Those close to Tim Hardcastle could describe him as someone with a restless spirit.

That’s true for his ability to identify problems and optimize solutions in the finance and insurance industries. But it’s also true for his racing passion – a longtime hobby that has put him in the driver’s seat of a literal racecar.

“You’ll see me on a racetrack somewhere in the U.K. next year,” said Hardcastle, CEO and cofounder of London-based InsurTech Instanda, in a recent interview with Carrier Management.

In fact, he said speeding toward goals with a team is his bread and butter.

Hardcastle’s software company, Instanda, is a fully digital and customizable policy administration platform that enables customers to design, build and launch insurance products across the property/casualty and life and health spheres.

The InsurTech’s no-code platform aims to ease and quicken the process of opening new market segments and effectively target niche products to businesses and consumers. Instanda allows clients to build unlimited product lines and distribution channels.

Prior to entering insurance as CIO at Hiscox, Hardcastle held CIO and COO titles at U.K.-based Agilisys and Jarvis. He bought a lot of software, and he sat in the hot seat on executive teams exploring how to enter new markets and revitalize portfolios. Now, he uses those experiences to connect with customers.

“I was a corporate guy,” Hardcastle said. “Very well paid, and I could have stayed in corporate life. But I was just driven by this really strong sense of purpose and desire to help the industry do better. You really have to have that belief.”

Convincing industry folks that Instanda’s “very different way of doing things is credible (and) reliable” is part of his company’s story, Hardcastle said. The company’s vision is to provide and tie together insurers’ core system and portals to pave the way for new opportunities.

A piece of advice that has resonated with Hardcastle is to keep it simple, but be sure to understand the complexities behind the simplicity. Understanding the details is important to find patterns and problems, and he said the ability to extract and boil the information down to the larger population is key.

“I think that’s what we’ve tried to bring to insurance,” he shared. “Insurance is complicated. It’s got many different ways of doing it. And so how do you solve that? You have to get into the complexity. You have to understand the patterns and then simplify the way that people who use our technology engage with that complexity. Make it really simple for them to engage with it.”

Looking across the insurance landscape, Hardcastle sees untapped potential.

He believes startups provide “one of the richest breeding grounds for great new ideas. I often use the analogy of a diamond being formed. You’re in such a high-pressure environment that great ideas will form and become diamonds.”

Still, he acknowledged that starting a company isn’t an individual endeavor. It requires a team – sometimes a co-founder – and impacts the founder’s family and friends, too. Aspiring startup leaders need to think about that, he said.

“Insurance is an amazing place,” Hardcastle said, “there’s lots of attractive parts. But you really need to … seriously think about the support you’re going to need and the price you’ll end up paying. And that’s going to impact your relationships. That’s one side of it people often do not do.”

He also touched on the importance of solving pain points that are meaningful – and will be bought at a profitable price point. Some industry pain points he believes are ripe for innovation and improvement include data ingestion and data enrichment for commercial lines; customer-centric, digital claims and the ecosystems around claims; and point of sale consumer journeys with integrated insurance.

There is still room for improvement in the industry, he said. Regarding innovation in these areas, he believes “there’s plenty of space for that to happen.”