The ranking of insurance keynote speakers

1. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

Few speakers on this list carry as much external recognition as Erica Dhawan. RealLeaders put her first among female keynote speakers, Thinkers50 has named her to its ranking of the top 50 management thinkers, and Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts. Her newsletter reaches an audience above 100,000. Nothing runs from a standing deck, and the material is reworked with the host team before the date, which is why the same work travels across regulated industries.

Best fit: carrier leadership meetings, brokerage and agency conferences, and industry events running a strategy track

2. Matteo Carbone

Matteo Carbone founded the IoT Insurance Observatory, a think tank tracking connected insurance across Europe and North America, and he sits on several insurance boards. He co-wrote All the Insurance Players Will Be Insurtech and writes a long-running column for Forbes on the economics of the sector.

His argument is that most insurtech conversation confuses novelty with profitability, and he goes after the underwriting math behind a given model. That makes him useful to a carrier weighing an investment or a partnership, because the session tends to kill two or three ideas in the room. He is blunt with claims that do not survive the numbers, which is the reason to book him and occasionally the reason not to. A carrier already committed to a direction should expect that direction tested in public.

Best fit: carrier strategy offsites, insurtech conferences, and innovation team planning sessions

3. Rob Galbraith

Rob Galbraith spent two decades inside carriers including USAA and State Auto before moving into advisory work and speaking. He wrote The End of Insurance As We Know It and has built a following among practitioners for translating emerging technology into underwriting and claims terms.

He covers what actually changes in a carrier's core functions as data and automation arrive, working through underwriting, claims, and distribution in turn. The material assumes an audience that knows the business already, so he can skip the primer and go straight to the operating consequences. It fits a room of product and operations leaders better than a general conference stage. For a leadership team trying to sequence a multi-year program, he is good on what has to happen first.

Best fit: carrier operations meetings, underwriting and claims leadership days, and regional industry conferences

4. Denise Garth

Denise Garth is chief strategy officer at Majesco, a core systems provider, and previously held leadership roles across carrier technology and industry associations. She co-wrote Reimagining Insurance and publishes recurring research on where carriers stand on platform modernization.

Her subject is the system estate underneath a carrier and what a modernization program costs in time, money, and organizational disruption. She brings benchmark data, which anchors a discussion that would otherwise run on vendor claims and internal guesswork. The vendor affiliation is worth naming for the audience, and the research stands up on its own terms regardless. The session works best where a modernization decision is live and the room holds the budget, since much of the value sits in the benchmark comparison.

Best fit: technology leadership meetings, core systems conferences, and carrier modernization program launches

5. Bryan Falchuk

Bryan Falchuk held executive roles at carriers and now runs an advisory practice, and he hosts The Future of Insurance podcast. He wrote The Future of Insurance book series, which assembles case studies of carriers and startups that changed how they reach customers.

He works on distribution and the relationship a policyholder actually has with an insurer, including what the agent channel is for once buying moves online. The case-study format gives an audience specific examples to argue with, which suits a room of distribution leaders. It is lighter on technology detail than some of the others here, deliberately so. Book him where the question is how the firm reaches and keeps customers, and expect the examples to come from carriers of a similar size to the host.

Best fit: agency and brokerage conferences, distribution leadership meetings, and customer experience summits

6. Nick Lamparelli

Nick Lamparelli is a reinsurance broker and partner at Insurance Nerds, and he has spent his career in catastrophe risk and modeling. He co-hosts the Profiles in Risk podcast and writes on how models behave when the underlying climate assumptions shift.

His material covers catastrophe exposure and what a model does and does not tell an underwriter, which has become a live question as loss patterns move. The technical depth suits actuaries, underwriters, and risk teams who can follow the assumptions. A general audience will find it demanding, and that is the trade a specialist booking makes. Where a book carries wildfire, flood, or severe convective storm exposure, this is the session that tells an underwriting team what its models quietly assume.

Best fit: reinsurance and catastrophe risk conferences, actuarial meetings, and underwriting technical days

7. Paul Carroll

Paul Carroll is editor-in-chief of Insurance Thought Leadership and spent seventeen years as a Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. He has written several books on corporate strategy and failure, including Billion Dollar Lessons, and he reads across the industry daily in his editorial role.

He brings a journalist's read on where the industry is heading and which claims about it hold up. The perspective is editorial and cross-sector, which suits a mixed audience of executives and analysts looking for orientation. He is a fit for a framing session near the top of an agenda and less so for an operational working group. He is comfortable naming the initiatives that quietly went nowhere, which an executive audience tends to find more useful than another list of winners from the same five companies.

Best fit: industry association conferences, executive forums, and annual outlook events

8. Tony Cañas

Tony Cañas is a partner at Insurance Nerds and works at The Jacobson Group on insurance talent. He speaks and writes on recruiting, retention, and the demographic transition running through the industry, and he built a practitioner community around those questions.

His subject is the workforce problem underneath everything else, meaning who is entering the industry, who is leaving, and what a carrier has to change to compete for people. The material is practical for HR and talent leaders and reaches association audiences worried about succession. It is a narrower session than a strategy keynote, and that focus is what makes it useful. An association audience watching its membership age out will find the numbers uncomfortable and hard to argue with.

Best fit: talent and HR leadership meetings, association young professional events, and succession planning retreats

9. Daniel Schreiber

Daniel Schreiber co-founded Lemonade and served as its chief executive, building a licensed carrier from nothing into a public company. He previously led a consumer technology business and has written and spoken extensively on how insurance economics differ from other subscription businesses.

He speaks from having built an insurer under the same regulatory constraints the audience works within, which separates him from a technology founder commenting from outside. The session appeals to boards and investors thinking about what a rebuild would actually involve. An incumbent audience may find parts of it uncomfortable, and that discomfort is often the reason a board books him. The material is strongest on why insurance economics resist the growth playbook that works in almost every other subscription business.

Best fit: board strategy days, investor and analyst events, and large industry conference main stages

10. Amy Webb

Amy Webb is the founder of the Future Today Strategy Group and a professor at NYU Stern School of Business. She publishes an annual tech trends report, wrote The Signals Are Talking and The Big Nine, and she works with boards on long-range planning methods.

Her material is about how an organization forecasts at all, using a method she teaches, so the audience leaves with the process and not a list of predictions. For an insurance audience the appeal is that risk pricing and scenario planning are adjacent disciplines, so the method transfers. She is not an insurance specialist, and a room wanting sector detail should book elsewhere on this list. For a board that has never written down how it forms a view of the next decade, the method itself is the deliverable.

Best fit: annual planning retreats, board strategy sessions, and large conference opening keynotes