Ruedi Wipf has been CEO of Consor for 10 years now. We are taking this milestone as an opportunity to ask the questions that often get neglected in the hectic day-to-day work routine.
Ruedi, why did you decide to join Consor in 2015?
I joined Consor as the successor to the founder, as a new investor, and as CEO. It was a unique situation.
At the time, I was specifically looking for a medium-sized software company in the B2B sector that was open to investment and had potential for growth. Not a start-up, but a company that was already established on the market. With Consor, I found exactly that.
Conversely, René Walter [editor’s note: the founder and former owner] was also looking for me and found me. He drew up a list of over 30 criteria. Among other things, his successor had to have studied computer science, be between 40 and 50 years old, and have already managed a medium-sized Swiss software company in the B2B sector. Coincidentally, I met almost all of these criteria, and we both quickly realized that it was a good fit.
What has changed internally at Consor since you took over?
A lot—really a lot. Consor was founded in 1979, and I took over in 2015. After 36 years under the same leadership, modernization was definitely needed.
We reorganized into cross-functional teams and switched to Scrum. We renewed our entire tooling and technology stack. We moved our data center to the cloud and now offer Consor Universal also as a SaaS model.
There were also many administrative changes. We updated our time tracking and CRM systems, reissued employment contracts, migrated personnel data to the cloud using a modern tool, strengthened our security processes, and achieved ISO 27001 certification. The list could go on almost endlessly.
Which technology or development has surprised you the most in the past 10 years?
Ten years ago, I would never have believed that Swiss and German insurers would move their business to the public cloud by 2025 and even adopt the Software-as-a-Service model. It was clear this would happen eventually—but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.
I know digitalization is very close to your heart. Where do you think the insurance market stands in this regard?
Insurance companies, along with banks and government agencies, were among the first to digitize their business—in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, many couldn’t capitalize on this first-mover advantage and are still running on host systems from that era. These legacy systems are stable and incredibly fast, but they’re expensive to maintain and lack flexibility. A 25-year-old entering the workforce today expects a web interface—not a black-and-green 25×80 character screen.
Overall, many insurers are lagging behind the IT developments of the past 10–20 years. Of course, all CIOs are aware of this and are looking for creative and affordable ways to close this digitalization gap.
Many are considering skipping certain technologies altogether. Instead of moving from host systems to client-server infrastructure, they’re jumping straight to SaaS providers.
The insurance business is traditionally seen as a conservative industry. How can industrial insurance foster real innovation?
It’s not the core task of an insurance company to be technologically innovative. Innovation in insurance typically arises through new offerings for customers. For example, parametric insurance or embedded insurance products like the new offering launched by Swisscom together with Zurich and AXA.
Doesn’t that also require innovative technology?
Absolutely. Especially in the field of technical insurance, there are many approaches that combine AI and the Internet of Things. For instance, wind turbines can be equipped with sensors, and using the collected data and artificial intelligence, predictions can be made about if and when a turbine might fail. HDI has launched a corresponding insurance product.
What does “digital responsibility” mean to you personally as a CEO?
The entire IT sector bears a special responsibility in this regard. On one hand, digital tools and applications offer huge advantages and efficiency gains in everyday life and business. On the other hand, it’s essential to ensure that sensitive data remains protected and isn’t misused. AI amplifies all of this—the great benefits, but also the potential risks.
This discussion goes far beyond the IT industry and affects politics and society as a whole. The much-discussed concept of digital sovereignty, in my view, is already an illusion. We are all dependent on large tech corporations. At the very least, we can try to spread the risks and not put all our eggs in one basket.
What personally drives you to give your best for Consor every day?
I still find it exciting to work with our customers and our team to develop new software solutions for emerging challenges.
I’ve been in the software industry for 30 years.
We’re driven by technology and almost addicted to new developments. Like surfers, we wait for the next wave and try to catch it as best we can.
What’s the current wave that needs to be caught?
Right now, everyone is interested in AI. In industrial insurance, we’re still seeing few solutions in this area. We have several ideas and want to develop prototypes together with our customers.
One idea is to feed the unstructured data from an insurance application into an AI and then make specific queries: What is the desired coverage amount? What deductible is requested?
What do you wish for Consor and its customers over the next 10 years?
I truly hope that products and processes will be designed and implemented more end-to-end. At many of our clients, we still see manual processes with lots of media disruptions. It would be great if more insurers shared our vision of bringing their entire process—from broker, risk assessment, quote, policy creation and changes, all the way to billing—onto a digital platform. Ideally, across all lines of industrial insurance. That would bring the greatest and most sustainable benefit to everyone involved.
Ruedi Wipf hast been managing Consor since 2015
