Round Two: From Empired’s Takeover to Monvia’s IPO

Monvia chairman Russell Baskerville and CEO Simon Bright sit down on listing day to explain why they are reuniting after Empired to modernise life insurance software, and how they plan to win against insurers’ own IT teams.

Back Together for Round Two

Simon Hinsley caught the pair on listing day, with the market still a few hours away from opening. Russell says the relationship goes back about 13 years, to when Empired bought a business called Endogen, which Simon was running. Simon became Empired’s chief operating officer shortly afterwards.

Empired was later acquired by Capgemini. Asked whether Monvia is a business they want to build and hold, or one to sell, Russell says the approach is the same as it was at Empired.

We wanna build a high quality, sustainable business that’s successful in its own right. And building a business that looks like that attracts buyers.

— Russell Baskerville

Simon Hinsley called it a relieving answer, since building a business purely to be acquired rarely works.

What Monvia Does

Monvia has been around for close to 30 years. It was started by a husband and wife, Martin and Kimberly, who built deep expertise in the insurance sector. About five and a half to six years ago they changed strategy to build a SaaS platform for life insurers.

Simon says the opportunity is obvious. Large, often very old organisations are struggling to deliver modern services to young people for something as important as life insurance. Digital transformation has already swept through banking and other sectors, and it is only now arriving in insurance.

We saw an enormous opportunity where you’ve got these really large and often very, very old organizations that are struggling to provide relevant, modern services to young people.

— Simon Bright

The software covers the whole life cycle of an insured person, across four distribution channels: direct, retail, group and corporate. That starts with the first experience someone has when they want to buy a policy, whether that is the individual or a broker, and runs through policy administration, claims, commissions, data insights and reinsurance.

The Real Competitor Is the IT Department

Simon makes a point that shapes the whole strategy: in this market, most of Monvia’s competitors are the internal IT teams of the insurers themselves. That is one reason he sees the timing as right.

On the technology, he is quick to give credit to the founders. Martin is an engineer at heart, and the platform he built five to six years ago is cloud-first and cloud-native, using modern technology that people want to work on. It was ready to go for today.

A New Mindset: Taking the Platform to Market

Russell and Simon’s group acquired the business just over 12 months before the listing, settling on 1 July last year. Simon says the refocus was major, but well received. The founders had concentrated on keeping existing clients happy, particularly the largest one. The new team came from a background of running big programs of work and wanted to treat the platform as a growth opportunity.

The first nine months went into the Australian and New Zealand market. Simon says there were deals in the CRM, but they were not well qualified or well structured, so the pipeline had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Active deals are now at the demo and presentation stage, though enterprise sales take time, with some taking nine, ten or eleven months to reach that point.

On the people side, Simon is proud of what the team looks like:

• Size: just over 100 people.
• Retention: a 98% retention rate, which he says is unrecognised in the market.
• Gender balance: 44% of the workforce is female, which he calls rare in the IT sector.
• Long service: 10 people have more than 15 years of service, five women and five men, and the business has tried to grow them into new roles rather than lose their knowledge.

A Failed Implementation, Then 66% Growth

The best proof point is the largest client, which has been on the platform for the entire five to six years of its life. When it arrived, it had a failed implementation behind it and sat in a declining retail insurance market.

They’ve had growth across the last 5 years at circa 66% CAGR in that retail sector of their business. And that’s really about transforming the experience that brokers and advisors have when they come to that particular client.

— Simon Bright

The logic, Simon says, is simple. If you make it easy for brokers to do business with you, they win more business and grow faster. The same client has used the experience to win the business of a number of large super funds, partly because a fund can see what its members will experience on the platform.

Simon gives a practical example. A member can enter a portal and increase their life insurance with a click, and everything happens in the background. The alternative is to download a form, fill it out, scan it and send it back. As Simon Hinsley noted, if someone says they will send a form afterwards, there is zero chance he completes it. Simon says the contrast is stark in Southeast Asia, where in Singapore people buy life insurance on their phones while standing at a bus station.

AI: Risk or Opportunity?

Simon Hinsley raised the fear that has hit software stocks this year: that AI will replace SaaS businesses overnight. Simon Bright’s answer starts with the environment. Life insurance is a highly regulated industry, and APRA’s standards are world-leading, which means insurers and their suppliers must have full traceability and auditability.

If a claim is being paid, why is it being paid? If a claim is not being paid, tell me the 10 reasons why it’s not being paid.

— Simon Bright

Being compliant with standards like CPS 234 takes a lot of work, and Simon says it is not something a newcomer replicates overnight. The licensing model also matters. Monvia does not license per seat. It uses an enterprise licence plus a variable element tied to the volumes flowing through an insurer, so it grows when the client grows.

That is also why Simon is relaxed about AI agents using the system. The roadmap’s first line item is building the connectivity, which he describes as APIs, apparently now called MCP servers, that lets clients access the platform and advance workflows without a human.

We don’t care if that happens, because we’re not a per-seat based license model.

— Simon Bright

Internally, the team talked about AI from week one and has equipped its developers, and is working through business analysis and design. The second part is putting AI into the product. The first example is claims summarisation, where screens of information from doctors are condensed to help a claims assessor. Simon is clear that it supports rather than makes the decision.

Staying a Product Business, and Looking to Southeast Asia

Simon says Monvia wants to be a software solution provider, not a services business, and does not expect its services arm to grow at any scale over the next five years. Growth will therefore rely on partners, which becomes especially important when stepping into offshore markets.

He and head of clients Stuart recently spent time in Singapore, on a trip with Insurtech and Austrade. Southeast Asia is the next stepping stone, both for the opportunity and because of similarities in regulation and legislation. Monvia is also being more deliberate in Australia, where the team has raised the company’s profile with all the large insurers and some in New Zealand. Tenders are part of the market, but Simon says early conversations matter.

The Name: A Walk From Coogee to Bondi

Simon Hinsley asked the question he says he had not yet asked: why Monvia? Simon Bright calls it his favourite question. He spent two to three hours one Friday afternoon walking from Coogee to Bondi, listening to one of the team present the solution. The words he kept hearing were “single core”, with different journeys or pathways for different users to access it.

Mono and via came together, and were shortened to Monvia. Simon says he fed his notes from the walk into AI to help define what the name might become. Simon Hinsley joked that he had assumed it involved a bottle of red and slurred words.

What Empired Taught Them

Russell says Empired was a long journey, with plenty done poorly and a few things done right. The lesson he most wants to bring across is to have the platform for success early.

Good visibility on our business, good discipline around management, focused on a small number of really important metrics and really driving hard towards those.

— Russell Baskerville

The second lesson is clarity about the customer, and not getting distracted into a deal for the sake of a deal. Deals should make commercial sense over the long term.

The team is built on the same thinking. The board includes Steve Tucker, former CEO of MLC, and entrepreneur Shaan Kanji, alongside directors with Empired backgrounds. The CFO and head of clients both come from Empired. Russell says the value lies in the whole team knowing how to win together, not just in the capability of individuals.

What to Watch: Pipeline, ARR and Quality of Logos

Asked what a new investor should watch beyond big announcements, Simon starts with pipeline, and says the team will be myopically focused on annual recurring revenue. As an enterprise-scale provider, Monvia does not expect to announce a win every month, but when it does, he says it will be significant.

Russell adds that at this early stage the quality of new clients matters as much as size.

For us it’s about high quality logos and brands and real long-term tenure contracts that are a base to grow.

— Russell Baskerville

A smaller deal with a prestigious client can become a reference client and a client for life, whereas a bigger deal that is strategically less important may not help. Simon also notes that Australian insurers are intensely focused on claims at the moment, and Monvia can take components of its platform, including claims ingestion, to solve point problems for clients today.

What Success Looks Like in Three Years

With the listing ceremony approaching, Simon Hinsley asked what success looks like two or three years from now. Simon Bright’s answer is about brand and reach, not numbers.

Success looks like Monvia being a common name amongst the major life insurers, not only in Australia, but Australia and Southeast Asia.

— Simon Bright

The company has a handful of great clients today. If it had three or four times that in three years, and was a household name among large enterprise clients, he says that would be a great success. Russell agreed 100%, and again pointed to logos as the measure that matters.