Innovation at Aviva

"We are experiencing significant shifts in the world – including societal, political, economic, technological, and environmental. These trends are changing the way people live, and will live, and this will fundamentally impact our industry. The innovation agenda at Aviva is a key part of how we will execute our strategy and better support customer needs, and is an important step towards our ambition of becoming the UK’s leading insurer." 

Ben Luckett – Chief Innovation Officer

Our themes

  • Mobility: building traction in the emerging new models of transport, ownership, and related services.
  • Prevention: transforming the insurance business model from claim to prevent helping customers protect their assets.
  • Wellbeing: Finding meaningful solutions at the intersection of financial, physical, and mental wellbeing.
  • Wealth: Helping customers build for a more certain and sustainable financial future.
  • Open finance: Participating in the new world of data and technology led commerce and embedded finance.
  • New services: creating new revenue streams and new adjacent business opportunities.
  • Data & AI: transforming the way we look at and use data to unlock the value of Big Data.

Venture investments

Aviva Ventures is the corporate venture capital fund for Aviva plc. We are focussed on financial and strategic returns and make direct and indirect investments that bring us new opportunities, ideas and emerging technology and customer trends that have the potential to:

  • be transformative to the existing insurance business model
  • accelerate our strategy
  • provide insights into how Aviva will need to adapt to the changing landscape

We’re a strategic corporate venture fund. This means that along with long-term value creation, we want to develop a strategic relationship with those we invest in, and provide them with expertise, global reach and scale.

Portfolio companies

Here are some of the companies our venture capital fund, Aviva Ventures, invests in: 

Owlstone Medical

Owlstone’s mission is to save 100,000 lives and save health care providers $1.5B. 

Shepper

Shepper carries out on-demand inspections on properties and assets through a network of gig-economy ‘Shepherds’.

Carpe Data

Carpe Data is the next generation data company for insurance.

Partnerships & the Fintech Pledge

Core to innovation at Aviva is working with partners in the Insurtech & Fintech ecosystem. The businesses that we work with bring disruptive ideas and technologies to Aviva, they help us to think differently and move at pace.

In April 2021, Aviva signed the Fintech Pledge which supports our ongoing collaboration with fintech and Aviva’s development in this area. The benefits and opportunities that come from working with the right start ups are significant and not to be underestimated. Fintech is a key part of how we are transforming our business to serve our customers more effectively. Partnering with start ups ensures we are always learning, challenging ourselves and improving as a business.

When working with start ups we hold ourselves to the Fintech Pledge principles:

The Fintech Pledge Principles

1. Provide clear guidance to technology firms on how the onboarding process works

2. Provide clarity to tech start-up firms on their progress through the onboarding process

3. Provide a named contact, guidance and feedback

4. Encourage good practice and improvement

5. Commit to implementing this process 6 months from signing this pledge and providing bi-annual feedback in the first year

Founders Factory partnership, UK

Founders Factory is a venture studio and accelerator that has helped create and develop over 200 start-ups. Aviva has been Founders Factory’s strategic partner in fintech since 2016. In 2021, we announced a new £10 million investment and a five-year extension to our partnership, to support new start-ups in the UK.

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