Pitch Pact in one sentence?
Pact™ new automated Claims as a Service (CaaS) platform takes insurance claims from weeks to minutes.
How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
A few years ago, my parents booked a holiday of a lifetime going to Sri Lanka. Sadly, the night before, on Father’s Day, my father died from an unexpected heart attack.
To save my mother the trauma and give her the opportunity to grieve, one of my many jobs was to take charge of the insurance claim. It’s a process you absolutely do not want to be doing when you’re grieving. It was incredibly stressful.
It took 12 weeks and constant communication through telephone, email, physical letters and filling out physical documentation to resolve the claim.
In the 21st century this is an archaic process that today’s technology allows us to streamline, reduce costs, bring confidence and disrupt an industry.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
Difficult, there were a lot of ups and downs, as every entrepreneur knows, but it those that made me and the company what it is today. The journey of an entrepreneur is a real roller coaster.
Where do you see your industry going?
Kicking and screaming in to the 21st century. The old guard are trying their hardest not to use technology, however with the reinvention of banking it’s finally too late to put this off. Pact™ is helping insurers, brokers and underwriters finally utilise technology to remove its customers pain points.
If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Learn to love failure. Nobody’s perfect. In fact, the lucky people are the ones who fail early and often, setting the stage for recovering from missteps and learning from their mistakes. Remember, behind every mogul, scientist, inventor and artist lies a string of failures. It’s usually on the 3rd try that you succeed. Mark Zuckerberg, as an example, failed with CourseMatch and FaceMash before succeeding with Facebook.
Learn to love failure.
When it's all over, how do you want to be remembered?
An advocate for what it’s truly like to be an entrepreneur. At present young people are only seeing the amazing ‘ups’ from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and don’t understand the trials you go through to make a successful business, let alone become a Billionaire. This has caused an increase in people becoming entrepreneurs for a quick ‘buck’, which isn’t reality and has seen suicides in new entrepreneur’s surge.
Which company (other than your own) do you admire and why?
Microsoft, they made a lot of mistakes with the Zune and Windows Mobile, however even missing two of the biggest revolutions they continued to grow, dominate and re-engineer themselves. I especially like the CEO Satya Nadella and his philosophy of empathy within the organisation. It’s domination of the cloud, alongside Amazon, shows how forward thinking they were when others were thinking about the here and now.
Microsoft are also very kind to start-ups and Pact™ has been fortunate enough to have graduated from some of their start-up programs.
In my spare time I like to…
Travel the world visiting some of the world’s top restaurants.
What is your favourite quote?
“The two most important days of our lives is the day we were born and the day we find out why we were born.” – Mark Twain