Rob Schimek on Embedded Insurance, the Protection Gap, and How bolttech Scales Across Asia

Asia Tech Lens - The Podcast

Inside Asia’s Biggest Protection Gap Opportunity

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Inside Asia’s Biggest Protection Gap Opportunity

bolttech CEO Rob Schimek on embedded insurance, trust at scale, and building a global insurtech from Asia.

Asia Tech Lens

Dec 09, 2025

In this episode, we sit down with Rob Schimek, Group CEO of bolttech, to unpack one of Asia’s most ambitious insurtech scale-up stories—and why the world’s protection gap is now a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Rob has spent decades at the intersection of finance, risk, and technology. From leading a major global insurer to building one of the fastest-growing embedded-insurance platforms on the planet, his journey shows how insurance is becoming an essential digital-economy layer—as fundamental as payments, identity, or logistics.

We dig into the big structural questions:
Why is insurance still so underpenetrated across Asia?
How do you build trust with regulators, distribution partners, and millions of customers?
And what does it take to create a digital insurance exchange across markets with wildly different rules, expectations, and levels of financial maturity?

Hosted by Miro Lu, this conversation goes deep into leadership, ecosystem design, and the future of embedded protection worldwide.

💡 What You’ll Learn

The global protection gap—and why it’s still widening
Why Asia is the most interesting insurance market today
How embedded insurance is reshaping distribution and product design
Building a cross-market exchange: data, partners, regulation
Why incumbents struggle with speed, experimentation, and UX
Underwriting in a digital context—and why trust is a product
How bolttech scales across Asia, the US, and Europe
Customer expectations in 2025: real-time, contextual, frictionless
Leadership lessons from transforming legacy insurers
Attracting talent to an industry many overlook
The future: from selling policies to enabling ecosystems

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Opening & early lens on risk
01:02 – The global protection gap
02:15 – Founding bolttech at 53
04:20 – Why embedded insurance matters
06:55 – Understanding the insurance customer
08:50 – How bolttech achieved 0 to 1 // what bolttech actually solves
10:40 – Turning vision into product
11:25 – Why Asia?
13:45 – Regulation & innovation
15:02 – The 2018–2020 incubation story
17:10 – Early experiments that worked (and didn’t)
18:43 – Building a global team
22:05 – Culture & high-performance execution
24:30 – Partnering across ecosystems
27:40 – Scaling across Asia, the US & Europe
31:50 – Risk, underwriting & trust
35:10 – The funding winter
38:20 – Investor expectations
41:17 – Corporate vs startup
44:40 – Speed vs certainty
46:45 – The Ironman mindset
50:10 – Endurance & leadership
53:27 – What Rob wishes he knew earlier
55:00 – Frustrations & regrets
56:35 – What keeps Rob optimistic
58:10 – The next five years
01:01:45 – Closing reflections

📚 References (Mentioned in the Episode)

Reports

Swiss Re Sigma—https://www.sigma-explorer.com
McKinsey Global Insurance Report—https://www.mckinsey.com
Deloitte Insurance Outlook—https://www2.deloitte.com
Bain APAC Insurance & Bancassurance Insights—https://www.bain.com

Books / Mindset

Simon Sinek—Start with Why
Ben Horowitz—The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Angela Duckworth—Grit
David Goggins—Can’t Hurt Me

Sports & Endurance

Ironman—https://www.ironman.com
Training Peaks—https://www.trainingpeaks.com

🎙️ About Asia Tech Lens

Produced by Perspective Media (Singapore), Asia Tech Lens explores the technology, trends, and people shaping Asia’s innovation landscape — and its global impact.

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