexible, modular technology platform at the core, but allowing for significant localization at the product and distribution level. The global strategy is about the “how”—a unified, digital-first, data-driven experience. The local execution is about the “what.” A perfect example of a challenge would be adapting a public liability product for India versus Germany. In India, you might be dealing with a massive market of micro-entrepreneurs and sole traders where the primary need is for a simple, low-cost product that can be purchased in seconds via a mobile phone. The regulatory framework is different, and the risk profile is unique. In Germany, the SME market is characterized by the Mittelstand—often established, family-owned businesses with more complex needs, like supply chain insurance, sophisticated property coverage, and stricter data privacy regulations under GDPR. You can’t just translate the policy wording; you have to re-engineer the product for the local business culture and regulatory environment, all while ensuring the user experience feels consistently “Tide.”
McNally’s experience at Cytora involved applying AI to commercial underwriting. How do you see that expertise being leveraged at Tide to go beyond the basic personalization we often hear about? Can you describe a scenario where AI proactively identifies a member’s changing insurance needs?
This is where things get truly exciting and move past the buzzwords. Basic personalization is using a business’s industry code to offer them a standard package. Advanced, AI-driven insurance is about understanding a business’s trajectory. Let’s take a small e-commerce business that initially only sells within the UK. The AI would establish a baseline of their activity. Then, it might detect a pattern of incoming payments from the United States and shipping expenses to a US-based logistics partner. Instead of waiting for the business owner to realize they now have international exposure, the system could proactively send an alert directly within the Tide app. It might say, “We’ve noticed you’re expanding to the US. Your current liability policy may not cover international sales. Here’s a tailored option to add global product liability coverage with a single click.” This isn’t just selling insurance; it’s acting as a dynamic risk management partner, using data to anticipate needs before the owner even knows they have them.
What is your forecast for Tide Insurance over the next 18-24 months?
My forecast is cautiously optimistic, and success will be measured by more than just the number of policies sold. The real proof will be in the “attachment rate”—what percentage of their nearly 800,000 UK members actually buy an insurance product through the platform. If they can get that number into the double digits, it will be a monumental success and a validation of the embedded model. I’ll also be watching their “time to quote” and “time to bind” metrics; success means getting those down to mere minutes, if not seconds. Finally, customer satisfaction and retention will be critical. If they are truly simplifying protection, we should see higher-than-average Net Promoter Scores and lower churn rates compared to traditional channels. If they hit those marks, they won’t just be another insurance provider; they’ll have fundamentally changed the way small businesses interact with and perceive risk management.
