How do two major insurers merge their IT, data, and teams without customers feeling a thing? In this episode of the Innovantage podcast, we go inside the ERGO and Gjensidige integration across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to see what insurance M&A really demands from technology and people.

Kristaps Spundins is Information Technology and Operations Officer at ADB Gjensidige and Deputy CIO at ERGO Latvia, with more than 14 years in insurance after starting his career as a software engineer. He now works at the center of a cross-border transformation, bringing two established insurers’ organisations, processes, systems, products, and data under one roof while keeping service running smoothly for every customer.

You’ll come away knowing how to make hard integration calls faster, keep a regulated business stable while everything underneath it changes, and protect the knowledge and relationships that give an acquisition its real value.

Introduction 0:00 From software engineer to 14 years in insurance 0:27 Why ERGO bought Gjensidige’s Baltic business 4:00 How to decide which systems survive a merger 9:14 Who gets blamed when the merger slows everything down? 13:00 Why trust drives successful post-merger integration 16:16 The hidden cost of overplanning a merger 20:53 Why software is now the engine of every business 26:47 Insurance is boring? 30:00 Legacy systems and when to kill, upgrade, or keep them 31:47 Why data is the asset every merger must protect 37:13 What makes mergers survive? 40:26 Can you pay AI to recommend your brand? 44:48 Will AI replace people in insurance? 51:09 What insurance will look like in the next 5 years? 56:03 Where to find Kristaps 58:50

Connect with our guest Kristaps Spundins – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristaps-spundins/ Connect with Max Max Golikov – https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-golikov/

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