EP46 - Change Is Not The Exception. It Never Was.
People talk about change constantly. Talking about it, however, never actually changes anything. The real question is whether change is something new, or whether it has simply always been there and we keep rediscovering it.
In this Episode:
François Jacquemin, an international insurance executive, explores the nature of change in this podcast episode, drawing on historical examples in warfare and leadership, as well as the recent transformation of the automotive industry, before bringing the conversation back to insurance. He explains why the core promise of an insurance contract must remain stable while everything around it evolves, how regulation across global markets is designed to preserve that stability, and what it means for insurers to manage change in a controlled, deliberate way. The episode is aimed at professionals in insurance, financial services, and international distribution who want to understand how to navigate change in a highly regulated, trust-driven industry.
Take the evolution of humanity. Civilizations were not destroyed by bad luck. They collapsed because of climate shifts, hunger, disease, an inability to adapt fast enough. Change was the operating condition, not the exception. One of the moments that shaped how I think about leadership early on was reading about Julius Caesar. Not the political figure, but the commander who, when he saw a weakness forming in his own ranks during a battle, picked up a sword and a shield and went to fight at the front himself. It changed the tide. A small intervention, fast and direct, but it shifted something that mattered.
From battlefields to drones
Look at what has happened in warfare recently. For a long time, the assumption was that power meant large armies, heavy infantry, and big missiles. Then, a country under serious pressure needed a different strategy and developed something nobody was prepared to defend against: large numbers of drones, difficult to intercept, and cheap to produce relative to the cost of countering them. That is not an accident. That is ingenuity born out of constraint. Someone needed a different angle and found one.
I am not making a political point. I am using it because it is one of the clearest recent examples of how real strategic change actually happens. It does not come from comfort.
The Ferrari question
Around the time I recorded this episode, there was a strong reaction online to the new electric Ferrari. I found it worth sitting with, not as a car buyer, but as someone who thinks about what people are actually purchasing when they buy something like that. Because when you buy a Ferrari, you are not really buying a car. You are buying prestige, emotion, noise, a feeling, a way of spending a weekend, and an association with decades of racing history. The objective reasons exist too, since Ferraris tend to hold or increase in value, but the emotional layer comes first, by a long distance.
So when a brand that has built its entire identity on that emotional layer makes a shift as fundamental as going electric, the reaction is not just about the engine. It is about whether the signal still carries. Whether the thing people were actually buying is still there. Some design decisions that were poorly received at the time later became iconic. Others simply did not work. It is too early to say which this will be. But it raised something I keep thinking about in the context of my own industry: what happens when what you sell is not a product but a promise?
The promise that cannot change
In insurance, what a client buys is not a contract. It is a commitment. They hand over money today and trust that in 10, 20, 30, sometimes 50 years, when something goes wrong, or a pension needs to be drawn, that commitment will still be standing. That is what they are buying. Security. Trust in something that has not happened yet.
That promise cannot change. Not should not. Cannot. The moment it does, the foundation is gone. Governments around the world have understood this, which is precisely why the industry is so heavily regulated everywhere. In Europe, we sometimes complain about regulation, but the US framework is not simple either, operating at both the state and federal levels. Chinese legislation is extremely strict. Whatever the cultural context or where you are, the insurance element remains regulated. That is not a coincidence. It is the architecture of trust, written into law, because the industry understood long before any regulator put it on paper that stability is the product.
Everything around the promise moves constantly
The promise is fixed. Everything around it is in permanent evolution.
Cyber risk barely existed as a meaningful category not long ago. Today, every insurer has to quantify, model, monitor, and prepare for it. Because everyone operates digitally, the exposure is enormous. Legislation has adapted. Risk categories have expanded. Pricing has shifted. Distribution has changed. None of that touches the core commitment, but all of it shapes how that commitment is protected and fulfilled.
The law itself evolves as the environment changes, and insurers have to adapt without compromising what they are there to protect. At the international level, the complexity multiplies because you are managing not one set of rules but several simultaneously, each with its own requirements and timelines.
Changing without feeling like you are
What I find genuinely interesting about this industry is that it changes constantly without appearing to do so. There is no big announcement, no dramatic reinvention. The change is deliberate, assessed, and controlled. You do not disrupt a value chain here. You examine where the pressure is, identify where change is necessary, prepare for the imbalance it will create, and manage that imbalance carefully. An imbalance in insurance is not just an operational problem. It is a potential failure to deliver on a promise, and that is the one thing you cannot allow.
When you are trying to bring non-insurance partners into the picture, banks, family offices, and asset managers, you have to do two things at once: show that you are evolving, and show that the evolution is under control. Both matter equally. A partner who sees no movement will question your relevance. A partner who sees instability will question your reliability. The work lives in that balance.
Risk management for everyone
The insurance sector is arguably the most sophisticated risk management operation in existence. Every other industry does some version of risk management. We do it for all of them, and for ourselves at the same time. Within that scope, constant change is not a disruption. It is simply the job.
Timecode:
00:00 Why Change Matters
00:13 History of Adaptation
00:37 Leadership in Action
01:27 War Strategy Evolves
03:46 Tech Disruption Example
03:49 Ferrari Goes Electric
06:30 What You Buy in Insurance
07:58 Promises and Regulation
09:35 Changing Risk Landscape
11:28 Controlled Change in Insurers
13:28 Risk Management Conclusion
François Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
So the good old topic change. It's a good old topic because speaking about change doesn't change. We always speak about that. Does it mean that change is the new normal? I think change has always been there in the... Let's take the evolution of humanity. It's very clear that things are changing all the time. As the weather is changing, so people have to adapt. Civilizations are destroyed because of climate change, because of situational change, because of hunger, because of sickness. Simply take the example I used, or one of the moments in my youth where I was inspired to lead, or by a leader, let's say first, was Julius Caesar, who was not staying in the back during a battle. But when he saw that there was a weakness in his ranks, he took a sword and a shield and went to fight with his men in front of the battle and changed the tide of the battle. At least this is what is written. That's one moment where he made a change. It's very, very simple, very short change, but it changed something. So that's one of the changes. Let's take the evolution of warring. I don't want to be negative here, but people will probably know when this has been taken when they look at this podcast in 15 years. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the way of podcasting will be so different and then nobody will look at those type of podcasts anymore. So maybe change will already be impacting us, or will impact us at some point. But no, joke apart, the art of war, like they write or they say, which is basically terrible, but is always an evolution. A few years ago, we thought that big missiles and big infantry and big armies were important. Then World War I, World War II, different conflicts have taken place, guerrilla. So things are changing, people are adapting, strategies are adapting and now we see that big missiles are not important because it costs a lot of money to hedge against those missiles. So, we create armies of drones that are sent almost every year on the enemies, and it's very difficult to fight against that because we were not prepared. And why did that happen? Because a country was simply under pressure to develop a new strategy to adapt, to defend itself or to attack other countries. I mean, I just don't want to do politics here. I just want to use this drastic change in the way wars were strategized and presented recently and how that was impacted by creativity and ingenuity from some people to create a different angle, to create a competitive advantage. I mean, can we say that in war? Maybe. Sadly is business and war... Is business war?
Business is certainly competition and very fierce competition. So, let's use the term, yes. So changes are happening, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, but it's becoming some form of norm in almost everywhere. We see that with technology as well. About technology, again, people will probably know when this podcast was taken because yesterday there was a big outcry about this Ferrari, electric Ferrari that's been presented. I'm not sure about that. That is a big change, I must say. For me, seeing it from... I'm not a Ferrari driver, obviously. I'd love to. I don't know if I want to have that new one. The change is so drastic. The feeling is drastic. I mean, what do you buy when you buy a Ferrari? I would think that you buy prestige, you buy fun, you buy emotion, you buy the noise, you buy a way of life, you buy a nice weekend out or... But you get something, and it's about emotion. It's about something that's been there for such a long time. You buy the race, you buy so many things that are, you know, on the emotional level much before any objective way of why would you buy a Ferrari. Although there's some objective way there as well because if you buy a Ferrari, usually the value doesn't go down, it goes up. So, sometimes it could be seen as an investment. But when I see this drastic change they've made, moving to electric cars, which basically is the society is moving there, and so why not? That's—you go with the flow. It's fine, I would say. Although you need to reinvent yourself to create the emotions I mentioned before. And actually, they reinvented themselves. They created a lot of emotion, and it's probably too early now to say if that's a pivot in the way sports cars are designed and seen, et cetera. But what I see my emotion, when I see my emotion or the emotion I've seen on Insta also, I don't think that it's very positive. So we'll see in the future. And let's be honest—it's not the first car, sports car, that a big brand, a designer brand like Ferrari who has very specific design shapes and so on is creating, and that some of them have been received well in the past. Some of them have not been received well in the past. If you get a look or the chance to have a look at the '50s or the '60s at cars that were developed, I mean, let's be honest, not all of them were so lucky. Some of them were trendsetting, weren't liked at the beginning but became a brand. So let's see what's coming here. Now looping back to insurance. Oh my God, you know, from Ferrari to insurance, this is a big jump in terms of emotion, why you buy insurance and so on. And I'm going to just say one thing about talking about change here. What you buy when you buy an insurance contract, you buy not the product itself. You buy a change or a security that you will have for your health or for your pension in the future, or if you have investment, you buy also there an environment that gives you a level of security, the possibility to do things with that contract, generation management, prepare for your pension, making sure that you have money in the long term. States are sometimes promoting those insurance. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes the state doesn't have a pension system or very small pension system, and an insurance becomes necessary. Or states say, "Oh my God, that's very expensive in my pension system, so maybe I should promote something else." And insurance is, because of the long term and the approach, an industry of choice where pension can be outsourced or part of it at least. But there, you're buying security, and you need to have trust in the system.
You buy this promise, and you need to trust that this promise will be there in 10, 15, 30, 40, 50 years. So you can't have a big change in the insurance industry. It's de facto the promise that an insurer is going to give. It cannot change. You can't change a promise. It's a commitment. You receive money as insurer, and you commit to do something, and that commitment is the hard product that you sell. It can be whatever insurance product, whatever you insure. But it's security. This promise cannot change. And the law of the states, the legislators in all the countries around the world have understood that, so that's why they create set of laws. Of course, in Europe, we complain about the regulation, but make no mistake, the US regulations are not very funny either. And they also have two levels, per state and then at federal level. The Chinese legislation is very constraining, very strict. And by that I mean that wherever you are, whatever the culture of a country is, the insurance element remains regulated. The industry is regulated. Distribution is sometimes a bit more, a bit less regulated. But all that regulation is there. So not only the insurance companies have understood that they need to be stable in the long term, but the states have also understood that. Now, once you understand this, and you can't change your promise, the way you deliver the promise, the way you create efficiency for your promise, the way you price your promise can—if you're efficient, you can have the same promise as the next-door insurer, but then cheaper or with better service, with better transparency. So in insurance industry, there's a lot of changes. First, the law changes all the time because the environment changes, and insurers need to adapt to their environment. So if you have insurance on paper like a long time ago, cyber risk, who cares? But now cyber risk is part of what we as insurer need to hedge against. It's a risk. We need to quantify it, but because we all work with digital tools, then it's a very big risk. Therefore, legislations are there for us to monitor and prepare the action to prevent the risk, mitigation, but also to prepare in case such a risk is materialized, what do we do? And that's a change. The promise was no change, but the way we protect our promise is in constant evolution. It's not big evolution, but it is there. So for us, the change is actually intentional. It exists at local and international level. It's even more important at international level because we monitor and we have to adapt on not one set of rules, but several sets of rules, which increases the risk. So it is very important for us that we are prepared to change, and we are constantly in that change. So how do we live that? Do we consider ourselves as a trend startup feeling funky industry that can just big bang themselves into doing something new all the time? No. We don't feel like we change, but we actually are changing and adapting all the time, and that's very important. Whatever you do in an insurance company or when you develop a new element in your value chain to support something new, a new product, a new strategy, if you want to convince non-insurance stakeholders in the distribution, for instance, banks, family offices, asset managers, then you need to do two things: demonstrate that you change, demonstrate that the changes are controlled. You need to internally for your own stakeholders also promote the change, but you cannot big bang your value chain completely.
So the elements that are changing everywhere, before doing the change, you need to prepare. You need to assess also where you are going to push for the change because if you change anything, you create an imbalance. An imbalance in insurance is a potential for an inability to deliver on one promise or part of the promise, which is something that we don't want to do. So the trust is built by creating the stability, but also accepting in that stability that there's going to be an element of change, and this element of change will be mastered at the end of the day. Insurance companies, the insurance industry are the masters of risk management. All the other industries do risk management, but we do risk management for all of them and for us at the same time. Even the US Army doesn't have a risk management department as strong as the one of the whole insurance industry combined. So we do that, and within those constraints, constant change.