When I meet James Downes on Leadenhall Street in the heart of London’s insurance district, he is dressed smartly.
But I needn’t feel bad about my trademark BusinessCloud blue hoodie, jeans and trainers; for James wasn’t born in a suit.
“The Blitz was my cohort,” the House of Insurtech founder tells me later, referencing the London club that launched the New Romantic movement in the early 80s and was famed for the eclectic homemade fashion styles of its denizens.
Those Covent Garden Tuesdays helped launch the careers of Spandau Ballet and Boy George. When David Bowie visited, he recruited ‘Blitz kids’ to feature in his Ashes to Ashes video.
More on Bowie later. As for the Blitz, it was where James found a home.
“I was expelled from school; went to France for six months and worked on boats; then came back and pretty much moved straight up to London in a bedsit somewhere,” he recalls over coffee. “I was working at Harrods and really didn’t know anybody at all.
“I never really fit in. I still don’t fit in. That was why going to the Blitz was really good: none of us judged each other. We were all as wacky and wild and bizarre and glorious as we were. It didn’t matter.
“I’d dye my hair black with blond roots… then go to work the next day!”
Founder Friday
We are meeting as part of my Founder Friday series, where I try to understand what drives the founder behind a business.
“My deep technical expertise is computer networks,” says James. “I’m a completely unqualified techie! I left school with no qualifications and ended up working in the City for a data provider. That was how I accidentally fell into computers.”
After a venture creating computer systems for small businesses didn’t work out, he launched BDMedia in 1995 alongside the nascent ‘world wide web’.
“It started out as a technical agency but then we merged with a traditional marketing business, effectively becoming a digital marketing agency,” he says of what would become Pancentric. “We did email search, websites, tools, protocols, PPC (pay-per-click).”
James performed several roles in Pancentric, including CTO; finance, HR and legal director; and strategy and consultancy director.
“I’m supposed to be a techie, but by the 2010s I was running design workshops. I’m not a designer, but I can do all of these things!” he says. “It helps me as an entrepreneur now because you have to do everything in the early days.”
Autism
After leaving in 2018, his whole life was put into context – to use his own words – when he was diagnosed as autistic.
“Most of my issues have always been around communication; so yeah, it was interesting. I can look back now and understand why I was expelled from school.
“I can remember one interview, for an insurance company, where I made the mistake of arguing with the interviewer because they were wrong about something. If people are wrong about things that are facts – that aren’t contentious – then I’m not very good at saying ‘okay, whatever’.”
“So there I was, almost 60 years of age, without a job or a pension – and three kids in their early teens to support.
“Getting a job was impossible because I’m quite unemployable: my range of skills is not specific enough! I can do project management, innovation… I’m not really technical anymore because I stopped doing that such a long time ago. I couldn’t even get an interview.”
So out of necessity he returned to entrepreneurship, and House of Insurtech was born.
House of Insurtech
“Why is it so hard to buy insurance online? Why are the customer experiences so bad?” asks James, a long-time advocate for human-centric design.
“You have to follow the question sets that the underwriting engines ask, in the order that they ask them – so the customer experience is being driven by the underlying software. So my starting point was: can we build some software that gives you the premium and rates the risk, without imposing sequence?
“We built an underwriting engine that is declarative rather than procedural. It might be a website, it might be a mobile app, it might be embedded in another journey – we don’t care. Its job is to collect facts about the risk of a proposer and then call our API with those facts; we’ll then work out the premium, in one go.”
The next question was: what if somebody wants to buy a policy?
“So we added on eCommerce; then we had to do documents; we had to save those somewhere; then we had to be able to do MTAs (mid-term adjustments); renewals; and cancellations…
“Before we knew it, we were building out the entire stack!”
Funded by friends, family and some seed investment from SFC Capital, James was joined by co-founder Nigel Coppen, who had spent more than two decades steeped in insurance at Vantage.
By then working with a development house in Belgrade – indeed, James returned from Serbia the day before we meet – the post-COVID funding landscape pushed them to launch and they secured their first client in 2023.
“It was a disaster for anyone trying to raise any money – basically everybody closed their wallets,” he recounts. “So we went: okay, fine, let’s go and find clients. And that’s what we did.”
Those clients include Integra, the home and church insurance specialist, and Lockton.
At the core of the offer today is Insurforce, effectively a no-code platform allowing clients to build their product, integrations and documentation in the cloud. And if they are not able to configure it themselves, House of Insurtech can offer those services.
“Our Insurforce platform is more modern than others in the market, which were built for a different world,” says James of his InsurTech 50 company.
He continues: “I can’t imagine what I’d do if I wasn’t doing this. How lucky am I that I can be building this platform?”
Ziggy Stardust
Back to Bowie: James went to see the iconic artist on the last Ziggy Stardust tour at the Guildford Civic Hall.
“It was the gig before he killed Ziggy,” he says with some emotion. “He sang Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide. Those words were a big thing for me.
“Oh no, love – you’re not alone… give us your hands, because you’re wonderful.”