Anna-Carina Haeusler: Reshaping the future of insurance industry

The insurance industry is a vital component of the global financial and risk management landscape. It helps individuals, businesses, and institutions to mitigate financial risks associated with unexpected incidents. The insurance industry leaders empower both clients and colleagues to contribute to the global economy. They demonstrate exceptional vision, innovation, and strategic thinking to share an unbreakable commitment to advancing in the sector. Anna-Carina Haeusler (Former Managing Director/ Co-Founder of apinity) is leaving an indelible leadership mark in the male-dominated insurance industry. Her passion, resilience, and unparalleled dedication have led to remarkable achievements at apinity.

Right Time and the Right Approach

Anna-Carina started her career at the beginning of 2013 with a company that decided to invent the mobile payment market in Germany, even though 80% of sales transactions at that time were in cash. However, she felt it was exactly the right time and the right approach, so she decided to be a part of that journey.

Three years later, cards accounted for 80% of total retail transactions in Germany. Thereafter, she went into consulting and worked on big digital initiatives like connected cars for BMW. She felt excited when she got a call to help Allianz build a marketplace for APIs in an environment where 90% of all IT services are still on-premises. “It was the right time and the right industry for me to work on the next big transformation,” she adds.

“You Cannot Be Just Super Small“

While climbing the stairs of success, Anna-Carina confronted numerous challenges. Talking about challenges, her partner always advised her to get used to the fact that yesterday was the last easy day. She states a few challenges regarding corporate start-ups. The mechanics are not like in the VC game. The corporate strategy, board members, the existing business, everything matters and comes into play. She elaborates, “You cannot just start super small. You have to be visible if your start-up is in the insurance sector. This industry is based on trust, so you have to be a very reliable partner to be successful in this industry while still maintaining the start-up spirit – not so easy.”

Enjoying the Journey

Anna-Carina has an excellent professional background. She studied logistics at HA Heilbronn, which was sponsored by some impressive German companies like Würth (super successful, still family-owned). In 2013, she started her career at Wirecard, the company that went bankrupt in 2020. Apart from the crash, she really enjoyed the journey.

There were 300 employees when Anna-Carina joined it and when she left in 2017, the company had about 5000 employees. She felt excited to be part of such a high-growth company and learned a lot throughout the journey. She was a part of the newly launched mobile payments division. Her team built, sold, and rolled out the product across Europe, India, and Asia Pacific.

Anna-Carina grew up with super innovative software development in cross-functional, cross-country teams with flat hierarchies and a servant leadership style. After 3.5 years, she left the company to see more different industries and started working for AdEx Partners, a small but high-quality management consulting firm. It was a little conservative step for Anna-Carina when she arrived. However, she was able to bring some spirit and digital vibes to the company and build the digital arm of that organization. One of her last projects was to help Allianz build the Syncier Marketplace, which her team transformed into apinity.

Step by Step during the Pandemic

apinity was founded in 2019 by Allianz SE Insurance Group as a corporate venture Syncier Marketplace. In 2022, it was acquired by Munich Re for strategic reasons and made a re-start as apinity. In the beginning, the company faced various challenges including funding, hiring people, and finding product-market fit. The biggest one of them, however, was the COVID pandemic. Though the company started in 2019, the first growth took place in early 2020.

It was hard to build the company in this situation of uncertainty and lockdown. It hired about 15-20 people during the lockdown. People started working with each other and had to trust each other without ever seeing each other in real-time. Going to market with the product without a roadshow event and live customer pitches was another challenge. However, the company somehow made it. Even today, it is functioning very well!

A Marketplace Tailored for the Insurance Industry

The original vision of the company was to establish a public API marketplace tailored to the insurance industry. Envision it as an advanced app store, a centralized platform where insurers could seamlessly tap into services via API integrations. While apinity’s marketplace provides the platform for offering and accessing services, its capabilities led many businesses to approach customizing their own white-label API marketplaces. It was like a cherry on top.

In more technical terms, while many companies have their own API management systems, apinity serves as an enhancement to these systems. Drawing an analogy from e-commerce, if the API management is the warehouse, its marketplace encompasses the complete overhead – from billing and analytics to delivery and beyond.

apinity’s white-label solutions are used by insurance companies such as Munich Re and ERGO who wanted to add an extra layer to their API management. Moreover, it has enabled a large insurance industry association called BiPRO to build a hub for all the services within its network. The backbone of Synpulse 8’s “open wealth association” is its API marketplace. apinity enables these companies to realize their vision: “To define, maintain and operationalize the Open API standard for a global wealth management community“. apinity has a public API marketplace with services from small to large companies like Telekom MMS.

Ecosystem of Solutions for Customers

apinity is looking forward to offering its customers an ecosystem of solutions. These solutions are present in the marketplace of digital services and on the other hand, white-label SaaS solutions exist. The company wants to connect providers and consumers of digital services via its marketplace solutions. In this way, it supports customers in developing new, customer-oriented products quickly and efficiently. In the future, it will be even closer to customers to develop solutions jointly with them based on its API marketplace. The goal is to establish apinity as a strategic partner in the financial industry.

Long-Term Success in the Future

Describing the growth trajectory, apinity is a four years old corporate start-up. To develop and then sell a product, the company had to grow fast in regard to headcount. Now, it wants to show that it has a reason to be on the market and focus on smart and sustainable growth. That is why its biggest headcount is not in marketing and sales but in the tech department.

According to Anna-Carina, speaking of many years of success would certainly be a bit of an exaggeration. As mentioned earlier, her company was founded in 2019 by Allianz as a corporate venture. In 2022, it was acquired by Munich Re for strategic reasons and made a fresh start as apinity. Nevertheless, she believes in the future long-term success of apinity.

She thinks one of the main reasons behind her success is the diverse team. By hiring the best people for the different tasks, it has become a multifaceted team. It has men and women between the ages of 24 to 60 who come from dozens of different countries. Its managers include both women and men. Having a co-managing director whose skills complement Anna-Carina’s skills and vice versa is another positive point in the long-lasting success of the company.

Maintaining a Competitive Edge

Clear communication plays an important role in building a successful organization. At apinity, Anna-Carina focuses that everyone on board should be aware of the mission, vision, and strategy of the company. If everyone has the same milestones and goals in mind and knows the guidelines, the company will be successful at joining forces. Furthermore, the need for the product stays along with the success of any organization.

In the fast-paced insurance and banking industry of today, APIs play a crucial role in promoting innovation and maintaining a competitive edge. APIs are vital for the advancement of modern finance, whether it involves adopting open insurance or open banking, exploring embedded insurance or banking, or leading an AI initiative. apinity has built the central place for all APIs so insurance and banks are able to turn their APIs into business products.

Flexibilities and Incentives

Post-pandemic, the era of entrepreneurship has changed. apinity has fully embraced the momentum of the home office from the pandemic era, becoming a remote-first company. This has the advantage of recruiting the best minds across Europe. Its employees have the flexibility to work from home. To maintain personal contact, the whole team meets in person once a quarter in Munich. Here, the company defines the roadmap for the next three months in cross-departmental workshops. In addition, it also offers its employees the opportunity to work up to 40 days from abroad per year. It noticed that this flexibility and incentives motivate the employees.

Learning Through Personal Life Experiences

Anna-Carina grew up in a very engaged ‘self-made’ family. Her mother is a politician and realized large construction projects with her own company and her father went all the way up from being a cook to being part of the managing board in a multi-million euro food-retail company. Both without a university degree! So, her biggest learning from this is: “You can do it no matter what!” She focused on learning through personal life experiences and growing as an entrepreneur. Looking back on her journey, Anna-Carina would not give any advice to her younger self because she is quite happy with who she is today and all the decisions she has made along the way.

On the pathway to becoming a leader, few moments had left an impact on her. She received negative feedback from her boss, “You rock, girl, but one thing that is holding you back from brilliant success is your emotional side. You need to put more distance between yourself and the surrounding people, then they will respect you more.” She took it, but she parked it in the corner. It made her realize what kind of leader she wanted to become in the future. She continued being that anyway.

A Strong Team and Personal Health

The team and personal health are two important things for Anna-Carina. By building a team, an entrepreneur gets surrounded by talented and dedicated individuals who complement their skills. A strong team is crucial for executing the vision of an entrepreneur effectively. Anna-Carina emphasizes health as entrepreneurship can be all-consuming. However, it is essential to maintain a work-life balance and prioritize physical and mental well-being.

Being open to new opportunities in the future, Anna-Carina does not have any big plans in her mind right now. She is enjoying what she has in the present. She is looking forward to growing apinity and bringing value to the insurance industry one step at a time and seeing what comes next.

According to Anna-Carina, if a book is written about her life story, the title should be ‘Embrace the surrounding chaos‘. The title should encourage the readers to embrace disorder, uncertainty, and unpredictability in their lives. Instead of always seeking order and control, one can find beauty and excitement in chaotic situations. Anna-Carina learned how to manage the chaos, make her degree, work, build up her sports career, and make music at the same time.

 

Note: The Interview was conducted with CIO Woman Magazine

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API marketplaces in insurance: 7 questions for Martin Thormählen

The CTO’s homework: How to develop new digital business models, customer-centric offerings, and other no-brainers (for the insurance industry). We asked Martin Thormählen 7 questions about his challenges as Chief Technology Officer of Munich Re, the digitalization of the insurance industry, and the associated central role of API marketplaces.

1. What specific challenges does a CTO in the insurance industry currently have to deal with?

At Munich Re, we continuously drive digital transformation throughout the Group and simultaneously develop new business models with innovative partners, both internally and externally. Top of mind is always the clever usage of data – to avoid all buzzwords – to either derive insights or create value-added services.

“Top of mind is always the clever usage of data.”

With my extremely forward-thinking team, as Munich Re’s CTO, I’m all about building new customer-centric offerings while keeping data privacy and compliance at the heart of all undertakings. On the technical layer, we grow our capabilities to connect our solutions with selected partners.

In a nutshell: As CTO I want to ensure at all times that Munich Re is able to leverage data at scale and to onboard new distribution partners or services quickly – 100% secure and compliant, and to offer our services with a seamless experience for customers.

2. How are those challenges connected to Munich Re’s latest investment in the API-Insurtech apinity?

Munich Re decided early that we‘ll need an API Gateway and an API developer portal – globally. Now our list of modern external and internal services has grown as expected. That was why it was the right time to finally invest in apinity to be able to build a professional marketplace and offer our services to our customers. With apinity, we will also establish a better internal developer portal that will not only support usage but additionally foster the creation of new services.

3. As CTO, how does apinity’s API Marketplace solution contribute to the Munich Re strategy?

The Munich Re Group Ambition 2025 will unfurl in accordance with the three guiding principles of Scale, Shape, and Succeed. We set the scale goals to grow the core reinsurance and primary insurance business. Our business colleagues do a fantastic job of making this a reality. In addition, we have set the shape goals to create new digital business models – in insurance and beyond.

“Scale, Shape, and Succeed.”

apinity is a perfect fit for both and a precondition for our successful goals to be an attractive employer where business and IT colleagues find the right services at their fingertips with concise documentation. This will be attractive for our customers too.

4. What opportunities and competitive advantages do you see emerging for other insurance companies (e.g., embedded insurance) due to such API Marketplace solutions?

Insurers create a competitive advantage by exposing relevant APIs in a cyber-secure manner to distribution partners, MGAs, TPAs, or other business partners. For a couple of years, we have known that embedded insurance is one of the most convenient options to get protection seamlessly – in personal lines products like motor, household, travel, gadget, etc. Carriers need to be able to expose their sales journey via APIs.

Some carriers might have on top a huge dataset and can derive values from it. While some data, scoring, risk evaluation, or others will only be used internally and not shared with potential customers, other data-driven services can generate new revenue streams.

“Does your organization know all your internal API´s?”

Everyone’s homework is: Does your organization know all your internal APIs? Have you ever tried to combine them differently? Could you save a lot of money if multiple data capture could be avoided via clever usage of internal APIs? You all know the famous Jeff Bezos memo, right?

5. Why have you decided not to build an API Marketplace solution in-house, and what would you recommend other insurance companies do?

We focus our internal development team on building high-value services, and we avoid having high spending on maintenance efforts. apinity provides us with precisely that: You have done all the heavy lifting of building the marketplace, including metering and billing capabilities, the mandatory cyber and data privacy protection.

“If I were a manager at a primary insurer, I would leverage apinity…”

If I were a manager at a primary insurer, I would leverage apinity and focus on building services, publishing them, nurturing internal usage, and going to market too.

6. APIs can significantly change entire business models. Did you have to convince your non-IT business colleagues to open up to this rather classic IT topic as well?

  • a. And if so, how did you succeed?
  • b. How do you explain the importance of an API marketplace to non-IT colleagues?

 

That’s a great question that takes me back to the beginning of business development: The topic of digital business models, API economy, ecosystem, and more was actually a training course for client managers and underwriters to educate our business units. Today every business unit within Munich Re has business developers. We‘ve built API-driven pricing and underwriting services next to risk scoring services and more. I think it‘s fair to say that the value of APIs and the business potential is nowadays a no-brainer – and we will still write a lot of business without the usage of APIs. We still have a huge potential for much more API-driven revenues.

“I think it´s fair to say that the value of APIs and the business potential is nowadays a no-brainer…”

7. Based on Munich Re’s tech trend radar: What does the insurance world of the future look like?

We had Open APIs, API economy, Digital Ecosystems, and other API-related trends on the Munich Re Technology Trend Radar in previous years. We‘ve set them all to adopted as we had evidence that the industry knows about them – even if it hasn’t been implemented everywhere.

The insurance industry will become even more and more interconnected with its partners. The days of painful data extraction from PDFs with embedded Excel Sheets are definitely coming to an end. In the indispensable “new normal” we‘ll share data via APIs only. The future API Marketplaces will enable a smooth transition from our outdated now to a seamless and frictionless future.

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Note: The interview with Martin Thormaehlen was conducted by Leander Lork, apinity GmbH.

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International Women’s Day: An Interview with our CEO Anna-Carina-Haeusler

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animation_delay=”0″ hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” font_size=”48px” line_height=”64px” letter_spacing=”0px”]International Women’s Day: An Interview with our CEO Anna-Carina-Haeusler[/fusion_title][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”3_4″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_repeat=”no-repeat” margin_top=”-24px” margin_bottom=”0px” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”true” hover_type=”none” background_blend_mode=”overlay” first=”true” type_small=”3_4″ min_height=”” link=””][fusion_text font_size=”16px” line_height=”20px”]

General equality and the right to vote for women were elementary goals when launching the International Women’s Day at the beginning of the 20th century. More than 100 years later, the challenges for women have changed massively. Nevertheless, the tech sector in particular is still male-dominated. We asked one of our women in tech about her experiences of being a woman in a highly competitive industry.

Anna-Carina Haeusler recently became Chief Executive Officer at apinity, the leading platform for API business operations. Prior to this, she worked at Syncier as Director of the marketplace team and as head of product and business. After her studies in Sales and Logistics at Heilbronn University, her drive for modernity led her from modern payment business, via tech consulting, to this challenging role. Digitalization is the linchpin of her story.

Anna-Carina Haeusler, congratulations again on your new role! What exactly do you do at your job, and what does apinity deal with?

apinity is an API business operations platform for the insurance industry. We offer a solution that connects companies and helps them scale, govern and secure their products. With our products, apinity exchange and apinity marketplace, we actively shape the open platform economy and diversity of partnerships in the insurance industry. Everyone is talking about it; we are actually doing it!

 

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“Everyone is talking about it; we are actually doing it“

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I see myself as a Chief Enabling Officer who focuses on developing her 30 employees into leaders who act autonomously, collaborate effectively and are personally committed to the success of the company (by the way, 80% of them are male and older than me). And of course, it is my job to cover all disciplines to a certain extent: from finance, business development, and sales, to HR and marketing.

 

 

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What sparked your interest in the tech industry?

I have a decisive experience in mind. A former supervisor placed his smartphone on a conference table, looked at me, and said, “You’ll soon be using this to conduct all financial transactions.” That was 2013 and a utopian notion for me at the time. Nevertheless, I was immediately interested. I realized that the idea of tech, with its visions, ideas, and speed, is more exciting to me than physical goods. I quickly recognized what tech actually means for our world and our daily lives and how expandable this sector is in Germany. Realizing innovation that no one else has yet imagined has driven me ever since.

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“Realizing innovation that no one else has yet imagined has driven me ever since.”

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Are there any other drastic or formative experiences for you?

How did you deal with them? Being a young woman has proven to be a barrier and a challenge more than once. I can remember one experience in an international setting. I was invited to meet a client as the team lead. It was an initial meeting to get to know each other, but the gentlemen started off by telling me their coffee preferences. Even after explaining that this was not my responsibility, I felt like I was taken less seriously because of my age and gender.

 

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“Reality drives me.”

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Such situations taught me to always rely on myself in the end. Reality drives me. I want to work in real teams, building real products for real customers. This result-oriented approach allows me to overcome many challenges and helps me deal with difficult situations with confidence.

Who are your role models and/or supporters?

First and foremost – super classic – my mom. She taught me to go through life openly and confidently and to draw value from every kind of lifestyle.

Besides that, I find the topic of career role models rather tricky. Many women follow stereotypes: The tough businesswoman or the one who seems to pull it all together alone. I find this image of the career woman outdated. Who is supposed to identify with such perfect women? We need more authenticity and approachability in female role models! A real role model doesn’t always have to manage everything on her own, nor does she have to be excessively tough. Such supposed perfection turns role models into non-role models for me.

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Why aren’t there more women in the tech industry, in your opinion? How can these hurdles be overcome?

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“For me, two aspects are crucial: education and how we treat each other.”

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For me, two aspects are crucial: education and how we treat each other. People who change careers are quite common in the tech industry. In my experience, men are more confident when it comes to daring to try something new. Conversely, women tend to apply only for jobs that fit their profile 100%. Schools and Universities have the obligation of opening people’s eyes and avoiding one-dimensionality. At the same time, companies must be more open in their approach to potential applicants. More transparency creates space for people who do not come from this specific field.

Additionally, more commitment from “Women in Tech” is needed, in my opinion. It seems to me that women set an even higher standard for other women. We need mutual support. Just because one person’s path was rocky, doesn’t mean we should make others go through the same experience. Fighting fire with fire makes no sense. We need to actively stand up for one another.

How important is International Women’s Day to you?

I think International Women’s Day is crucial. Fairness and equal opportunity are elementary to me. On International Women’s Day, these issues find their voice. It allows us to put more power into our statements and to support each other. Especially with women’s unique role in the reproductive process (it’s okay to call a spade a spade), demands for a flexible working environment are fundamental in this context. We still have a long way to go; the journey of gender equality must not stagnate!

What message do you have for young women and girls who are interested in the IT sector?

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“Be brave! IT and tech are playing an essential role in our worls. It´s your choice to be part of that and to be successful.”

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Be brave! IT and tech are playing an essential role in our world. It’s your choice to be part of that and to be successful. No other industry functions so much on diversity and cross-functionality. This area is where women need to be! Network with women who already have experience in the field, write bold applications and tap into the community. If you understand tech, you understand the future!

Note: The interview was conducted by Victoria Durner, Syncier GmbH.

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