The Australia-listed technology firm Bravura Solutions has scored two recent notable wins: it has achieved a high ranking in the global sector and has recently been signed up by Schroders, the UK wealth manager. The moves show that the firm is building momentum not just in its home market but globally, executives say.

Bravura says it is one of only two Australian companies to have been listed among the world’s top 100 technology vendors to financial services companies by Financial Insights and American Banker magazine. This is sixth year in a row that Bravura has secured a position on the FinTech 100 list, it said.

The FinTech 100, now in its ninth year, is an annual listing of the world’s technology vendors that generate more than one third of revenues from the financial services sector.

The listing gave the firm a chance to tout the virtues of its Sonata wealth management platform, launched two years ago. It provides a single administration solution for life insurance, trust, pension/annuity, group superannuation/pension and UK wrap.

Meanwhile, Bravura has announced that Schroder Investment Management (Luxembourg) has implemented its Babel financial messaging platform, as Schroders streamlines its Straight Through Processing system.

Business performance

“We have sustained steady growth over the last financial year, with a 126 per cent increase in net profit after tax, a 22 per cent growth in EBITDA and a five per cent increase in sales revenue,” Tony Klim, Bravura chief executive, said in a statement.

“During the 2012 financial year, we signed five new client contracts with leading financial institutions, completed implementation projects with three clients and performed 79 client upgrades. So far this financial year, we have also signed two new client contracts,” said Klim.

“We attribute this trend of success to our excellence in product offering and significant new deals, including a ten-year contact with long-term client, BNY Mellon,” he said.

As for the Sonata service, Klim said the firm now has two clients using this platform, Partners Life in New Zealand and Russell Investments in Australia. It expects more significant international interest.

A few days ago, this publication spoke to Roland Slee, managing director, APAC at Bravura Solutions, about products such as Sonata.

Sonata combines support for retirement savings and pensions products, life insurance and wraps in a single application. It has functionality targeted at the specific needs of UK wrap, Australian superannuation, NZ KiwiSaver and Asian life insurance, he said.

Slee is a relative newcomer at Bravura, joining the firm last November, and he said he is upbeat about its prospects. "It is a company that has very deep domain knowledge in the market sectors it addresses including transfer agency and wealth management globally,” he said.

"Bravura was previously less focused on technology; we saw it as a means to an end and focused primarily on leveraging our deep industry knowledge to create compelling business solutions. However, in the past five years we have seen a ground shift in the way financial institutions are leveraging technology to create business advantage,” he said.

“We now feel that to create truly compelling business solutions we must combine our deep industry knowledge with advanced skills in software engineering, leveraging state-of-the-art technology in areas such as mobility, analytics and financial messaging,” Slee continued. 

“Today business moves much faster than that, so Bravura now builds its core wealth management platform, Sonata, using an AGILE software development method that delivers new software releases with new business functionality that are well tested and production ready every four to six weeks. This enables our software to underpin our clients' ability to innovate and remain at the forefront of competition,” Slee said.

"Partners Life wrote its first million dollars in premiums in their first three weeks of operations on Sonata, and in its second year of growth Partners Life is expected to win more than 20 per cent of all new business in the NZ Life market. That's very unusual and indicates the effectiveness of their approach. Partners Life is a disruptive new entrant in the NZ life insurance market,” he said.

"We are actively focused on promoting Sonata to life insurance firms in the Asia-Pacific region. In Asia, you tend to find life insurance products being sold in large volumes, so the systems that support such businesses need to be highly scalable. There is also a strong demand in Asia for access to core wealth data from mobile devices,” he added.