Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 35. Published 16 October 2025. Guests: Finlay Dargan (Equine MediRecord), Paul Prendergast (Kayna) and Anthony Borgman (WTW). Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: I have a question for you. Do you know an embedded finance use case involving horses? I didn't, until now, when I learned about Equine MediRecord. The Irish software company enables horse owners around the world to manage medical data, treatments and more for their horses. Co-founder Finlay Dargan realised the vast majority of horses globally have no insurance at all, often because it's difficult to obtain and expensive. This creates significant financial risk for owners. So he partnered with insurance technology provider Kayna and broker WTW to launch an embedded mortality insurance solution, starting with the UK market.
In this episode I speak with Finlay from Equine MediRecord, Paul from Kayna, and Anthony from WTW. Together they give us a complete picture, from identifying the opportunity to building the technology and bringing it to market. You'll hear how they created an insurance product that fits seamlessly into the horse owner's existing workflow, and what this reveals about embedded insurance opportunities in unexpected markets.
But before we dive in, a quick word from this episode's sponsor, Marqeta. When it comes to your card program provider, you can't afford to compromise. Marqeta's modern payment solution flexes with your business without the trade-offs. Stable and agile, secure and innovative, scalable and configurable. If somebody tells you you can't have it all, don't believe them. Your business and your customers expect more. Choose a partner that delivers more. Choose Marqeta. Learn more at marqeta.com/lars. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Finlay. Hi Anthony. Hi Paul. Welcome to the podcast.
Today is one of the first editions where we're going to have three guests. Looking forward to diving into the specific topic of embedded insurance in the specific sector of horses. For those of you who have listened to one of my previous podcasts, I learned quite a bit about jewellery, where my father-in-law is active. My daughter is still too young to be excited about horses, but maybe that happens at one point as well, and I'm going to get some insights here. So Finlay, I guess you are the person here with the biggest horse knowledge of all of us, right?
Finlay Dargan: I presume that's the case, given your introduction. Yes.
What Equine MediRecord does
Lars Markull: Perfect. Finlay, maybe you want to kick us off. Obviously you mentioned it's embedded insurance, it's in the broad sector of horses. Maybe before talking about the specific insurance case, maybe you can give us a little bit of an introduction about what your company does, and then soon after that we can go deeper into the embedded insurance case.
Finlay Dargan: So my name's Finlay Dargan, I'm the COO of Equine MediRecord. Essentially this came out of, I come from five generations plus of horse breeders in Ireland, and just on our own farm, keeping up with all of the paperwork that regulation generates became increasingly difficult. And therefore it was a brainchild of myself, my brother Pierce, and our tech partner Simon Hillary. We came up with this idea that why can't a lot of this paperwork just be digitised?
The digital revolution came very late to a lot of the agricultural sector. So we started building out how can we digitise some of the paperwork aspects of the horse racing industry in particular. So we primarily focused on medical records. And now that we've grown around the world, the next step was, well, we're sitting on this pile of data, how can we help customers to improve other parts of their life where there's complications with paperwork?
And that naturally led us to think, well, we're sitting on an awful lot of health data, a lot of horse data. Surely this could be of interest to insurers. We can help the horse racing industry, which faces huge problems of underinsurance and non-insurance in the horse sector. And so we started to seek out partners to help us to bring some digitisation to the equine insurance sector. And that brought us into contact with Paul, and eventually with Anthony and WTW.