12 Questions with Tim Wright
Welcome to 12 Questions, a Q&A series where we pose the same set of 12 questions to intriguing folks at the intersection of insurance, risk management, commercial real estate, and digital innovation.
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This week, we chat with Tim Wright, Senior Advisor & Director at Archipelago!
1. What is the most interesting idea you’ve encountered in your world lately?
I am intrigued by the potential to create a digital wholesale broker that connects non-standard risks anywhere in the world to specialist insurance capital globally at a fraction of the current cost.
2. Where do you think no one is looking right now?
The insurance industry has, for some time, suffered from a market failure; despite being overcapitalized, a substantial majority of insurable risks remain uninsured or underinsured.
3. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your industry?
I would love to make the insurance industry a magnet for young talent, given its purpose of facilitating enterprise and its potential for personal and professional development.
4. What’s the most rewarding part of what you do?
I love working with smart people to translate great ideas into new businesses; just a couple of years ago, neither Archipelago nor McGill existed and today they are thriving businesses.
5. What do you envision the next 12 months will bring?
It is my sincere hope that the coming 12 months will bring a resumption of some kind of normality, enlightened by the experience of the past 12 months and liberating an explosion of energetic creativity.
6. What’s your favorite building?
King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England, has been my favourite building since escaping the library while studying in Cambridge many years ago. It is a gothic masterpiece that still fills its visitors with awe and wonder, five hundred years after it was built. Just imagine the impact on its first visitors.
7. Please dispel a myth or misconception about your work.
Insurance is anything but boring! Steeped in history and grounded in science and mathematics, it functions to enable risk-taking, grows faster than the economies it supports and is populated by some of the most interesting and fun people I have ever worked with.
8. What are the tools, apps, or gadgets that you just can’t live without?
All the usual suspects, but especially my Fitbit Ionic, which motivates me to offset the calories.
9. What’s your biggest pleasant surprise related to remote work?
For the past thirty-odd years, I have traveled constantly, and although I’m very fortunate to have a house in London and a small place in France, I never really appreciated them and their surrounding spaces until remote working.
10. What’s your favorite productivity tip for staying motivated and getting work done?
Write To-Do lists, but rank them in order in terms of preference and then complete them in reverse order. With exercise, I prefer endurance sports, but with work, it’s the opposite: work in sprints, with good breaks in between.
11. What or who do you read/watch to keep informed?
I am pretty traditional. I start my day reading:
Throughout the day I read:
My favourite column is by Quentin Letts at the Times, who provides a wonderfully satirical political sketch.
12. Nominate two people who should answer this next. Why?
Steve McGill, eponymous founder and CEO of McGill and Partners, because although he has worked in the insurance industry at the most senior levels for the entirety of his career, he is always bubbling with new ideas.
Rowan Douglas, Head of the Climate & Resilience Hub at Willis Towers Watson, because he has managed to bridge the world of insurance and public policy better than anyone else I know.
Thank you to Tim Anglade, VP of Product at Archipelago, for inviting Tim to answer 12 Questions.
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