People

Axiome Partners is a digital insurance start up, founded in 2020 by John Cummins and Alastair Burns.

Co-Founder

John Cummins

With a strong science and technology background and for over two decades, John Cummins has led a diverse range of innovative initiatives in collaboration with universities and companies. In recent years, he co-founded the Legal Technology Laboratory in the US to bring lawyers and computer scientists together on cutting-edge legal tech projects. Most recently, and in collaboration with UCL and a range of other organisations, John has undertaken pioneering work in the area of next-generation, digital contracting, also becoming known as ‘computable contracting’. John has a wealth of experience in computational modelling and information science, much of which was gained through his direct involvement in R&D projects, mainly in the fields of engineering science and manufacturing automation.

Co-Founder

Alastair Burns

With over thirty years’ experience in the US, European and London insurance market, holding roles across the insurance value chain, Alastair has led business and functions that have served Global brands through to individual consumers. His interest in technology and associated data issues have been ever present, from the early EPS eTrading efforts of the London market, through to the design of context aware travel insurance products for the mobile telephone companies. His most recent role drew him into the detail of the Future at Lloyd’s, and with it a new understanding of what will really be required for the insurance market place to achieve its goals of true client centricity at a sustainably acceptable cost base.

Axiome Associate

Hélène Stanway

Hélène is an award-winning and highly effective insurance leader with a proven track record in emerging technologies, innovation, operations, data and change. Hélène has led several notable initiatives such as the Global Health Risk Facility, the Digital Risk Engineer and Insurwave for AXA XL. She helps companies in the global insurance market embrace change to achieve their desired strategic goals, improve processes, increase efficiency and deploy relevant tools. Hélène’s desire for transformations is seen in her roles as a Non-Executive and Coaching Director at EDII, the President of SENSE Consortium, Strategic Advisor for r10 and as LMA’s Market Engagment Advisor to the Chair of the Data Council. She works towards advancing women in the industry through mentoring and participates in the Insurance Breakfast Club to support and accelerate female career progression.

Axiome Associate

Geert Bormans

As an information architect, Geert has been solving complex problems for customers for 30 years. Using cutting-edge approaches based on structured data technologies such as XML and Linked Data, Geert has a proven track record of delivering successful projects in areas such as content migration, content management, and electronic publishing. Geert has been using his skills to design foundational information architectures and models, mainly for technical documentation, legislation publishing and in the insurance industry. Geert plays an active role in the larger markup technologies community, by contributing to standards development or as a member of the organising committee of the Markup UK conference.

Axiome Associate

Jacinto Dávila

Jacinto is a computational logician with over 30 years of experience as a developer and researcher in logic and artificial intelligence. As a tenured professor at the Universidad de Los Andes, he led the creation of a graduate program in modeling and simulation as well as a distance education system in computing. More recently, he has been working on developing a controlled form of natural language for computer applications. He believes that some restricted form of natural language will be the ultimate computer programming language. He has developed a translator for Logical English, which is one of the more advanced experiments in translation into computer languages like Prolog, LPS and ASP. It has been used for applications such as digital contracts (or logical contracts) for blockchains, law, education and the insurance industry.

Axiome Associate

Bob Kowalski

Bob is a notable figure in the field of computer science, and is well known for his work in the field of logic programming, and as the co-inventor of the Prolog programming language. He is also one of the main architects of Logical English, a high-level, logic programming language, written in English as a controlled natural language. He argues that the use of computational logic can help to improve natural language communication and problem solving skills. In the course of an illustrious career, Bob has won many awards, including, in 2021, the Inaugural CodeX Prize for his work on the application of logic programming to the formalisation and analysis of the British Nationality Act. Bob is a Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Imperial College London.

Axiome Associate

Robertas Zubrickas

Robertas is an interdisciplinary economist with research interests in social engineering. He has made scientific contributions on the topics of decentralized institutions, policy design, incentive contracts, and behavioural biases in decision-making. Robertas’s ideas on improving crowdfunding platforms have found practical applications. Based at the University of Bath, Robertas has a vast network of collaborators who come from Purdue, George Mason, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Zurich universities and the World Bank. At Axiome Partners, Robertas is involved in developing economic models for the application of computable contracts in the insurance industry.

Axiome Associate

Joshua Young

Josh offers a rare combination of technology awareness and language understanding. He entered the commercial world having taken steps towards a career in academic research in the field of English literature, gaining an undergraduate degree as a scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford and later an MPhil from Cambridge. Following several years of experience as an investment analyst at a multi-billion-dollar equity fund, with coverage of many leading technology and healthcare businesses, he is collaborating with Axiome to help communicate the fundamental technology shift that Axiome represents to the insurance industry. Furthermore, and capitalising on his deep understanding of applied linguistics, Josh is taking a critical look at the language used in commercial insurance contracts with a view to imbuing greater levels of computability.

Axiome Associate

Victor Paraschiv

Victor Paraschiv is a technology leader with over 20 years of experience developing innovative platforms and leading high-performance engineering teams. Most recently, Victor served as the Chief Technology Officer of Nakhoda, Linklaters’ AI and legal technology unit. At Nakhoda, Victor built a world-class team of engineers, lawyers, and product managers to develop solutions for the legal industry. Under Victor’s technical leadership, Nakhoda released an award-winning contract management platform that significantly improved the contract negotiation between tier 1 investment banks using structured data representation for contractual clauses. Victor holds a Master’s in Computer Science from University College London.

Axiome Associate

Ed Cummins

Eduard supports Axiome in a number of ways, not least of which is his responsibility for managing and updating the Axiome website and IT infrastructure. Ed is studying Economics and Maths at the University of Bath and is concurrently developing a number of themes to help build Axiome’s thought leadership and intellectual property. To date, most of Ed’s time has been spent on investigating the use of large language models for insurance contract design. This has involved using existing contract wordings as part of the query set, and then designing new clauses by drawing upon an LLM’s generational capabilities. Ed has more recently started to look at the application of economic theories and modelling to understand the impact of product disaggregation in the commercial insurance space.

Advisor

Oliver Goodenough

Oliver Goodenough’s research and practice at the intersection of law, science, technology, and finance make him an international authority on legal innovation. On the academic side, he is a Research Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and affiliated faculty at Stanford’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, where he has been a leader in their initiatives on computational law, computable contracting and insurance contract automation. For CodeX, he has been a principal author of Computable Contracts and Insurance: An Introduction and Developing a Legal Specification Protocol: Technological Considerations and Requirements. He is also a Research Fellow of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research and an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.

Advisor

Dickie Whitaker

Dickie Whitaker has 40 years’ experience in the (re)insurance business and for the last 20 years has specialised in risk and innovation, linking academia, government and finance. He co-founded the Lighthill Risk Network, Oasis Palm Tree ltd, the Oasis Hub and is the Chief Executive of Oasis Loss Satellite Applications Advisory Board, Expert Group for the Global Risk Assessment Framework (GRAF), UNISDR, Cabot Institute Advisory Board, Natural Environment Research Council and others. Dickie supported and steered the computable contracts project funded by the Lighthill Risk Network that served as the genesis for Axiome Partners.