Advisory & Dealmaking
Willow Ventures is a Singapore-based advisory and dealmaking platform. We work with insurers, banks, brokers and private equity investors across Asia-Pacific, from the first view of a market to a signed agreement.
What we do
Channel strategy, partner selection, partnership origination, commercial structuring and negotiation, including the parts most advisers hand back: finding the counterparty, getting into the room, and agreeing terms that hold.
Use-case prioritisation, deployment sequencing, operating-model design and implementation through complex organisations. The constraint is rarely the technology; it is the sequence, the owner and the operating model around it.
Buy-side target screening, sell-side positioning, commercial diligence and transaction support, grounded in an operator's read of whether the distribution and the book actually behave the way the model says they will.
Market entry, licensing pathways, carrier strategy and appetite, and distribution-model design across Singapore, Labuan and the wider region, for both new entrants and incumbents building alongside their core.
How we engage
Engagements range from focused diagnostic sprints to multi-market programmes, with Willow acting either as an adviser or as an embedded extension of the client team.
Most work begins with a bounded first phase, enough to test the thesis and produce something a management team can act on, before any longer commitment is made.
Who we work with
Principal
George Kesselman
Managing Director
George has spent close to two decades in insurance across Asia-Pacific, in senior roles at AIG and as Chief Commercial Officer of ZA Tech in South-East Asia, before founding Willow Ventures. He works with regional leadership teams on the problems that sit between strategy and execution: distribution economics, partnership structures, AI deployment and transactions.
He is President of the InsurTech Asia Association, author of The Power of Play (Wiley) and a co-author of The InsurTECH Book.
Enquiries
Most engagements begin with a short call to test whether the problem is one Willow is genuinely the right party to work on. If it is not, we will say so.