New executive governance at Wakam

Olivier Jaillon, CEO of Wakam, unveiled a new organization aimed at supporting the fast-paced growth of the European leader in B2B2C “white label” insurance.

The new organization will be effective immediately:

Three Vice-Presidents are named Chief Operating Officers and are responsible for scaling up Wakam’s delivery platform, upon three main axes:

• COO Revenue : Franck Pivert

• COO Risk & Capital : Christophe Neves

• COO Scalability : Bertrand Robert

Three Vice-presidents will support the CEO, across the organization, to further enhance Wakam’s steering efficiency, leveraging its bold and innovation-driven culture:

• VP Finance & Corporate Legal : Raphaël Soula

• VP People & Culture : Vanessa d’Aumale

• VP Strategy & External Relations : Clément Royo

These six COO and VP will directly report to Olivier Jaillon. They will be leading the community of Wakamees to deliver Wakam’s strong ambitions and rapid expansion.

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• Wakam has been growing faster than 30% p.a. since 2016. To become a true powerhouse, Franck Pivert, COO Revenue and former executive committee member at Allianz Partners and a McKinsey alumnus, will be responsible to widen and strengthen Wakam’s business footprint across the European continent, the UK and Ireland.

• Unlike most super-fast-growing companies in the insurance space in Europe and beyond, Wakam is a fully licensed insurer, leveraging its balance sheet to maximize value-creation. Christophe Neves, COO Risk & Capital and ex Chief Risk Officer at AIG Europe, will work on further building the company’s technical excellence, as well as efficient capital management, reinsurance and alternative risk transfer.

• As InsurTech venture and private equity funding has been growing at 60% last year in Europe, and as Wakam just passed the mark of 10 million API calls per month, the company decided to accelerate its investment in technology. Bertrand Robert, COO Scalability, will steward the building of Wakam’s robust data and technological delivery platform, and will oversee major operational transformation initiatives. Bertrand was Ops Lead at Alan, now one of Europe’s leading B2C InsurTech in the health space.

• As Wakam is already nearing half a billion euros in revenues, Raphaël Soula, VP Finance & Corporate Legal, will transition the company to a group structure and lead its corporate up-sizing. Before joining Wakam, Raphaël was CFO at B2B2C business units of Axa and Generali, and spent several years with auditing firm EY.

• In the last two years, Wakam has doubled its number of employees, and will accelerate further to power its growth. Vanessa d’Aumale, VP People & Culture, is on-boarding talents across several European locations. Vanessa was formerly Head of People at BlaBlaCar, the French car-sharing scale-up.

• Wakam is accelerating its already 60% p.a. growth outside of France and has recently been authorized to operate in 32 countries across Europe and the UK. Clément Royo, VP Strategy & External Relations, will sherpa Wakam’s business and institutional agendas to boost its expansion as a European leader and recognition as a central player. Clément was a senior advisor to the chairman of the Budget & Finance committee at the French National Assembly before joining the company.

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Olivier Jaillon, Wakam’s CEO, declared: “I am absolutely thrilled to have such a team around me, taking upon them to scale our business into a sky-rocketing, robust and highly profitable pan-European leader.”

Emmanuel Clarke, Chairman of the board of directors also said: “With this new organization, striking the right balance between fast delivery, continued innovation and robustness, Wakam is readying itself to accelerate, and enable more and more business partners among those who want to lead the change in insurance.”