Jason Howes is the Chief Transformation Officer at Allianz UK, bringing nearly 27 years of insurance industry experience and more than two decades within Allianz to the role. Jason joined Allianz in 2001 and has built a distinguished career leading complex change programmes across the organisation, previously serving as Director of Business Transformation and Head of UK Commercial Business Transformation. His promotion to Chief Transformation Officer in 2024 reflects his proven ability to deliver large scale transformation initiatives that strengthen Allianz’s market position and deliver for customers, brokers, partners, and employees.

David Bicknell is a principal analyst in GlobalData’s Thematic Intelligence team. He has over 30 years’ experience in writing about and analyzing the technology sector, both from the vendor and the user perspective, and both in the UK and the US. His career in technology journalism and analysis has included detailed research into IT projects and he has co-authored a book, ‘Crash’, with investigative journalist Tony Collins, which explored why and how IT projects go wrong. David and Tony have also co-authored a novel on the life of computer pioneer Charles Babbage. Prior to joining Thematic Intelligence, David spent six years editing a GlobalData title exploring the use of technology in the UK public sector. He has previously worked for Computer Weekly, and for the BBC in Leicester. David has a strong interest in art and art history. In September 2022, he undertook a two-year, part-time Undergraduate Certificate in Art History course at the University of Oxford. He has recently begun a similar two-year Undergraduate Diploma in Art History course, again at the University of Oxford.

Professional experience

• A regular speaker, both chairing and presenting, at technology conferences.
• A specialist in the following themes: cybersecurity, digital twins, edtech, 3D printing, smart cities, the space economy, and industrial technology.
• Extensive understanding and research in the delivery of IT projects. His book, co-written with Tony Collins, ‘Crash’, is regularly cited in academic writing on IT projects.
• Regularly quoted in the business and technical press.
• Strong understanding of the business and technology world.

Karun is a Senior Analyst within Celent’s insurance practice based in London. His research efforts have centred around identifying and analysing insurance technology trends and software platforms in the insurance industry, particularly in the EMEA region, encompassing property and casualty (P&C) and life and health (L&H) lines of business. Karun is a highly accomplished and technology-focused professional with a wealth of experience in the global IT industry, specifically within the insurance, pensions, and investment management sectors.

Before joining Celent, Karun spent 22 years at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where he played a pivotal role in expanding the company's insurance portfolio in Europe. During his tenure, Karun excelled in securing and executing large-scale, multi-million-dollar global IT contracts. He assumed complete solution and cost ownership, providing strategic guidance to clients on transformative initiatives.

In addition to his extensive insurance industry experience, Karun has a background in manufacturing and supply chain management. He has led consulting engagements focused on IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture, further enhancing his expertise.

Karun's recent reports have covered a wide range of subjects, including core systems analysis, digital twins in insurance, best practices in cloud adoption, quantum computing, parametric insurance, ESG, and climate change.

Since joining Celent, Karun has been a featured speaker at industry events in London and Celent events in Europe, covering topics such as NetZero Transition, Climate Change, Cloud, Customer Experience, and Legacy Modernization.

Josh Hart co-founded YuLife in 2016 and serves as its Chief Product and Technology Officer. YuLife is the life insurance platform that rewards people for living well, operating across the UK and South Africa. Josh's first company was Chelsea Apps Factory, which he founded and grew to 120 people, making it the UK's largest privately held enterprise mobile consultancy. He built products for clients across insurance, healthcare, finance, and pharma. It taught him how to scale a team, ship under pressure, and build things that work. It also taught him that he wanted to build for himself.

YuLife is the result. Josh leads product, engineering, and design, and is the architect behind Yunity, the company's AI intelligence layer that automates the full insurance lifecycle. But the technology is shaped by two passions that sit at the core of everything he does: user experience and game design. Josh believes that the best products are not just functional, they are magnetic. The gamification engine inside YuLife, the reward loops, the daily nudges, the micro-interactions that turn insurance into something people actually want to open, all come from a deep belief, that how something feels, determines whether anyone uses it at all.

He is direct, warm, and relentlessly focused on the people he builds with and the people he builds for. He lives in the UK with his young family.

Andrew Gough has spent his career helping large, regulated organisations adopt transformative technology; from the earliest days of cloud computing with Google and AWS through to AI-driven process automation at Pegasystems. A former Royal Navy officer, he brings an operational discipline to technology sales that tends to focus on what works rather than what looks good on a slide. At ai4process, he leads EMEA commercial strategy, working with firms across sectors to turn process transformation from a concept into a measurable outcome. He'll be available throughout the event to discuss how ai4process works in practice.

James Daley has been a consumer campaigner and financial journalist for over 25 years. Before launching Fairer Finance in 2014, he worked for the consumer group, ‘Which’, where he campaigned for a better deal for customers of banks and insurers in the wake of the financial crisis.

James is frequently interviewed on national television and radio, and has regularly appeared on shows such as Watchdog, Rip-off Britain, Dispatches and Moneybox.

Before working at Which?, James spent 10 years as a business and finance newspaper journalist, latterly as The Independent's personal finance editor and cycling columnist.

James is a member of both UK Finance's and the Association of British Insurers' Consumer Advisory Groups. He was also previously a member of the Chartered Insurance Institute's professional standards board and is an Honorary Alderman of the London Borough of Wandsworth having served as a councillor for 12 years.

He lives with his wife and two children in Tooting, where he's also Chair of Governors at Smallwood Primary School.

Natasha Crawley is the Group Head of Risk & Compliance at ManyPets and an experienced solicitor with a background in roles at AXA UK and HSBC. She leads the organisation’s regulatory strategy, governance framework and risk management agenda, ensuring ManyPets operates with integrity while enabling innovation and growth.

Natasha is known for delivering clear, commercially‑focused advice that supports pragmatic decision‑making and strong customer outcomes. Her approach balances regulatory rigour with a deep understanding of business priorities.

Her work underpins ManyPets’ mission: to deliver pet insurance like no other — more supportive of pet parents, smarter in how technology is used, and committed to simpler, more forward‑thinking experiences.

She collaborates closely with regulators, industry peers and senior leaders to embed ethical, resilient and forward‑looking practices across the business.

Since joining GlobalData Strategic Intelligence as an associate analyst in the 2024 graduate intake, Aidan has written reports on artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, future of work technologies, and geopolitics within the mining, defense, and financial services sectors. In Aidan’s most recent reports, he explores the impact of blockchain and AI on the banking, payments, wealth management, and insurance sectors, discussing potential risks to FS firms that do not develop their own strategies. He explores topics like anti-money laundering (AML), agentic AI, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, know-your-customer (KYC), Insider threats, and human error.

Ruth Lux is a global leader in climate and disaster risk finance and a member of the Operating Committee of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), where she also serves as Co-Chair of the Sovereign & Humanitarian Solutions Working Group.

Until March 2025, Ruth headed the Public Sector Solutions practice for UK, Europe, India, Middle East & Africa at Guy Carpenter, advising governments, multilateral agencies, and public entities on climate resilience, sovereign and sub-sovereign risk financing, and the integration of insurance into development and fiscal policy. She has also worked extensively with multilateral development banks, NGOs, and the private sector, helping bring together diverse partners to pioneer new models of disaster risk financing and resilience-building. She additionally serves on the Advisory Group of the Start Network’s Risk Pooling and Risk Financing initiative, which is scaling innovative approaches to anticipatory humanitarian action.

She has played a leading role in the design and implementation of innovative insurance and risk transfer programmes, including parametric drought and flood solutions, macro-level climate facilities, and sovereign catastrophe financing strategies across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.

Earlier in her career, Ruth founded and ran a political risk consultancy advising corporates and government agencies, and headed political and terrorism risk analytics at JLT Specialty.

Ruth holds an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, a BA in French and Spanish from the University of Bristol, and is fluent in French and Spanish.

I work at the intersection of financial services technology, enterprise architecture, and advisory. As Principal Architect & Technology Advisor at Celent (part of GlobalData), I support research, advisory, and consulting work across financial services — helping clients and teams make sense of complex technology landscapes in practical, grounded ways. My background includes platform modernisation, data and architecture strategy, and the adoption of emerging technologies in regulated environments. I’m particularly interested in advisory work, research, and speaking that helps senior leaders navigate complexity, where technology choices intersect with organisation, risk, and long-term strategy.

Vytenis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Moterra, a secure enterprise AI platform built to make private, practical AI accessible to businesses of all sizes.

A physicist by training, he brings over 15 years of technology experience across Microsoft, EY, and cloud services — specialising in helping organisations deploy AI that works within their existing systems without compromising security or data privacy.

Before founding Moterra, Vytenis led cloud and DevOps divisions and drove enterprise partnerships. He also lectored on Information Systems and Cyber Security at the university.

At this conference, Vytenis shares his perspective on how AI can meaningfully transform the insurance industry — from automating claims processing and underwriting to enhancing fraud detection and customer experience — all while keeping sensitive data secure, private, and fully under the organisation's control.

When he's not building AI platforms, he's playing in a rock band

Usha Badrinath is Chief Data Officer at Mosaic Insurance, where she sets enterprise data strategy and leads AI integration. Her experience sits at the intersection of risk quantification, commercial economics, and frontier technology. Her track record includes award-winning, industry-first innovations - ML-powered algorithmic underwriting for a London syndicate, nat-cat products that became market benchmarks, and some of the earliest data products in insurance. Formerly the global head of data solutions at a catastrophe modelling firm, Usha built a portfolio of data-focused products from the ground up, represented the business with global regulators, and incubated entirely new risk categories including Terrorism and Life Risks - simultaneously owning the science, the product, the P&L, and the evangelism. She has scaled global teams to 170+, advised 14 insurtechs, and worked with more than 60 global (re)insurers across underwriting, claims, and exposure management. Usha writes and speaks on the pragmatic application of emerging technology, bringing a panoramic view of how data and AI are redefining the economics of (re)insurance.

Erica McEwan is an award-winning Production Designer, creative lead and visual storyteller with 20+ years’ experience shaping the look, feel and meaning of film and television. Working across production, development and post, she brings a rare end-to-end view of how ideas become worlds, and how those worlds influence what audiences believe is possible.

Fusing graphic design, motion graphics, identity and live-action craft, Erica’s speciality is visualising “near-future” realities: taking complex themes like automation, surveillance, connected infrastructure and systemic failure and turning them into believable environments you can step into. She doesn’t just design sets; she designs the visual logic of a world, making the abstract feel inevitable.

Her career highlights include work across the first 19 Black Mirror films, HBO’s His Dark Materials, Doctor Who, and most recently the BBC and Disney+ limited series The War Between the Land and the Sea. Erica’s work, and the work of her teams has been recognised by BAFTA, the Art Directors Guild and the Royal Television Society.

At the Digital Transformation in Insurance Conference, Erica brings an “out-of-industry” lens to the panel Insurance Black Mirror “Stress testing the failure models, so innovation doesn’t backfire”, introducing a session that explores what happens when IoT, AI and automation create new systemic risks, and why resilience, governance and thoughtful design are the rails that stop innovation becoming a single point of failure.

Adam Elleston, Solutions Architect at Unipro, is dedicated to bridging the gap between complex business challenges and high-performance technical reality. He plays a pivotal role in Unipro’s mission to liberate organisations from the constraints of generic, off-the-shelf software, instead delivering bespoke solutions that provide genuine digital autonomy and a lasting competitive edge. With deep technical expertise and a focus on agentic AI orchestration, Adam designs robust, future-proof architectures that eliminate technical debt and vendor lock-in while dismantling fragmented legacy systems. His approach is rooted in Unipro’s "human-led, AI-accelerated" philosophy, ensuring that every architectural decision aligns with a client’s unique strategic roadmap. A passionate advocate for innovation, he partners with leaders to transform technology from a potential liability into a powerful, defensible asset that drives sustainable, innovation-driven growth.

Daren is a Vice-President in CGI’s UK Insurance business, leading a consulting team working with clients to shape digital strategy, modernise business models, and apply emerging technologies to deliver measurable outcomes. With over 30 years’ experience in the London and General Insurance markets, Daren brings deep industry expertise alongside more than a decade in InsurTech, consulting and technology delivery. He applies a pragmatic approach in the use of technology to make a difference for the business, focusing on a lean, rapid approach to transformation and the value it creates for people. Daren is passionate about approaching complex challenges differently and believes that traditional transformation does not meet the needs of modern business. He partners with senior business and technology leaders to bridge the gap between innovation and reality, to ensure solutions are focused on real value not technology hype. 

Daniel Sullivan is Bupa’s Director of Product, Proposition and Transformation for UK Insurance. Since joining Bupa, Daniel has worked on several initiatives including: Well+, Connected Care, our SME growth strategy, genomics and most recently is part of the later living (Project Owl) working group.

Daniel joined Bupa UK in 2021 from KPMG UK where we held a variety of roles, including Director of KPMG’s Marketing Centre of Expertise. Daniel’s career has focussed on marketing and proposition management in financial services, including roles at Lloyds Banking Group and Unum.

Daniel lives in Wiltshire and has a degree in Communication Studies from the University of the West of England alongside professional qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Insurance and Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Aadil Bundeally is a seasoned transformation professional with over 20 years' international experience across Banking, Wealth & Asset Management, Insurance, and Impact Investing. He brings deep industry knowledge spanning regulatory landscapes, operating models, organisational design, integrated systems and governance-risk-compliance frameworks. With relentless focus on customer advocacy, operational efficiency and results-driven innovation, underpinned by Data Analytics, RPA, AI-ML and Gen AI, he has deployed numerous platforms and solutions delivering significant cost reduction and quality-of-life improvements for customers, suppliers and staff. A firm believer in the three lines of defence, he maintains rigorous governance whilst managing complex multi-level stakeholder relationships and generating robust C-suite analysis. Experienced in product management, vendor selection, procurement oversight and dispute resolution, he has held senior roles at Lloyd's of London, Virgin Money, Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group, leading diverse teams across consulting, interim and in-house engagements. He holds four postgraduate qualifications, including an MBA from Melbourne Business School and UCLA Anderson.