Bermuda’s pioneering place at the intersection of insurance and digital assets has been likened to the legendary coffee house where Lloyd’s of London was founded in the late 17th century.

Dan Roberts is the CEO of Bermudian-based Nayms, the world’s first fully regulated crypto-native insurance marketplace.

Nayms, a play on Lloyd’s Names, the investors who traditionally funded Lloyd’s underwriters, has set up two BMA-regulated companies on the island – one having a digital assets business license and the other having a Class IIGB insurance license.

Speaking at the Bermuda Tech Summit, Mr Roberts said: “We love the story of Lloyd’s, a 350-year-old market that started as a group of individuals coming together in a coffee house out of London to discuss how to create different ways to share in the world’s risk. It was the best that could be created with the tools that they had at the time.

“What’s exciting for us -- the joke being that Lloyd’s of London, we call ourselves Nayms of Bermuda -- is that there is now a whole plethora of technologies that can be used as tools for people getting involved in the space.”

Mr Roberts added: “We see Bermuda as a place where the new coffee house is being built. It’s a digital coffee house because we now have new tools and there is an opportunity for us to almost have a fresh start where a lot of the complexities that existed in the traditional insurance space can be thrown out.”

He said a lot of the learning that has happened over the last number of decades can be included, adding: “We are not here to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are structures, regulations, legal processes etc that exist for a reason, and have a place here.

“The vast majority of our innovation comes from how those regulatory and legal processes fit in with this new technology. Instead of it just being a technology pool -- innovation.

“If we can get that piece right, then we want to provide that digital coffee house environment for the new world of insurtechs that are coming through.

“Bermuda is a very concentrated, focused, clear place to do that. This conference has been a testament to that.

“You can really walk around and have conversations with all the participants that are going to form these new syndicates, these new capital providers, these new MGAs and MGUs that are ready to do very interesting business on a new set of tools.”

Mr Roberts was speaking on the panel “Re/insurance Reimagined” at Hamilton Princess and Beach Club.

He was joined on the panel by Sandra DeSilva, CEO and chief software architect at Nova Limited; Joseph Ziolkowski, CEO of Relm Insurance, the world’s first fully regulated collateralised reinsurance business that can accept both fiat and crypto as collateral; and Adam Hofmann, founder and CEO of Nimble, the global decentralised insurance company.

James Knox, managing director, technology and blockchain industry-regional practice lead at Aon Solutions, was the moderator.

The Tech Summit, the signature event of Bermuda Tech Week, was presented by the Bermuda Business Development Agency in partnership with government’s Economic Development Department and Next Bermuda, the fintech industry association.