Australian FinTech company profile #46 – Axe Group
- Company Name: Axe Group
- Website: www.axegroup.com
- Key Staff & Titles:
Kimberley Lathe, MD and CFO
Martin Stewart, Founder and Marketing Director
Jason McGrath, Chief Financial Officer
Tom Higgins, SVP Business & Technology Strategy
- Location(s):
Sydney, NSW Australia
Melbourne, Vic Australia
Philadelphia, PA USA
- In one sentence, what does your fintech do?:
Axe Group designs and builds innovative adaptable insurance software for Life and P&C insurance companies that deliver change today, without limiting what you can do tomorrow.
- How / why did you start your fintech company?:
We founded the Axe Group in 1997 with a focus on developing software for the internet. Three years later, we made the decision to focus on the systems needs of insurers – our core market being for Life and P&C insurance for new business, policy admin and claims.
We believe technology should meet our clients’ current needs rather than holding them back like we saw other insurance software solutions doing.
- What the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?:
We have recently successfully expanded into the US and Canadian markets, after receiving sponsorship from the Pennsylvania State Government and the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. The most exciting aspect of our North American expansion efforts is that we haven’t yet come across a competitor with better technology or implementation track record than us.
- What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?:
Challenge yourself, do work you care about and take the risk! And be prepared to pivot your business model each day as you see opportunities arise.
- What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?:
We want to move to a cloud-based SaaS model, which would mean there would be no boundaries for our solutions.
- What other fintechs or companies do you admire?:
Rounded is a web and mobile app helping Aussie freelancers and sole traders to better operate their businesses. So far, they are currently the only app to specifically target the sole trader/ freelancing world – a group whose numbers are increasing significantly with the global trend towards work flexibility. Other companies from this part of the world who have done exceptionally well are Atlassian and Xero.
- What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?:
What I find most interesting is the amazing change in technology over our business’s lifetime and how the rate of change keeps accelerating. One dramatic example is when we started our secondary hosting ‘server’ was an Intel 386 with 4 megabytes of memory. Now our servers are 64 GB; that’s 32,000 times bigger.
