Ernesto Suarez, Founder & CEO, Gigasure: A story of entrepreneurial spirit and technological prowess

[Music] Welcome to the Lloyd's British Business Excellence Awards beyond the trophy podcast. We are here with another one of our fabulous winners, Ernesto Suarez, who took home the new business of the year in 2025 for his business gigashoor. Welcome Ernesto and I'm told I get to call you Ernie. You can. You can. Does that mean I'm becoming a friend of yours now? Yes you are. Okay good. An inspiration. [Laughs] So. Fellow entrepreneur. A fellow entrepreneur, exactly. And that's why we're here today because I love talking to people like you and learning more about your business, about your journey. I think it's quite a fascinating journey actually that we, we might not necessarily know about. But you are from the world of insurance. So enlighten us, tell us for someone who knows nothing about gigashoor. What is it and what difference are you making? Okay well firstly thank you for having me here and creating this podcast with you. It's, I've heard the previous ones and I was very excited to do this. And gigashoor is my second business, my second venture. And it is a digital first travel insurance provider. That's probably the simplest way I can put what we do. It is supported by an app which has plenty of features for you to manage your insurance policy. But again what our objective is with this company is really to shape the product, the travel insurance product around the person and how you travel versus it being a document or up a point of friction that people see with insurance in general. But for us building gigashoor and to me personally is somewhat a long journey that started 20 years ago when we started watching brands pop up on Google and people switching for insurance. There is, there's a, the markets evolved very quickly. And the way companies are designing products is changing. And I think what I want to bring to the table is I want to join all the things that I know about technology and marry that with my kind of education and insurance working with a corporate firm for 10 years of my career. And that kind of meeting point of the two is where I get my inspiration, I get my motivation. And I really want to design a product that is useful to people and particularly the new generations. And people like my children, like you know I see them interacting with technology with mobile devices. And I kind of have an insight. I feel privileged to have an insight as to what consumers really are going to be like in the future. So for me that's what's keeping me in the game. And it's what's probably a lot behind the, the ideas that are creating gigashoor. And you know, fortunately we've had a lot of success in building the company. Second time around is a lot easier by the way as an entrepreneur. My first business was a very similar business and insurance in Trumedere. Building that in the UK and abroad. So and exiting that successfully gave me a wealth of knowledge that I can then apply to this second venture. But gigashoor to me personally is a continuation of what I started building 10 years ago in my first building business. But one of the things I'm focusing on now is travel insurance. There's a lot of change in travel. Your plans change when you plan travel. And a reflection in how we wanted to build gigashoor was build a product that changed in how possibly travel could change. So how we built the company was thinking about the customer being very empathetic about potential changes in their travel plans. And also catering to delivering that elevated customer experience in a mobile device. Okay. This business, the app is everything for us. It's the hero of the story. Whereas in my first business, that wasn't the case because it was 10, 15 years ago. Possibly you would say it's more about the customer journey on the web. This one is all about how can we optimize that journey for customers using a mobile device. So that brings in thinking of how do we design the product to be flexible, customizable, and adding features that really are going to engage our customer more with the product. And that kind of has to make everything fluid. And what I mean by that is, insurance is traditionally known as you buy the product and you kind of put it away for the rainy day when you have a claim. And what we want to make sure we build is a product that you can come back too often, not only because of a claim, but on in respect of how you plan your travel. And we thought travel, it was a perfect product to build that engagement with. It's one of the more exciting industries anyway. I love to travel personally. And I think that gives us great joy in kind of building what we're doing. Because we know we want to deliver something people will somewhat enjoy, but at the same time trust. And we do want to build that travel companion, you know, where you kind of you travel everywhere with your mobile phone. We want to be there in your phone present so that you know you can count on us when you need us. And kind of that brings me to the journey of our business. Really, it's about building it in phases. I learned through my previous business that you can have everything day one. You've got to iterate. You've got to pivot. And you've got to really go where your successes take you. And, you know, growing up in the US is a bit of that where I've, you know, I've kind of not afraid to fail. And if you read a lot of literature today, business books about European entrepreneurship and, you know, there it seems like there's a more conservative attitude here. And if you fail, that's kind of a no-no. In fact, when I got my first job in insurance, the interviewer asked me, "What are you majoring in in school?" And I said, "Well, I'm majoring in economics and I have a minor entrepreneurship." So it's, "Oh, entrepreneurship's a bad word." And I I kind of was stunned. And that was my first taste of European culture when I was applying for my first job. So since then, you know, I always kept that really close to me. And I thought, you know, I'm going to have to probably see how long I last in the corporate world before I really want to do what I want. But entrepreneurship, as you know, Sarah, I started at a very early age. I don't think you can teach entrepreneurship. It's something we have within us to just curiosity, wanting to learn, and wanting to not be everything people think about what entrepreneurship is. There's a bit of something to prove to yourself, something that you can also feel good about giving other people. So it's that feeling. And now with a family and kids and everything, I feel like the entrepreneurship status has made me a little bit more of a hero at home, you know, versus going to work every day, not being seen all day. Entrepreneurship's really given me that flexibility to carve into myself really. So on that, that's fascinating to come from that angle of your world, I guess, before. I'm quite jealous that you got a first go round to learn from some bits and bops. I wish, you know, I think a lot of founders learn from listening to fellow founders of, you know, what went wrong, what can I learn from? But you'll always still make mistakes, regardless. We make plenty of mistakes. All the time. But tell me a bit more about that bit before. You know, because I think you were born in the UK. I was not born in the UK and this is a very interesting story. Are you ready? So I was born in Paris in France. And at a very young age, my parents moved back to the US in Miami, where I then grew up from the age of four. In the Sunshine State? In fact, to make it even worse, I grew up in an island off Miami. So keep your skin. And. Sounds awful. A very, very small town, I think, island for the city of Miami back then. And I really grew up in an area area where there was one main high street and the rest was residential areas and very small shopping mall. But everyone that came into the island had to go into this one road. Okay. So at 12, I kind of was already with my friends thinking of ideas of how can we make some lunch money from this. And you know, we had this great idea of setting up a car wash right in the corner in the first gas station that you entered the island. So when we did this one summer, we were busy for about 60 days non-stock. And we were only 12, 13. People would give us tips probably larger than they would give adults because we were kind of younger people kind of probably felt sorry for us. But at the same time, we took great pride in our work. And I would come home exhausted. But we knew we were building up our savings. We were talking about what the next Nintendo game we would buy, you know, at that time the Game Boy was popular. So it was all about like, you know, what game are we going to buy with the money we make. And very quickly I learned math. I learned, you know, we obviously needed to spend or charge more on, you know, what we were doing versus what we were spending on all the soap we had to buy in the sponges and the towels. But you know, that gave me a first instance to what entrepreneur being an entrepreneur was like, you know, the feeling of making money was not going to lie. It was a very, very nice feeling. But at a young age, I set my compass, you know, what I wanted to go to school for. I wanted to learn business. My mother used to ask me, you know, can I study history, languages, you know, liberal arts. I was, no, business says, no, you go for an MBA, you do an MBA for that. No, you could get that right out of high school, you know. So my interest was always business. I'm, I consume business books and I have a big business book library and it's been my, yeah, it's been my kind of like motivation ever since I was a kid. And my family already was, you know, we had an established family business in where my parents were from originally from El Salvador. So, you know, having a view of what my grandfather did and what he was doing with his brothers, also was a little bit of an aspiration to me saying, well, the grandfather has done his own thing. So all along I grew up with examples within my family to kind of carry that forward. And, you know, once in the corporate world, I went through school. I got a job in a big finance, financial services firm, did my time in New York, traveled the world with that firm and then settled in London where center of insurance, center of the world for insurance. I think that's kind of like how my career kind of drove, and for me kind of drove me here, you know. And say, I think the corporate world gives us, it gives us a good starting, let's say, I think, to somehow times learn from mistakes, perhaps learn different communities within business. I would say the corporate world does do that. It also teaches a lot of that time wasting, but we weren't going to. So what was the leap that for the first business from corporate world, first business? Like, was there a moment in time where you were like, actually, let's do it this way? So before I answer that question, I agree with you about this, mystique about the corporate world. I found it an extension of my education. I almost found it like school. And everything we did in the corporate world for me was, it was about learning. It wasn't about trying to be the CEO of a company. And I always had this frame in that I just need to really take it to the bottom of everything, look at the detail. And that's when I started developing this, this real appreciation for the amount of detail and work that went into developing products. So for me, the corporate world was such an important stage of becoming the entrepreneur I am today, particularly in an industry where it's so vital to know both sides of the coin. There was no way I would know how the insurance value chain worked as an outsider. I think for any entrepreneur out there wanting to dive into insurance first off and start a business, it's even more riskier than if you didn't do some time in insurance because there's so many different facets to making a business work in insurance. There are so many communities that and areas of the market that you need to really understand so you don't get brought. And that foundation to me gave me the confidence to then coming to your question, so what gave me that leap of faith? It was part that that confidence that I thought I had the tools to start my own thing. But it was also the aspect of timing. Timing for me was almost like in two parts. One was I'm ready to get out of here. And the second one was I was kind of helped along by the fact that the world was melting at the time I started my first building. Remember the financial crisis, the CD swap, the CDW swaps and all that, that kind of melted a lot of the financial services firms that were heavily invested in this. So my company was one of the creators of those CD swaps. So therefore it took a big hit and it made everything real. From one day to the next, all of my hard work, all of that future earnings, the stock options, all that. There were kind of worthless. So you asked yourself that question, okay, this is a perfect moment. And of course, as an entrepreneur, going into a market where there's very little capital and all the venture funds are telling you, it's not the right time, because the market's correcting. I jumped into one of those situations where do I have a strong business plan here to convince people to come along with me for this ride? And that's when I really learned what people are really investing in is not your business idea. It's you. It's you. And I could ask you the same question. People were probably looking at you and saying, "Sara, you think you can make this happen?" And you gave them that confidence. Well, I had that same feeling. You know, I understood that it wasn't about the idea anymore. It was about what, you know, I think what I brought to the table. And I thought that was for me the real turning point. And that very early on in my first business, I kind of had this feeling that it was going to work. And that I couldn't fail. And I kind of used even the fundraising process of another learning point for me. If I told you my kind of raising funds raising process in my first business compared to the second, it's vastly different. You know, the things I learned from the first business were definitely not there in the second time around. It's confidence, but it's knowing the detail in how we're, you know, people shape the exits. You know, most of the times people talk about, well, how much equity do you have and how to, you know, what to keep and all that. And my first business, I was kind of asking those questions on the go. In my second business, I knew exactly what I wanted not to get myself into, because then I knew I wasn't going to be very happy once the business was a success. That deal you made day one matter, matters a lot. So all those little things shape you as an entrepreneur and give you that confidence. And the most important part is that you have to transmit that confidence to your team. Your team depend on you as much as, you know, anyone else. And they look to you for answers. And you don't have to know everything. And that's the other thing. You need to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. People that know more about certain things that, you know, and you need to build that that team early because a lot of things happen in a business, as you know, in the early days, that shape the future. And, you know, that is what gives me the most pride in building these businesses. It's the relationships I build along the way. It's the teams that I've built. And I've had a lot of success in building those teams, you know, and, you know, as I built my second venture, Giggas Shore, it was nothing, you know, there's only one person I worked with in the past. The rest have been people that I met along the way that has, you know, impressed me. And that I'd have shown me a quality that I was either lacking in the first venture or I knew I needed for the second venture. And with that came a mixture of people that were very fast at things and good at certain things versus people that were just very experienced. That brought the know-how and the application of that knowledge to the product immediately. So for me that foundation in Giga sure was extremely important. It was because we were dealing in a market that was a bit more complex and the product was a bit more complicated. So you needed that kind of experience. But yeah, the team doesn't come day one either. The team comes along the way and you'd be surprised how many people once you leave and start something new. Those people that you met a long time ago kind of reached out and say, "Hey, remember me?" And that is also something I look up to because it's like, "Wow, you've had the courage to kind of step out of your shell and think about how you possibly can help." And so my team in the second venture was built with a mixture of that. It was people that I've worked with in the past, people that I could trust and making sure they geled as well, already having that intuition that they could work together. And I think that now gives me a lot of pleasure because I see it in action every day. I come to work. I see the tension, but I also see the friendliness, the camaraderie. And these are kind of hard to get to if you're an entrepreneur building a huge company very fast and you're hiring people you don't know. So I think I'm fortunate to build a business at a pace that is allowing me to carefully select those people as they come into the company. So. In terms of your motivation, there's something you've brought up quite often. What would you say is your ultimate motivation day to day? Professionally I think it's about kind of the integration of the evolving technological field partially because I love technology, but I also am a big maverick. Like I'm the first one to go and buy the new gadgets and stuff. For me, the motivation is trying to mix that technology evolution with the industry, you know, the travel ecosystem. Yeah. Which to me is the opportunity I saw when I set out to do Gikashore, right? I didn't just do Gikashore because I need to do another business. I want to stay busy. No, there was an opportunity. Again, create your own luck. You know, we're about creating our own luck. And what I saw was a huge opportunity. And I can say it now because I saw that three years ago, but I was getting a good dosage of travel insurance, you know, know how with the acquire of my first business. And I was also kind of looking at going through that COVID phase where travel almost, you know, came to a standstill. And what I saw was a travel insurance market from an inside. I saw a traveling insurance market where it had about 1,300 product offerings in the UK market alone, dropped to about 400 in a year. Okay. Now, if the industry in the market, the traveling insurance market was sustainable with 1,300 offerings in different distribution channels, it served in different ways. What's going to happen when travel resuscitates when it comes back and that 400 has to be built up again. So I thought for this business, gigashoor, the opportunity was that. And because I was coming out of a nerd out of my first business with the company I was working with, I stayed on for five years. They were building a new team. The business they had purchased acquired into their other companies in the region. To me, I was somewhat becoming quickly invisible in that spectrum. And it was just almost like a perfect time to take that leap and look at what I could do next. So it was kind of just a natural progression of what I was learning. And learning, absorbing, thinking about how I could make it better with what I know, what I like. And when we talk about the product, I'll tell you why it excites me because that is another thing we're building in the traveling insurance space, which many people now are starting to do. Okay. And it was always what I said to my investors. I said, we build this and this will become a hygiene factor in three or four years time. And that is making unraveling the insurance proposition to make it more customizable. And it was about adding that customization and positioning as more of a tailoring it to what you really need when you travel versus here's an add on, here's an add on. And building this engagement factor and features in the product that would give you that delight. So parametric insurance is one of those technologies that was starting to become a feature that most lots of insurance companies were looking at, but they weren't actually implementing. But I, you know, parametric insurance. Which is really another way of saying it's kind of an event that's happening and you're building an automation, a trigger to an outcome. So if your flight's delayed three hours, there's no public information of every single flight in the world when it lands, when it arrives. Flight radar. Flight radar. Exactly. So imagine using that technology and putting it into a service that says, if your flight's delayed more than three hours, we'll send you 25, 50 pounds cash to your bank account so that you can enjoy it at the airport. Go to WH Smith, buy yourself a paper, a couple bottles of water. Yeah. You'd be lucky if you could buy 50. I'm thinking maybe a newspaper and a bottle of water. No, but it's those kind of grads. Notification moments that we want to deliver now in the product that are making it so interesting for our target audience. And again, when we look at the industry, the market, it's all about who you're targeting and what you're building, who you're building your proposition for. We took a very, you know, wise decision to say, what, we're going to go after millennials. That's our target audience. We're going to build everything they like. We're going to build everything in the proposition they like. And that's where we're going to start. And that's what we did. And then we're going to look at Gen Zers. And when you look at the cycle of customers coming through the insurance space, you can see that millennials are now the greater part of that. You know, they're starting to be the more prominent segment in the workforce. They're starting to take up leadership positions in big companies. There's a lot of influence. But here come Gen Zers starting to enter the workforce. But they're coming with all the gadgets and tools that they grew up with. They grew up with mobile phones. My kids grew up with iPads, you know? So there's an expectation. There has to be more than just traditional insurance products sold to you through websites clicking forms. There has to be this more relevant way of giving them what they want. And as you know, our kids use chat more than email. Want to shop on their mobile device more than they do on the websites. And they're going to use online banking and other services almost immediately and spontaneously. And they want to interact with that product spontaneously. That is our objective at Giga Shoriz. We want to deliver that proposition to that customer base coming through the insurance. Like, and then before you know it, it will be the whole insurance space. So you know, we have big aspirations to not just stay in travel. We want to expand. Once we can prove the concept of the platform, the engagement, the kind of like the simpleness of it and the use, we want to then expand that to other product. But can that actually be replicated through what you're doing? So, um, travel insurance, the example of your flight being delayed. Yeah. You know, then you automatically get that money and it all comes through the app and that is fantastic. But for a different sector, can you replicate that technology? You can. And it's happening now. There are, there's a lot of, um, innovation in claims right now. that is allowing other product verticals to get into the game. And think about what can we do here to make the claim, the moment of truth, much easier for the customer. And as those businesses evolve and offer these services, businesses like ours can go to those services providers and make those arrangements, make that collaboration happen. So we start integrating all that innovation into our products and that somewhat is what we're building because we're not the ones behind building the technology where we're tracking every flight. We're tapping into people that have built the service to allow us to tap into that information. So it's all about data and how we extract and share data and make those services possible for consumers like us who eventually will want, I want my claim payment now. And that is the truth, the reality that many insurance businesses are facing today. We've got to innovate and we've got to push the industry forward. So we're not carrying the flag. We're not a poster boy type business. We just, we need to stay ahead of the game to survive. And even distribution channels like Price Comparison websites, they're evolving as we speak. They've got a lot of stick from the regulator in the early days for just throwing cheap prices. People were going for the cheap prices, but now they're starting to integrate trust signals. Actually, which product is actually good? Raided not only on product features, but on what customers are saying. So there's a whole evolution of how that price aggregation is being presented to customers. And we're just kind of adopting. We're kind of trying to stay a step ahead of that and provide customers features that they want. And we can only understand that when we speak to our customers and learn what they really want. You know, building gigasheurs is also become not only about insurance. It's about how do we make sure we can provide good service when we issue an app? Our customer survey agents have to be almost as good as telling people about the product and showing them how the app works. And so how do you do that? How do you make sure there's good as you? That basically you put them through a very rigorous onboarding process. We've got product expert that teaches them everything about the product. And we've got experts that know about how we're delivering the technology. That in itself comes together as they hear people come and say, hey, I can't upload this. Hey, my document didn't stick to the form. Can you help me? Or sometimes it's just like my information's missing. There's very simple errors that we have to almost like put a SWAT team around always and fix. And that's what really makes the business exciting in a way. We're constantly iterating, catching up to what we've designed. Like we need to make sure what we put out works. So your business not only becomes about always innovating, it's about how can we automate? How can we make things simple? And when you ask me about how are you transforming travel insurance, things like that, I come back to the original idea of, well, what are we going to do to make insurance simple? And it's all about that. It's about how you buy insurance, what are the key takeaways about the product you're buying? Do you understand what you're buying? You know, there's this whole big misconception. People just don't read insurance products. People don't read insurance policies. That is true. It is true. A lot of times, I think people just don't understand a lot of it. Because a lot of businesses are just putting the legal text blurb out there and people kind of just don't follow. You need to almost like break that down and put it into layman's terms. And that is what we spend a lot of time doing with our product is we take those key features, those covers, those benefits that are for your benefit. And we try to explain those easily for customers in our platform, in our platform, of course. But yeah, look, the motivation, the passion, the whole, I want to deliver something really cool here. He's all about just thinking about what the customer really wants and what they're looking for. And once you've got them, now you've got to keep them. You've got to nurture that relationship. And insurance is still working its way up that trust value proposition because it's hard for insurance companies to deliver that on the front end. Because in the end, the complicated part happens when you're handling the claim. And for many businesses in our industry, that claim is being handled by your service provider, your partner. And I think this is where the regulator has come down on the industry and is trying to really encourage the industry to get behind. Hey, own up to your partners. Don't just hand off people down the chain, own up to whom you're partnering with, and deliver a good outcome. And to your point, that I think that's what Gen Z expects as we-- If one payment. They want payment. They want it straight away. So looking at-- you took home new business of the year, which was a brilliant accolade. I think on the evening, you were definitely the most shocked winner that we had when you came off stage. So I think it was great to see how much it meant to you. I think you've had a lot of success in quite a short amount of time, probably largely to the fact that this is second time round. And that motivation and the drive. So what does the future look like for Giga Shaw? In 10 years' time, if I interview you for this podcast, which I hope will still be running, what would you be proud of saying to say? I think where we're taking the business to answer your part A is to continue to deliver those relevant experiences to our customers in the shape-- currently in the shape of travel, because that is our first vertical. But once we get the platform to deliver what it really is meant to deliver, which is an elevated customer experience, we can then start thinking about horizontal growth, which means adding other retail insurance products to the mix. Things that you can then really enjoy-- for us, motor insurance is not really a motivation, because motor insurance is a commodity. It's a very hard market to get into, by the way. It's a very different market. But for us, it's the more specialty products that I'm interested in to evolve, because those are the ones that are going to become more interesting for people to design and create that innovation. So for me, we're looking at Pat Insurance as a big market. Obviously, COVID brought to light the need of a furry friend at home. Did you get one? No. No. The kids wanted one, but I could not. And we need to keep thinking about other markets. So for a giga sure, it's not just about the UK. It's about Europe. It's about the US. And for us down the road, does that mean growth with power by new investment? So we'll need a good reason. But at the moment, the success we've had early on is it's encouraging, because what we've built means the market is taking-- there's demand for what we've built. And anybody will tell you, starting on your business, if you've got the man for something you've built, I think you're on your way. When you're struggling to create that demand, I think you're going to have a long journey. And in coming full circle to why I was so excited and so shocked about the award is because we've been trying to look for recognition in smaller industry-style award programs. And I only don't on me that what this program offers is longevity, its continuity, its community. And I felt all the phases to get to the stage we were at were valuable and credible, which is why it brings the excitement on that night. So the night itself is grand. It's just like so many people and it's huge. And the whole spectacle is insane. And I grew up in America. I like to talk about our successes. And that's something that I struggled with. in the past, in the UK, there's not many people like to talk about their successes, and I think that's so important in what we do. You know, I think it's good stories to tell and good educational stories, and you know, someone asked me the other day, you know, because I am looking at other programs to involve myself in. And it says, "What is attracting you to this program the most?" It was a very simple question, but yet I thought about it and I thought, "Do you know what's attracting me the most?" It's not sitting in a kind of classroom learning from a tutor or a teacher, a professor, or whatever it is, or an expert. It's more about the collaboration I'm going to have and the interaction I'm going to have with other founders. Yeah. Like-minded people that can share their story with you, and I was having that nice conversation with other founders in the luncheon you did a couple weeks ago, and I thought that this is why I'm really kind of, I'm happy to be sitting here and explaining my story because it's, you know, I don't get to do it often. So you've brought that out in me. But also just to also show the team that there is, you know, value their hard work, recognize their hard work. So I'm not just here for myself. I'm here for my team that, you know, wish I could have them here, but to be honest, that is what really, as an entrepreneur, makes you feel good. It is working through that together and building success together. I keep telling my team, we can't do this if we are not, you know, together. Alignment comes with the togetherness, the motivation to work together. You don't have to create alignment. Alignment happens naturally. And people that start meetings and say, "I want to be aligned." It's like, what? You can't just do that. You can't just align. You kind of need to feel it. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I just have so many visions, experiences of my past that I want to bring to this business, you know. A valuable insight is you've got to look back to go forward. You know, I heard one day someone say, "You can only look forward." I would say, "Man, you don't know where you're starting. You've got to look back to really know where you're going." And, yeah, it's so valuable as a founder, as a young business, to have that experience, you know, because, you know, people are going to come to you and not ask you about why, you know, what's 2+2, they're going to ask you, like, you know, very, very sincere questions that they will appreciate your feedback. They look forward to it and, yeah, it makes me feel good. I think it's like, I could talk to you all day about the nuances of American entrepreneurship versus British entrepreneurship. Really good. It's so different and is each year is our programme developed side. Realised that my good friend, Alison, who is on our advisory board. She always says, "Less humble, more bragg." And that's what she's always encouraging people to do. And in turn, that's what I say as well. So, I think that's a lovely place to finish in that you well done you, you know, to build what you've built in such an incredibly short space of time, just shows the inspiration that you can provide to other founders and young entrepreneurs. Those Gen ZEs, let's say as well. And I think actually, you know, people might tarnish the insurance world with, it's a bunch of corporates, but actually I think you're really shaking it up. And I think you'll be back as entrepreneur of the year, international expansion winner as well. And hopefully, many more beyond that. So, I wish you all the success for the future. And thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Sarah.