Guest Blog from Dan Roberts, CEO at Nayms
CEO Musings: Looking back to look forwards – A note on the next 3 years at Nayms.
So there we have it: Nayms is now the world’s first, fully-regulated marketplace for on-chain insurance. A goal we started back in 2019. After 3 years of problem solving, 2 years of regulatory sandbox, 1 year of key team growth, 6 months of token preparation, 1 month of being fully-regulated, 1 week of the craziest crypto market yet and 1 day of sitting with my feet up; I take this opportunity to visualise the next 3 years at Nayms by looking back over the past 3.
As a reminder, our mission remains:
To be the World’s Leading, Digital Insurance Marketplace.
Before we get there, let’s look back at our key progress:
Regulation
Stay with me. Regulation has become a vital and, dare I say it, exciting part of the Nayms proposition over the last 2 years. Not only has it allowed the project (and the team!) to mature at a fast pace, but it has enhanced our product offering significantly. Our challenge has been to avoid regulatory and legal processes dampening the impact of our technology. We have asked how we can use a regulated approach to catalyse our infrastructure in getting into the hands of our target marketplace participants. Here’s a rundown of the strategy with a shout-out to David Verbeeten for leading the research and implementation of such a structure:
Nayms holds a Digital Asset Business Act (DABA Class F) Licence as well as an Innovative General Business Insurer (IIGB) Licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA). We are the first company ever to hold both licences. Our regulated entity in Bermuda is set up as a segregated accounts company (SAC), allowing marketplace users to conduct compliant insurance business, on-chain, under our licensing. This is because Nayms holds the regulatory relationship with the BMA and thus has an important and highly responsible role of working with our insurance partners on defining their plans during on-boarding to their own ‘on-chain balance sheet’. We will be building out our governance framework for new entrants to allow leveraged balance sheets in 2023, completing our model.
Team
It is no great reveal that building a killer team is of the highest importance. But I’ve been incredibly grateful to see the effect of this first hand. Our CTO, Theodore Georgas, has brought in some engineers who have had an immediate impact on the productivity and synchronicity of the development team. Marko Dumic and Aleksander Marinkovic are very notable here. We’ve also seen Adam Adamson become our Head of Business Development and have welcomed Danielle Wall Elliott in as our COO and board member. Such individuals continue to take Nayms to new heights. We will double our team in the next 9 months and I can’t wait to see the great work smart people can do when given the autonomy, support and platform to drive their career, and Nayms, into new territory.
As for team challenges, sourcing through to onboarding of a new candidate is a difficult task to master. Here we are lucky as we have just formalised a partnership with Mana Search who basically run our entire HR department. It wasn’t always like this. From LinkedIn jobs to fending off a gabble of recruiters, hiring the wrong people, interviewing candidates in unproductive ways and missing our mark on culture, 2022 has been the year where it’s all come together…and we’re now ready to scale.
As CEO, I’ve also seen the importance in my role evolving as the business does. No longer am I Head of Any Research Whatsoever, Lead Begger of Capital or Chief Inspirer of Blue Skies, but instead I’m needing to grow into a strategic leader with the support of my close peers. As Nayms continues to grow, so too will my role and the roles of the wider team. We will all need to embrace this if we are to remain at the front of our industry.
If you want to learn about our culture and be a part of our growing team then get in contact with hello@nayms.io
Competitive Landscape
The benefit of a new market emerging is that partnerships prevail over competition due to the vast amount of spare capacity for early innovations to grow into. Although we avoid the mindset that ‘we have no competition’, we’d rather collaborate with players in the space to help both parties grow. Competition exists more over the market’s attention and their bandwidth in understanding nuanced insurance propositions beyond ‘crypto and insurance’. I’ve been largely grateful to see this sentiment echoed amongst my peers, with a nod to Eyhab Aejaz, my fellow start-up companion, who has taken Breach Insurance through a similar journey from existentially uncertain to the skies the limit. I look forward to all the work that is to come between Nayms and Breach. We already look back with nostalgia and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
But enough about looking back.
Looking forward
Following our regulatory announcement (you can see this here) Nayms is now ready to launch two products:
- On-chain balance sheets within the context of a marketplace.
- Fully regulated, crypto-native captives.
We have maintained our strategy around flexibility when it comes to providing digital infrastructure to the market. Not only can an insurance party build an on-chain balance sheet, but now crypto projects can hold their own token, or a portion of treasury assets, in a regulated cell for the purpose of self-insurance. This makes us the only fully regulated, crypto-native captive product in the world. As a growing market continues to look at a multitude of ways to build out their risk transfer strategies, we are pleased that Nayms has this flexibility built in.
Furthermore we will be launching our own native utility token, NAYM, to the market as a catalyst for marketplace activity and to allow early adopters and users going forward to buy into the growing success of the marketplace. You can find our token paper here. A major component of NAYM is the economics involved in aligning user incentives to grow what we call the Nayms Discretionary Fund (NDF). We look forward to launching this post listing as a way to provide a final layer of protection over certain marketplace activities.
Looking further ahead we’re discussing Nayms+, the idea that insurtech solutions plus an active marketplace are inherently more valuable. Imagine a parametric claims solution that has insurance collateral attached directly to a trigger, and the payment rails to settle this instantly. With a flood loss for example, your bank account would fill up with a payout whilst your property filled up with water! Imagine a policy aggregator built directly into overall marketplace activity so retail customers have full insight into all the best insurtech policies available. Imagine a chat service for users where the barriers between comms and activity, through features such as integrated calls-to-action, are entirely removed. Only a digital marketplace can get the most out of the best insurtech solutions out there, and through building, buying or partnering we intend to do just this.
The past 3 years have been a process of building, iterating, educating and preparing for scale. The next 3 will be about growing into a major player in the digital asset ecosystem and beyond. The insurance industry shouldn’t be as manually driven as it is. Nayms is looking forward to working with the insurtech solutions out there that think the same.
What feels accurate is the old adage: good things take time. Nayms is not about making a quick buck based on imperfect market sentiment, but is about detailed research and real problem solving. What we have built in our team as a foundation to the Nayms mission is a problem-solving machine. And the problems are everywhere. It is this problem-solving fabric to Nayms that will see us survive and thrive in the years to come.
So here’s to that.
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Thanks for sharing your story Dan. It has been amazing to see your vision come to life over the last 3 years and it looks like we have an exciting 3 years ahead!
If you are a pre-seed or seed insurtech and are looking for support and funding – or maybe you just have an idea that you would like to chat through – we have the experience and the tools to help you get to market faster. Check out our incubator and venture fund or get in touch.