The day before I interview Ernesto Suarez for Founder Friday, London is ablaze with sunshine.
By the time we meet at Hyde Park for a ‘run and talk’, the rain is coming down under heavy grey skies. Ernesto may have grown up in the Miami heat – but it would take a great deal more than the UK’s changeable spring weather to dampen his enthusiasm.
“I love seeing everyone having an impact on my business,” the Gigasure founder and CEO tells me later in our run. “And they need to know it, too.
“Everybody’s got to be aligned in the startup phase to exceed the targets, to deliver on the promise. That’s the best part of building a business: the period where you get excited for someone coming to a meeting and delivering to you what a web page is going to look like; what the product can do; or what the technology can solve.
“It’s all so exciting. It’s kind of like a dopamine hit – just like running.”
Ernesto should know: he is the only Salvadoran to run all seven Abbott World Marathon Majors. “I think really good while I’m having a run – it takes me out [of the business] and I create a lot of empathy in my thinking,” he explains.
“It’s something the industry has only just started to talk about, but I’ve always been a very empathetic leader in my businesses. I look after my teams; I have to personally enjoy who I work with; and they need to know that.
“But I also love it when my team is built of people that are smarter than I am at their field, because I lean on them.”
Competitive advantage
Born in Paris with business studies in Boston and Barcelona behind him, Ernesto started out working on Wall Street. “I wasn’t actually looking for a job in insurance – it just happened. I joined AIG and spent the first 10 years of my true financial services career there.
“That’s where I picked up a lot of my insurance know-how and accreditations. It was a necessary period for me to also learn the industry.”
Settling in London, where he grew AIG’s personal lines division from scratch, he says he was always looking for an opportunity to build something. The experience with AIG was a competitive advantage in starting his own ventures, starting with Halo Insurance Services, as he understood both sides of the value chain.
“When you start your own business for the first time, you’re also learning how to raise capital; who to partner with; how to build your team,” he says. “At AIG I was already managing a large team, so I had the confidence that I could build one at a startup. I felt like I was on top of everything as we built Halo.
“The traits you learn in a corporate are very critical, I think, when you start a business: it also brings that discipline of going to work, of doing reports, generating insight and understanding, and being accountable.”
His previous experience was also key to convincing investors to back the firm with patient capital.
“Investors don’t really home in 100% on your idea; they really home in on the person presenting that idea – whether you have the credentials, the trust. It’s like going to an interview.
“But nothing can be done with my businesses if I don’t surround myself with a good team, because insurance is full of specialists, and you need them to guide you through the risk: underwriting risk, product risk.
“If you don’t have a good idea how insurance works, you could end up just providing fallacies of what you’re going to deliver.”
Timing & luck
Halo sold car hire excess insurance which customers understood and at a price point 60% under the prevailing price point.
“Our product became a consumer champion story very easily,” he says. “All the papers would write about people being fleeced and the predominance of fear tactics… and here was the antidote. It was perfect timing.”
Somewhat modestly he says luck, as well as timing, is hugely important to succeed as an entrepreneur.
“I’m getting that same good luck again with Gigasure. But the whole point is reading the room: if you’re good at that, that can transfer into your new venture.”
Having sold Halo to Zurich Insurance Group in 2017, it would become part of the Cover-More group portfolio, with Ernesto appointed UK manager for the latter during his earnout period. By 2023, he was ready to target travel insurance with Gigasure.
“It’s a bit of a continuation of my first business,” he says. “We were thinking of doing travel at Halo, but we never got to do it because we were so busy with the exit purchase; we then tried to get Cover-More to support us, but that wouldn’t fly either.
“I then saw COVID wipe out three-quarters of the travel propositions in the insurance market: it went down from more than 1,200 to about 430. So I knew that when the market picked up again, we would be dealing with less competitors.”
Still speaking easily as we begin the next mile of our run, he continues: “We’d had a very successful exit with Halo and made people a lot of money – but this time I wanted to avoid complicated sources like VC and go private.
“I tapped the people I know in my network. They all supported me. And now I have all my funding through private angels.”
Gigasure
Gigasure, a star of our InsurTech 50 ranking, is redefining how insurance is delivered into the travel industry. Through an app, it provides flexible, customisable, upgradable policies, as well as real-time parametric benefits – a type of insurance that covers the probability of a loss-causing event happening – through GigaShield. Users can access instant payouts for flight and baggage delays.
“My target market was Gen-Zers and Millennials,” says Ernesto. “We decided to build a hero app to support all the self-service needs to manage your policy; and on top of that, make the product more modern and engaging.”
His approach is to partner with companies such as Blink (parametric insurance) and Miss Moneypenny (digital wallet cards). By collaborating with others in the InsurTech ecosystem, Gigasure’s proposition is better than that of everybody else, he says.
“Building a brand was something that I didn’t have a great time doing in my first business, because it was mostly built from search and PPC.
“With this one, we needed a brand identity to establish ourselves as a product in the market that could trade through aggregators.”
Gigasure has around 10 staff and there are several nationalities within the business. Rather than spending crucial money on recruitment agencies, he has reached out to former contacts with specific insurance experience to build a highly productive team.
“An entrepreneurial journey is very personal, and you don’t want to mix those personal goals with what the business needs operationally,” he acknowledges.
“For me personally, I want to continue testing new technologies into insurance to see what’s possible. But you want to keep it practical.
“With AI, for example, some people are on the bandwagon; some are not; and I’m somewhere in between. We’re a distribution business, and there’s nothing better in insurance than building relationships – so people are still key.
“With AI, while you’re a startup, you don’t have to prove yourself; whereas if you’re Direct Line and you’ve got millions and millions of policyholders, it could do something more impactful.”
Before leaving the cold behind in favour of a warm Notting Hill cafe, Ernesto tells me he is planning to run the New York City Marathon with his son this year. What time does he expect this 22-year-old to set, I ask?
“Under three hours: I hope to spend some time with him in the pen before the start because I won’t see him after that!”