Exclusive: JAVLN CEO outlines next-gen insurance platform

JAVLN, the insurance technology company servicing brokers, agencies, and advisers across Australia and New Zealand, is accelerating its development of a cloud-based broker operating system.

"Because our broker operating system is in the cloud, we can continuously evolve it, making it simpler, faster and smarter," said David Leach, CEO of JAVLN.

"It's also evolving into an all-in-one platform for our target audience, which is primarily insurance brokers, with the right connections into third-party systems, to make things really simple for our end users."

Leach said AI integration is a major focus. "The direction of travel for us is about our software being smarter and more assistive, and to be able to really give our end users a big boost in their working day. Some examples are content summarisation built into our UI, searching capability, agentic capability and copilot capability."

The goal, he added, is to create software that is "simpler, faster and smarter" for advisers, enabling them to deliver higher-quality advice with greater efficiency.

Trust focus

As JAVLN scales across new markets, maintaining customer trust and operational resilience remains a priority.

"So trust is something we take really seriously. Security is fundamental for us. We are SOC 2 compliant. In Australia, we're aligned to the essential eight cybersecurity framework, and we proactively continue to invest into security," said Leach.

He described the company's approach as that of a custodian of customer data, with a focus on providing a primary system for advisers.

"We want to be the trusted technology partner for our customers, the primary system for that adviser."

Market expansion

JAVLN has achieved strong momentum in the ANZ region and is now eyeing international growth.

"From a product point of view, it's about global market fit, and not overthinking all the different regions and actually trying to work really hard in the R&D area to build products that have strong global market fit," said Leach. "Separately, decoupled from that, you have sales, marketing, partnering...and that whole go-to-market area tends to be more region by region or country by country. Further afield from APAC is UK - London especially is the home of insurance. It's a large industry, a lot bigger than Australia, and a really exciting future opportunity for us, but very early days."

Leach sees a shift in the role of advisers within the industry. "The word broker is used in a few different industries, I much prefer the language of adviser. JAVLN can create super-powered advisers, advisers that are better at what they do because they're able to leverage technology to provide better quality advice to their clients, but at a faster pace, more efficiently."

Modernisation challenges

JAVLN faces the typical resistance from legacy systems prevalent in insurance. Leach outlined the lessons learned while scaling the platform.

"There's a lot of legacy desktop systems, a lack of connectivity, systems are not easily able to talk to other systems, and certainly not in the cloud either. There are also a lot of DIY solutions where people have tried to build their own systems," he said.

The company's solution is a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) approach, where all customers use the same cloud version, and updates benefit the entire customer base simultaneously.

"That's what we already have, and what we continue to build out," said Leach.

Recent funding has strengthened this approach. JAVLN raised AUD $6 million to accelerate development and global expansion.

"It means that we can keep building great software at a faster pace. In software, like many companies, you want momentum. You want development velocity, the pace at which you're releasing new features to market," said Leach.

What is JAVLN's vision?

Leach emphasised culture and brand identity as core to JAVLN's growth.

"Becoming a global company, but more importantly a world-class company, means having a world-class culture, great products, very satisfied customers, and true global reach," he said. "If you build the right culture and hire the right leaders, you're able to achieve so much."

A distinctive visual identity also plays a part. "We want to be bright orange and stand out from the crowd. Orange is our primary colour in our branding, and we want to bring our bright orange to everything we do, internally and externally," said Leach.

Looking ahead, JAVLN intends to maintain its cloud-first, AI-enabled platform as the foundation for its expansion, while positioning itself as a primary system for advisers and a trusted partner in insurance and financial services across APAC and beyond.