Where Courage Meets Capital

Over the past few weeks, I have published two pieces that were really one argument.

In Running to Stand Still I made the case that our industry’s obstacles to innovation are not technological. The capital is returning, the tools are extraordinary, and still, we manage to get in our own way. The blockers are cultural and organisational, and because they are of our own making, they are ours to remove.

In Learning to Love Uncertainty I went underneath that to ask why. My answer was that we are deeply uncomfortable sitting in the not-knowing, and that a culture which cannot tolerate uncertainty will only ever produce process innovation: the careful optimisation of things we already do. Anything genuinely new requires standing, for a while, in a place where the answer is not yet visible.

I stand by both. But reading the market recently, I think there is a third thing to add, and it completes the picture rather than complicating it. Nerve matters. So, it turns out, does money.

The bar has moved to adoption

Insurance Business ran a piece recently in which senior figures at Lloyd’s and The Hartford set out where they believe insurance innovation goes next, and I think they have it exactly right.

Their argument, in short, is that we have largely solved the problem of proving new technology works. The harder and more valuable problem is scaling it, turning a strong pilot into something embedded across an entire market. Dawn Miller of Lloyd’s put it plainly: innovation only creates impact when it is tested against real market needs and adopted at scale.

She is right, and it is precisely the clear-eyed framing this market needs. Consider the evidence. Forty-seven US startups have now come through Lloyd’s Lab, raising more than $600 million between them. The pipeline of ideas and the capital to seed them are both in good health. And, exactly as Miller says, the decisive work then begins at the point of adoption and scale.

That is the right place to look. Serious capital going in at the front, a well-run pipeline doing exactly what it was designed to do, and the real test waiting where it matters most.

I have mentored at the Lab since its founding, and from my own view inside the Room I think Miller and Scott have named exactly the right frontier. What I would add, in support rather than correction, is why clearing that bar is hard, because naming the reason is the first step to solving it.

Part of the answer is the cultural nerve I wrote about last time: an unfamiliar idea needs a market willing to stay with it long enough to let it prove itself. Scaling costs money, and at precisely the moment a promising business needs serious growth capital, here in the UK we have not always made it easy to find. The good news is that this is changing.

The other half of the answer

Which brings me to work I have been actively supporting, which, deserving a piece of its own, will be the subject of an upcoming blog. Watch this space.

In summary however, Sir Alastair King, until last November the 696th Lord Mayor of the City of London and now following me as a Master of the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs, took Growth Unleashed as his mayoral theme and has not put it down since he removed that particular chain of office.

Whilst Lord Mayor, at the Mansion House in May 2025, he, the then Chancellor and seventeen of the UK’s largest workplace pension providers signed the Mansion House Accord, committing to allocate at least 10 per cent of their defined-contribution default funds to private markets by 2030, with half of that directed into UK assets. On the Government’s own reckoning that could unlock up to £50 billion of investment for the British economy. It is the work for which he was knighted in this summer’s Birthday Honours, citing services to pension reform.

This ambition is no longer confined to the City. In July, the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, backed a £1 billion UK Scale-up Fund to channel money from pension schemes such as Nest and Railpen into British start-ups, with the British Business Bank alongside. It is a government-led counterpart to the industry-led commitment Alastair helped broker, the same idea pushed from the other end. Correlated, not copied, and all the better for it.

Alastair has this year carried the same agenda into our Company’s Scale-Up Capital programme, whose flagship event at the London Stock Exchange in June brought more than 200 delegates, over half of them active investors, to meet eighteen screened businesses typically raising between £5 million and £30 million, including three of the Lloyd’s Lab alumni whom I mentored. The momentum only building, with a defence and dual-use showcase to follow at Mansion House this September and a further regional showcase forthcoming in Edinburgh.

More than £120 million has now been raised across the wider programme.

His warning was characteristically blunt: Britain sits on a goldmine of innovation and then watches its gems get polished elsewhere.

A sentence I would pin above every insurtech conversation in our market.

Three things have to line up

So here is where the two pieces land, with the third leg attached.

Innovation that actually changes anything needs three things at once.

1.       A culture with the nerve to live in the uncomfortable space long enough to find something worth having.

2.      A market willing to adopt what it finds, rather than admire it in a pilot and quietly revert to normal.

3.      Capital patient enough to fund the unglamorous middle distance where a good idea becomes a real business.

Line all three up and they compound. Nerve gives you ideas worth having. A market ready to adopt turns them into practice. And patient capital carries them across the middle distance where so many good businesses have stalled. Get the combination right and the brilliant company no longer gets bought and scaled somewhere else. It grows up here, which is the answer to the very worry Alastair keeps naming.

The genuinely encouraging part is that all three are within our gift.

●        The Accord is widening the pipe.

●        The Lab and programmes like Scale-Up Capital are filling it.

What remains is the part that costs nothing and gives the most back: our willingness, inside our own organisations, to back something a little before it feels entirely safe. That is the same nerve my blog Learning to Love Uncertainty was about, the readiness to wade out until our feet no longer touch the bottom, and the same self-made courage that its partner blog, Running to Stand Still, said was ours to summon all along. Miller and Scott have shown us where to aim. Alastair and the Accord, and now the government itself, are marshalling the capital.

The last and best ingredient is one this market already holds in abundance: courage. So let’s spend it.

The water is deeper out there. That is exactly why it is worth the swim.

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 Mark ‘Hux’ Huxley is the founder of Huxley Advisory, with nearly 50 years’ service to the insurance industry. He mentors and advises businesses across brand, proposition, purpose, leadership and operations. He was the 2023/24 Master at the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs and the current Chair of the Financial Services Group of Livery Companies.