“The more voices we have around the table, the better”
Why the strongest ideas need people willing to question them, test them, and bring them to life
For Alexandra Wyard, Director of Product and Proposition at Allianz Personal Lines, good innovation starts with gaining a deep understanding of the problems you’re trying to solve.
In this interview, she explains why diverse experiences can expose overlooked problems, how leaders give people the confidence to challenge assumptions, and why insurers must change – not just the way they recruit, but the way they work – if they genuinely want more diverse talent.
Disproving “urban legends”
“We spend a lot of time proving or disproving what we call the ‘urban legends’ of insurance,” says Alexandra Wyard, with a grin.
Whenever someone claims that a particular type of customer behaves a certain way, Alexandra’s team asks whether the data can prove or disprove it.
Take the idea that people in a certain occupation are more likely to drive at night. That’s hard to prove and may require combining several data sources. But doing so may also help better understand those customers, Alexandra says.
If they do drive mainly at night, are they exposed to different risks? Do they need different cover or support? There’s no point selling breakdown cover to night-time drivers if the call centre closes at 8pm.
Testing assumptions this way reveals where the company may need to change its cover, its service, or both. It’s a fascinating insight into the mindset and methodology of Alexandra’s team. Particularly as, when we spoke, she had been in the role of Director of Product and Proposition for only about three months – so this team and its mandate is still pretty new.
Products must reflect constant societal change
“My role is really driving the strategic direction of our product and propositions across personal lines, and how they should develop to take account of the societal and technological changes that are happening almost constantly all around us,” she says.
Motor insurance may appear established, but vehicles, homes, customer expectations, regulation, technology, supply chains and patterns of use are constantly changing.
“After the pandemic, so many homes went from two cars to one. So many households have switched to either hybrids or EVs. The vast majority of vehicles on the road will have some form of assisted driving technology in them.”
Insurers need to respond to these changes by developing the products and propositions customers genuinely need.
“There’s nothing worse than solving the wrong problem”
This leads us to Alexandra’s definition of insurance “innovation”. From the outset, she’s clear that innovation is not synonymous with technology.
“For me, technology is an enabler, not innovation in itself. There’s nothing worse than an innovation that solves a problem that isn’t a problem – which can often be the case when you lead with technology or the solution rather than the problem.”
She pauses for a moment. “Actually… innovation for me is a great solution to a problem that needs solving.”
This reflects her insistence that products should reflect customers’ changing lives and spending patterns. It also reflects her positive belief in the power of insurance to give customers the support they genuinely need. But what is it that sets successful insurance innovators apart from the also rans?
Good ideas must be challenged
Alexandra highlights three key aspects. The first is really to understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
“Okay, sometimes people start with the solution, and that sometimes works. You can say, oh, I’ve got this great tool, how would I apply it? That’s great, but genuinely impressive innovators are the people who understand a problem and find generally quite a simple way to solve it.”
The second trait successful innovators share is that they surround themselves with people who question and refine their thinking.
“My experience is that people who are good innovators are generally also people who have a good bunch of sounding boards around them, so they have people they ask, ‘Is this crazy? What do you think about this?’ And those people will give them an honest answer.”
And then there’s the third element that’s needed for success – and another reason why a good sounding board is so important: confidence.
“It’s so easy to lose confidence in a good idea when it’s a little bit different and you’ve got other people around you who are maybe not bought in and they don’t understand,” Alexandra explains.
“So if you’ve got a really good sounding board, people who can validate and help you refine your idea, perhaps help you go through a proof of concept – then you’ve got the confidence that comes from a little validation, and that allows you to move forward.”
Confidence is also important for team members to challenge ideas. Alexandra sees confidence as something leaders can help build through coaching, support and recognition of what people already know. She adds that occasionally being wrong is an essential part of testing an idea: “Sometimes we’ll all be wrong and that’s okay.”
Of course, confidence is often shaped by lived experience. Alexandra talks about what it was like returning to work from maternity leave in 2025. She “wildly underestimated” the emotional complexity involved. Happily, her colleagues and managers were hugely supportive – something she knows not everyone would be lucky enough to have experienced.
“I think your lived experience will very much shape the world you operate in. I speak to friends and peers across the industry and colleagues who’ve moved, and it’s not the same everywhere.”
This is one reason why Alexandra is so keen to support others. She speaks of giving a talk earlier this year to women and non-binary people starting their careers. She also spends “an awful lot of time as a kind of mentor and a coach and a leader saying to people, ‘Just go for it, have confidence, just trust your guts on this. You know your process, you know your customer, you know your product. Have confidence in what you’re suggesting’.”
“Diversity is a bit of a superpower”
Lived experience is important in another way for Alexandra, who believes people with different backgrounds and experiences can reveal customer behaviours, needs and opportunities that others have not considered.
“The more voices we have around the table that are broadly representative of our customer base and the society we live in, the better. And whether that’s gender, whether that’s LGBTQ+, whether that’s socioeconomic background – we’re doing an awful lot in Allianz at the moment around social mobility – having those voices is super important.”
But why is diversity important to the business?
“You need that diversity of thought to bring a different perspective, because it will challenge the status quo,” she says. “From a business point of view, that’s incredibly important, and it links back to innovation. It also helps ground your decision-making in logic.”
Alexandra adds that diversity helps us see truths, patterns, and opportunities that we otherwise wouldn’t.
“Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about new products and new markets have been with people who said, ‘That’s not how my dad uses his car. He uses it like this.’ It’s something you’re simply not aware of or alive to… Sometimes you get that insight through customer feedback or surveys. But often it comes from people who have a different experience to you.”
Reflecting on the power of random connections and diversity of thought, she adds: “diversity is a bit of a superpower when you’ve got a group of people making decisions”.
“Some of these challenges may never be solved”
Alexandra is a strong believer in the power of insurance to help customers. But while diversity can increase this power, some some customer problems can’t be solved through better insight or product design alone.
Her work with Fair4all Finance on building inclusive financial service products for low-income households has brought her closer to those for whom insurance may have to compete with the last five or ten pounds left at the end of the month.
“There is a wider piece that the industry is very aware of and actively working on with this charity to help address.” She is keen to stress that solving the problems of structural poverty takes time and that very likely “some of these challenges may never be solved.”
Yet that doesn’t mean the industry shouldn’t strive to do more, to find ways to accommodate low literacy or educational disadvantage – to help overcome what she describes as “an instinctive distrust of financial services.”
Diversity cannot remove the structural cause of these problems, she says, but it can improve the industry’s understanding and response. People with relevant lived experience may better understand distrust, exclusion, and the practical realities shaping customer decisions.
“The chances are, you are going to have people in your organisation who really understand how to cut through to people who don’t trust the financial sector.”
Of course, if insurers need those perspectives inside the business, they must deliberately recruit, support and retain people who bring them…
“You have to want that talent”
This feeds into my next question about how to attract more diverse talent.
“I think you have to want it,” she says. “You have to want that talent and be prepared to run your business in a way that meets the demands of that talent.”
For some, this means recruiting in more diverse locations outside of London. “My team is based as far south as Bournemouth and as far north as Huddersfield, and that means I’ve got a wonderfully diverse group of people in terms of geographical location.”
It’s highly unlikely that you can get someone from a multigenerational household in the north of England to move to London for an entry-level underwriter role, “but if you can set them up in a regional office, it will make a huge difference to the diversity of thought in your team.”
Another great way to find more talent is to adapt recruitment practices to take account of candidates’ diverse needs, for example if they are neurodiverse.
“I really notice the difference as somebody who conducts interviews now,” Alexandra says. “Having people aware of the questions in advance. Some people might think it’s cheating, but it removes that anxiety and flap. I just want to know what you’ve got to tell me. I’m not trying to trick you. And it makes such a difference.”
After looking at recruitment comes inclusion, which is about having the right policies and processes, access to maternity policies, paternity policies, supporting caring responsibilities, and flexible working. A whole raft of formal and informal benefits that make people feel welcome and allow them to work at their best and most productive.
“It’s none of your business”
Throughout this conversation, confidence has been a constant theme. Great innovators need to have it. They also need to have team members with the confidence to challenge their ideas. Diversity of thought and experience help teams more confidently generate new ideas for products that are more representative of a more diverse society, while also helping challenge assumptions.
Inclusion is also grounded in confidence, Alexandra believes. Which in turn must come from strong leadership. Because the truth is, diverse teams need to be managed well.
Alexandra points out that people absorb information and form opinions in different ways, for example. Some need time to read, reflect and digest an idea before responding. Others prefer to think aloud and reach a conclusion through discussion.
If every decision is made in a fast-moving meeting, the second group will naturally have more influence. That does not mean their ideas are better. It means the process suits them better.
“People need to feel supported in expressing what they need to work in the most effective way they can,” Alexandra says.
That may mean circulating material earlier, giving people time to respond after a meeting, or asking for views in more than one format. The responsibility is not entirely on individuals to force themselves into an established way of working. Leaders need to understand how their people contribute best and make reasonable adjustments to the way discussions and decisions are managed.
Alexandra’s own team offers a useful example. It has 20 members, excluding her, including 11 women, an ethnically diverse mix of employees, and several people working flexibly or part-time.
Flexibility helps people remain in work while managing responsibilities outside it, including caring or further study. Alexandra is equally clear that employees should not have to disclose every detail of their private lives to justify the way they work.
“We try to have a bit of a philosophy in my team, which is: it’s none of your business why someone else needs flexibility. Trust that their manager knows and is managing it,” she says. What matters is agreeing an arrangement that enables someone to do their job effectively, and not getting stuck on why someone else is doing what they are doing. “There’s no stigma here around part-time or flexible working, and I think that has to be led from above.”
This, ultimately, is how insurers avoid solving the wrong problem: by having the confidence to bring more voices around the table – and running the business in a way that gives them the confidence to be heard.
How Allianz fosters an innovative culture
This is something Allianz fosters as part of its culture. “Allianz actively provides training on how to build a test and learn approach in your team, benefitting from ‘fast failure’ and I think that says a lot about how organizationally we view things.”
Alexandra is unashamedly proud of working at Allianz, not least because the company is serious about encouraging innovation and creativity at every level of the business.
Employees can submit ideas through the Allianz intranet, and every idea must receive feedback: “It doesn’t matter who submitted it, or how crazy the idea is.”
There’s also a Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank-style pitching programme where employees can pitch ideas directly in person, and the top three ideas get taken forward and implemented.
“When you see ideas being pitched and taken forward, it gives people that confidence and that courage to step up,” Alexandra says.
“Part of the reason I’m incredibly proud to work for Allianz is because it gives me an opportunity to genuinely effect change. I work for a huge multinational organisation that has at its heart incredibly strong ESG credentials. We do really good things for people and I want to be part of that. I genuinely believe we have a moral obligation to make the world a better place, every single one of us. And so being part of an organization that does that as well is important.”
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Diversity & Innovation: Perspectives from insurance industry leaders at Insurtech Insights Europe, 2026
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