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Simon Schwarz – FreightInsure Ep. 200.

December 6, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

About this Episode

In episode 200 of Fintech Chatter, host Dexter Cousins chats to Simon Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of FreightInsure, about his journey from fintech to insurtech.

Simon shares how his career from investment banking, to fintech, to insurtech (working with SocietyOne, Zip and BizCover along the way) has shaped his current scaleup, FreightInsure.

We take a deep dive into Simon’s strategy to build FreighInsure and how the MGA (Managing General Agent) model has enabled the distribution of embedded insurance products.

Simon reflects on the dual responsibilities as Co-Founder and CEO, and his life hacks for balance and well-being. 

About Simon

Simon is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of FreightInsure, Australia’s leading platform for embedded freight insurance. 

He started his career at Investec Bank in Australia, holding roles as Head of Investments, Head of Credit and Head of Board Risk and Capita. Simon has sat on boards as a Non-Executive Director and Chairman at several investee companies.  He has also acted on advisory boards at Zip Co and Middle, and is a Board member of Insurtech Australia and the Regulatory and Compliance Working Group.

Simon is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, holds an MBA (Exec), Masters of Applied Finance, and is the recipient of the University Medal for pure mathematics from the University of Sydney. He was an Honorary Fellow at Macquarie University’s Applied Finance Centre and a member of the  Menzies School of Health Research Development Committee. 

About FreightInsure

FreightInsure offers embedded goods-in-transit insurance directly from a transport company’s booking platform. Shippers no longer need to buy annual marine insurance policies, but can simply purchase insurance on a needs basis, when booking their freight, within less than a minute.

Key Takeaways

  • How the MGA model allows for rapid growth without the need for capital reserves
  • How distribution innovation is big Insurtech opportunity
  • How AI applications are being developed to enhance underwriting processes
  • Freight and logistics market isn’t sexy but it presents vast opportunities for growth
  • Identifying profitable market opportunities is crucial for business success
  • The quality of founders is the key to a startup’s success
  • Focus on distribution to solve market problems effectively
  • The role of a founder differs significantly from that of a CEO
  • InsurTech in Australia is gaining momentum and attracting capital

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

05:54 The Birth of FreightInsure

12:01 Innovation in Distribution

17:57 Future Innovations and AI Applications

25:15 Identifying Market Opportunities

30:54 The Dual Role of Founder and CEO

39:00 The InsurTech Landscape in Australia

Links & Resources:

Links from this episode.

More on insurtech on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter Podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech companies with exceptional leadership talent. With a proven track record placing top executives in mission critical roles, Tier One People’s trusted partner for many of the world’s most recognisable fintech brands.

Today’s guest is Simon Schwarz from FreightInsure. Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Schwarz
Thanks, great to be here.

Dexter Cousins
Long awaited Fintech Chatter debut. We’ve been longtime collaborators, so it’s great to kind of finally have you on the show and talk about FreightInsure.

Simon Schwarz
Really happy to be here, thanks Dexter.

Dexter Cousins
Yes, so first of all, before we talk about FreightInsure, can you give our listeners a little bit of a kind of short background on who Simon Schwarz is and how you got into fintech?

Simon Schwarz
Sure. My journey’s been, I think, a little bit of a traditional one. I worked in banking for nearly 15 years. I left traditional banking, investment banking, and my first role was as an executive of one of Australia’s largest fintech businesses. But you can run an investment banking business, you can run a fintech business, and I found that startups, scale-ups, completely different kettle of fish. But I had all the functional skills from my banking days to really make a go of it in fintech.

And since then, the last 10 years, every business I’ve been involved has been fintech or insurtech. And it’s really about leveraging all the traditional skills, thread at risk, product design, customer satisfaction, and doing it in a way that you can distribute better, faster, more accessibly than anyone else using technology.

Dexter Cousins
So you’ve worked for some, I guess, really recognisable brands, adviser, Zip. You’ve worked also with SocietyOne, which is one of the, I guess, OG Australian fintech businesses as well.

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
I guess you also spent some time at BizCover, is that right?

Simon Schwarz
That’s right, yeah, yeah.

Dexter Cousins
So kind of BizCover for me was one of the first, I’d say, kind of Inu in Australia as well. And it really kind of started to get the incumbents to take notice and start to kind of figure that digital really was the way to go. How has that journey of working with all of those businesses and some incredible founders, investors, etc, how’s that journey kind of got you to the point of recognised that FreightInsure was a great problem to solve?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, I think every one of those businesses I’ve been involved with has shown me what to do and what not to do, recognise opportunities and figuring out which one of those you can execute on. I’ll take BizCover for example. It does what it does so well. It identified a gap in the market, which is distribution of business policies to small and medium businesses in a way that they can access them quickly, cheaply and efficiently online, without a broker intermediary.

And if you can deliver on that product promise, you’ve sold for distribution into a market that just isn’t tapped by the majors. You need technology to do it and you need the distribution agreements in place from the majors, able to distribute their product as well. If you can do that successfully, you’ve got a really, really big business. And just because they’re not large policies doesn’t mean that the business itself isn’t very large, if the underlying market that you’re serving is very large.

And that’s really the genesis of FreightInsure. Freight, as you say, it’s not sexy, but it’s a really, really large market with mass tailwinds causing it just to explode. You look at COVID and work from home, you look at the rise and rise of e-commerce and the consequent movement of freight from large wholesale bulk shipments to small single parcel shipments, and the need to ensure that the end customer isn’t bearing the risk of loss or damage. You’ve got a massive market and you can figure out how to utilise technology compliantly to service that market, you’ve got a good business.

Dexter Cousins
How did you first of all discover the problem to solve? Because we’ve known each other a while, you never ever kind of confess the love of freight, all things freight. So where did the inspiration for the idea come from?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, so I’ve worked in a lot of industries, a lot of industry verticals over the years. You do that in financial services, you kind of become a jack of all trades. But I never really worked in freight and logistics. And I partnered with some guys who actually have been running one of Australia’s other least known but most successful insuran, is FreightSafe, for many years. J’s largest independent freight claims manager, with warranty services and claim management services for the high volume, low volume claims that arise in freight every day the week.

Someone’s laptop gets lost, stolen or damaged, and someone puts up a hand to DHL and says, come on guys, you owe me for my laptop, and then they fight with you about it. That’s what FreightSafe does. And their clients range across some of’s largest and smallest freight and logistic companies. It’s a great business.

And those freight clients have been saying for many years, we love what you do, but we wish our customers weren’t claiming against us. We wish there was some insurance product that we could embed into our freight services. When something goes wrong, customer claims against the insurance product rather than against us. And that’s where FreightInsure was born. So I partnered with them. I had the fintech, insurtech, regulated financial services background to really build this business from the ground up. Really came with the freight, an industry experience and credibility, and between us we’ve got a great business.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. So in terms of customers, who are your customers?

Simon Schwarz
So we run a B2B2C business, is how we look at it. Our direct clients are Australia’s freight companies, so many multinationals, from the small mums and dads running trucks to the large multinationals running freight platforms in many international jurisdictions. So we work with those freight companies to embed our insurance product and the technology that services it into their freight booking platform.

If you think about purchasing travel insurance, you’ll go online to quant.com, you’ll book your airline ticket and at checkout there’ll be a button that says, do you want fries with that, do you want insurance on your air ticket? And we are the button and the technology and the insurance product behind it that enables us to put that button into freight booking platform. So when you buy freight you can add cover for loss or damage at the click of a button.

Dexter Cousins
So are you the underwriters of the product as well, or what kind of a model you have?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, so we have an MGA model, where we’re the digital underwriters on behalf of our capacity providers. We essentially do everything from beginning to end, the pricing, quoting, underwriting, binding, payment, documentation, mum adjustment, claims. We do everything end to end. And our capacity providers, they’re taking the risk on the performance of the portfolio.

Dexter Cousins
Obviously one of the biggest challenges for any earlier stage business or growing business, particularly in fintech and insurtech, is capital and risk management. Could you explain a little bit about the MGA model and how that works, and the kind of innovation behind that? Because it’s a pretty smart kind of move for a younger business who wants to grow fairly quickly.

Simon Schwarz
Sure. Your feature of our business, and it is covered before, it’s a capital-light business. When you have the capacity providers taking the risk on a portfolio, you’re not an APRA regulated insurer. You’re an ASIC regulated AFSL holder, but you’re not required, nor do you need, to hold capital against the risk of the portfolio. That’s the job of the regulated capacity provider.

What you do need to be doing is ensuring that your technology and operations run efficiently and compliantly, so that you can do that entire end-to-end process, from the quoting, the binding, the payment, the claims that arise, from millions and millions, tens of millions of policies at fairly small premiums, at scale. And you need to ensure that your technology and operations are configured so you can do that without it being cost prohibitive, either because the process is inefficient, because you’ve introduced compliance or operational technology risk into your process.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, it’s interesting, because we often think of innovation as being this kind of highly disruptive, kind of world changing event. And yet really, when I look back over certainly the last 20 odd years that I’ve been in the space, all innovation has been incremental improvements and just, I think, kind of almost necessity driven solutions to problems that actually then turn into businesses that can then turn into industries or new product offerings as well. And I think the MGA model is a really good example of that, where we’ve seen some great businesses come out of nowhere really and adopt that model, thinking of Cover Genius as another good example in that space.

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, look, I’d say the MGA model is not new, and like you say, there changes. When I did my MBA way back, we were told there are two types of major innovations, product innovation and then distribution innovation. And I’d say that what we’ve done in and Cover Genius and BizCover before us has really been step change in distribution.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Simon Schwarz
The product is not new. BizCover, it’s stock standard business insurance policies. Freden you’re talking about, goods in transit policies have been around for a long, long time. What we’re talking about is innovation in the distribution model, embedding those policies into the distribution of freight. So it’s an add-on to the freight purchase. In the case of Cover Genius, add-on to whatever the underlying product or service is that they specialise in, more general embedded insurance. That’s the innovation.

Means you can now distribute that standard policy together with the underlying good or service, where you’ve got access to this as long as you can use technology to plug into the sale of that underlying product. You’ve got much higher conversion rates on, and access to, the massive distribution that comes with the underlying volumes flowing through that system. Case of freight, there are billions of freight going through Australia annually, and if you can attach yourself to small proportion of those, even to attaching to the underlying freight consignment at point of sale, it’s a massive business even with a small percentage conversion.

Dexter Cousins
I think what’s also really interesting is if you look at fintech, and certainly over this last five years, I saw some of the key kind of, I guess, trends have been banking as a service, which hasn’t quite worked, and now it’s evolved to embedded finance. And you think about embedded insurance, it’s been around a lot longer than the embedded finance piece has as well, and yet it’s not really talked about at these events, right, that I go to. It’s almost like embedded finance is this new thing, we’ve just thought it up, and it’s actually been around for quite a long time.

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, no, it has. I think the innovation here is figuring out how and where to distribute using that. You have to think, where’s the innovation going to come in insurance? It’s not really product, it’s not really risk-taking, because that’s what insurers have been in for a long time. They’ve got a lot of data, a lot of experienced people playing in that space. The innovation comes in distribution, of figuring out where you can embed and how you can embed those policies so that you can do it at scale. And that’s where the digital economy has really opened up vast markets.

You think about your typical consumer. It’s said that when someone buys something online, they want the same experience whether they’re going through Apple or Amazon or Netflix or quantis or AIA or I a. Consumers don’t differentiate the product or service they’re buying. They want the same Apple and Amazon service in everything that they’re buying online. So if you can figure out a way to offer those traditional products and services in a way that can be delivered to the customer at an Amazon or Apple pace, or brilliance of customer journey, you’ve got a business, because you’ve innovated on the distribution, and then the MGA business model allows you to do that profitable.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Before I launched Tier One People, a lot of my clients were insurers, and I think one of the kind of key frustrations that I had working with insurers, and I think it’s still there, is that their idea of innovation was improving process in the back end. And as a customer, this is…

Simon Schwarz
That’s absolutely right, because if you think about what insurers do, they’re about the product and all of the operations that happen behind the product, whereas distribution, traditionally in insurance land, that’s what intermediaries do, that’s what brokers do. So you’re not innovating on the distribution side, you’re innovating on the product and the product operation side.

As you say, your clients would be thinking about how they can make the process more efficient on the back end, and the customer doesn’t care. The customer wants to know how can I purchase this policy quicker, easier, cheaper, and claim should be a brilliant experience, rather than having to go through the intermediary. And that’s what we and all of the insurtechs like FreightInsure try and do and are really able to do using technology, if you do it well.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. So talk me through the FreightInsure business. How many people are you now?

Simon Schwarz
So we’re about 40 people between Australia and Sri Lanka. We utilise resources between the FreightSafe and the FreightInsure teams, and we use those legacy resources from FreightSafe as part of the broader FreightSafe group where we can, and then we hire specialist executives where we need.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And in terms of the Sri Lankan team, is that operations, technology? What elements have you found have been able to offshore well, and what elements have you found you got to kind of keep onshore to optimise the business?

Simon Schwarz
It’s a good question. You always have to tread very carefully, because there lot ofic to be had, efficiencies to be had in offshoring, but you lose some degree of control and also some degree of locality, proximity to your customers. We find that anything that can happen more or less in the back office ought to be successfully offshored, and we’ve had a very strong and stable team in Sri Lanka focused on tech and operations for many years.

Those functions which you really need boots on the ground, local marketing, local sales, some degree local execs, those are what we try and do based out of Australia. That models work very well. We don’t use labour hire firm, to really have our own teams that happen to be based in Sri Lanka, and have been very strong in St teams for years.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of, I guess, the kind of growth trajectory since you joined, Simon, where was the business when you came on board, and kind of where have you taken it to now?

Simon Schwarz
So I came on board at a conception stage. Together we designed and launched FreightInsure in about 6 months from design to launch. We sold our first policy probably 2 months later. Since then the business has been growing exponentially. We’re currently experiencing around 30% month-on-month growth at top line. It’s a very large market, very under serviced. The more freight company distributors we get on board, it just adds incrementally and exponentially to the volume of policies and the premium flowing through the platform.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of scaling, kind of challenges, has that present any kind of issues to you as you’ve been growing at that velocity?

Simon Schwarz
Look, it always does. I’ve worked across, as we talked about before, many startup and scale-up businesses. They all have their challenges at various stages of that growth. You try and run the business with the resources you have and to try and support the growth that you’ve got in forecast to get. It’s no use putting a 100 people into a startup business if there’s nothing for them to do, the capital to do it. But you got to figure out how you can bring the people on and have the capital to do so before you hit the growth that those people are needed for.

So we’ve managed that fairly well today, drawing on the FreightSafe resources and then hiring quite judiciously where we need to. Our challenges have more been not on the human resource side, or on the technology side, and making sure that our technology is flexible and nimble and fast enough for the application that it’s been designed for.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Simon Schwarz
So we’ve recently retooled our tech, in process of migrating to new tech platform, and that’s really been about flexibility and speed as much as is about enterprise grade service.

Dexter Cousins
So we’re talking just a couple of days after Black Friday. I think, did you see a spike in your customers, and did that have any impact on you technology wise?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, funny we talk about a single event, Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Our clients, who were the freight and logistics companies across Australia and internationally, they see this whole time of year as their peak season, just because a sale happens on a Friday doesn’t mean deliveries happen tomorrow. They might be staged over the next 3 to 4 weeks. And we find that November and early December is really peak period for the freight and logistics industry in Australia, particularly around the small parcel deliveries.

What we’ve heard anecdotally is it’s still peak this year, but for some reason it’s a little less peak than usual. Some of the boil seems to have come off a little bit, but overall volumes are definitely up relative to Prim.

Dexter Cousins
It’s definitely a cyclical business. Hopefully Michele Bullock listening to this and she might reduce interest rates.

Simon Schwarz
That’s right, you got to do it quickly, and time for the goods to be shipped before Christmas.

Dexter Cousins
And what are some of the cool things that you’re working on right now?

Simon Schwarz
So we’re working on some really cool AI applications at the moment. Lot of the smarts in the underwriting is determining what sort of goods are being shipped, by what sort of carriers, what sort of transit routes. Where you’ve got structured data, it’s great, you can map that to your underwriting engine. Where you’ve got unstructured data, customer says, I’m shipping a PS2, black and titanium, 13 in, it doesn’t say electronics or game. You have to figure out, across million consignments, how to map that into your underwriting engine. So there’s some pretty cool AI applications that will take those large unstructured data sets and map them into the categories that your underwriting engine needs. And early days, we’ve seen actually really good responses.

Dexter Cousins
You mentioned as well there’s a rebrand coming. What was the kind of thinking behind that, and is there, I guess, is there a danger that you kind of lose some of the momentum or the kind of brand recognition that you’ve already had?

Simon Schwarz
So the impetus for the rebrand was really around, two years into the business, we really clear now on what our essence is, why we exist and value our customers get from us. And it’s really about embedded freight insurance. When we launched, the message was FreightInsure, we insure freight, is what it sounds like. But really the embedded component is such a critical part of our business and why our distributors and customers use us, that we’ve kept the FreightInsure name but change the brand logo so that it highlights the embedded nature of the product.

I’ll give you a sneak peek. If you can imagine a capital F with an I embedded in the space that the F creates, inside that rectangle, that’s the logo. It’s the F and the I, with the insurance embedded within the freight. Really, really powerful, because it tells people, in a single visual image, what we are, what we do and why we do it.

Dexter Cousins
And one thing that really kind of always fascinates me, Simon, is I see a lot of founders who spend an awful lot of time kind of creating values for culture, and then creating this other set of values for customers. And I kind of always wonder, what’s the difference between your people and your customers? Aren’t they kind of, at the end of the day, people, and maybe you should have the same values for both?

What was the journey that you went on, I guess, first of all in terms of kind of figuring out what those values are, but I guess secondly in terms of the type of culture that you wanted to build? You’ve worked in some really great businesses that have gone through some very rapid growth, but all of them have got very different cultures, right, and very different types of leaders. What did you kind of take from all of those learnings to say, hey, this is what good and bad, taking all that into consideration, this is who I want FreightInsure to be, this is who I want FreightInsure to stand for?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, it’s a great question. And in fact our culture and values really inform the whole strategic rebrand. It’s not just a logo rebrand, just looking at what is our market that we’re playing in, how we play in that market to be successful. We use the cultural elements that I’ve learned from all of the fintech businesses I’ve worked with along the way, all of which have been high growth businesses. Some of them are focused on innovation, some of them are focused on execution and some of them are focused on relentless customer satisfaction: understand your customer, understand their needs and make sure you satisfy them.

And what we’ve built in FreightInsure is really the intersection of all three of those things, which is innovate relentlessly, execute relentlessly and focus on your customers relentlessly, to make sure that the innovation that you are delivering through your execution is what’s going to make them very happy and keep coming back for more.

Dexter Cousins
So you mentioned as well your kind of earlier career in investment banking. I’m guessing then you’ve seen every kind of pitch, every kind of problem, every kind crazy entrepreneur, or the two guys from Bondi who are going to kind of revolutionise. From all of those experiences, in terms of, if you were starting out again or you were giving advice to somebody as to how to identify the type of problem to solve in Australia, where it’s relevant to the market and it takes into account the fact that you’re not in Silicon Valley, you haven’t got loads of investors, you haven’t got 350 million people living in the country, what guidance would you give people as to where to spot those problems, and like you’ve done with FreightInsure, problem that nobody’s solving, right, and it’s a kind of an untapped market where if you execute well you can get rapid growth like you’re getting?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, look, the first thing I’d say is don’t discount the two guys from Bondi. I’m thinking Larry Diamond and Nick M.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, yeah.

Simon Schwarz
Look, yeah, putting Larry and nide, I think the quality of the founders is key. When I’m got my investment hat on and I’m looking at pitches, I’m really looking at the quality of the founders and their ability to execute. A business idea is nothing without the guys behind it that have the experience and the drive and frankly the success that’s going to make this one a success. It’s much harder to back an unproven founder than is somebody who’s done it before, the first time. I saying the people are everything.

The other thing is the market opportunity. I would always back a problem looking for a solution than a solution looking for a problem. If there’s a clear market opportunity where customers and potential customers are saying, wow, if you were able to deliver this to me, or this is a thing that’s making my life a nightmare, if someone could solve this problem for me I would buy that every day the week, that’s a good business, if you can figure out how to deliver that product to them profitably and sustainably. That’s what FreightInsure fundamentally does and that’s what BizCover fundamentally does.

And I’d say Zip is in that category, where the founders of Zip and Afterpay tapped into almost a zeitgeist of modern consumer, to say there’s a demand for a product the customer don’t even know they have. They delivered it to them and the rest is history. I think SocietyOne tried to do that, but tap the zeitgeist a bit wrong. The idea of society-led lending and borrowing, peer-to-peer, is a great idea in principle. In practice it just doesn’t have the economies of scale or the price competitiveness that you need to offer sustainable product and build a profitable business in the long term. I think most of those P2P businesses have since, yeah, merged or disappeared.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I think that’s kind of one of the challenges, right, is that there’s often this kind of thing of, hey, we’re changing the world, we’re going to solve the kind of unbanked in Africa, and then you go there and you realise that actually, yeah, somebody’s already solved the problem, people don’t want you to solve the…

Simon Schwarz
Right, what you think is a problem, but it can’t be solved profitably. But you’ll find there is a product market fit, but the two sides of strategy are, do you have a product that people want to buy, and can you produce that product and sell it profitably? And you have to be able to solve both of those two things, and that’s really what we would okay, is the strategy sound, and strategy both market facing and also the ability to deliver into that market.

Dexter Cousins
So there’s a paradox, I guess, for anybody who is looking to get an idea off the ground or a business off the ground, in that if you kind of go to the kind of usual channels, the advice that you’re going to get is focus on AI or focus on web 3 or whatever the next hot thing is. And so we see this kind of cascading of ideas all in these spaces. Nobody’s going, hey, I think there’s an opportunity in freight insurance, might want to have a look in that. How do you get, I guess, the inspiration, the ideas, the kind of discipline to, okay, I’m going to shut out the noise and I’m going to go and spot where the problems are? Do you have like a framework or anything that you kind of use to go and identify those problems?

Simon Schwarz
I use elements of it, but what you’re talking about essentially design thinking, which is you’re not coming up with a brilliant idea which is a solution looking for a problem to solve, the latest AI thing, okay, what can I do with that? You’re getting out there into the market and listening to what customers or customer segments are saying, what their pain points are, what they really want, and then trying to really absorb it, stand in their shoes, figure how can I solve that pain. If I were that customer, what would I want? And now how can I leverage my knowledge, technology and distribution and products and everything else to design and deliver a product that solves that problem? If you can do that, you’re well on your way to building a business.

I often say to people who come to me for business and startup advice, I’ve got this great idea, raise capital for it, and I tell them, an idea is one thing but a business is a completely different thing altogether, and being able to distribute that product as part of that business is almost the be all and end all. It’s no good building a better mousetrap, as I say, if no one wants to buy it. And even if people want to buy, if you can’t figure out how to distribute it, the idea isn’t worth having. So I often tell people, focus on the distribution, and in a way that distribution will solve a problem for the market in which you’re distributing, and then the product design and everything else kind of come second.

Dexter Cousins
Beautiful segue into the next question that I wanted to ask you, Simon, which is, it’s one thing to be a founder and come up with an idea and get the funding. It’s a completely different thing to be a CEO and a leader and to grow that business and to be looking out for 40, 50, 70, 100 people. How have you developed yourself, and what kind of leader have you kind of really tried to become as you’ve gone on that journey?

Simon Schwarz
It’s a great question. I think the role of founder and that of CEO are really quite different. The founder is the visionary, the one that has the idea, the one that moves the chess pieces around to give that idea flesh and bones and legs and get it out there in the market. That’s the role of the founder. The CEO is the one that has to fire, occasionally fire people, and set the values and the tone, maintain relationships with stakeholders, make sure that the operations are running efficiently and that the bottom line is profitable. It’s quite a different practical, it’s almost like the difference between idea, innovation and execution. CEO is as much execution as anything else.

And straddling those two roles at the same time, it’s quite a challenge to get the right, and often find myself coming down on one side more than the other over a period, and having to look back and recalibrate and make sure that I’m doing both things. I’m staying true to the founder part of my role, which is the ideation and the vision and the relentless drive of the business forward in pursuit of that vision. And then the CEO role is about execution and operations and making sure that we have the people and the culture and the processes and the technology in place to deliver on that vision.

Dexter Cousins
Have you found any kind of, I guess, routines or daily habits or kind of things that you’ve had to now introduce into your daily schedule that are now almost like rituals that you’ve got to do, in order for you to be able to perform at the level that you’ve got to, but to be able to handle the challenges, the stress, they kind of protect yourself from your, keeping your mental health and physical health in a good spot as well?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, so I’d say there are really two things, actually three things that have done that for me over the years, and two of which I’m practising now, one of which I should practise more.

Dexter Cousins
Just giving you a gentle reminder.

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, it’s great. The two things that I’ve done and kept with me over the years are really regular structured exercise. You make time in your routine, in your day, in your week. I will be exercising four times a week, five times a week, at this time of day, and then I build everything else around that, because if you haven’t sharpened your saw you can’t cut down the tree. So keep the exercise going as your baseline, and with that comes good eating, but exercise that I really found you need to structure and stay consistent with.

And the other thing that’s really got me through is, as an observant Jew, I keep Sabbath on a Saturday. And that day where you switch off and you’re not thinking about work and you’re spending time with family and community, and allowing everything else to process in the background without getting drawn into the million things that suck you in in your workday, I found actually it’s been invaluable for me over the years, actually keeping grounded and going out to do battle again the rest of the week.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah.

Simon Schwarz
The third thing I’d say is meditation. There was a time when I was meditating regularly, early morning and late evening, and found also I was very, very helpful just to stay centred and have your brain not following every million thing that comes in through the day. I just haven’t been as diligent and consistent as I’d like to have been over the years in staying true to that morning and evening meditation. I now do it sporadically rather than consistently.

Dexter Cousins
And in terms of kind of learning, inspiration, just keeping up to date with what’s going on in the industry, there are any kind of resources that you use or podcasts that you kind of regularly listen to, that you’re staying up to, that you found beneficial?

Simon Schwarz
So I’ve been a longtime reader of McKinsey articles, signed up to them maybe 25 years ago when I started working professionally, and find that there’s just a steady variety of articles on up-to-date issues and recap of historical issues with modern relevance, that if you just read a couple of these every few weeks when they come out, you really stay on top of the latest thinking without going down the rabbit hole. You kind of sift out what’s new, what’s old but new, without being drawn into the latest and greatest. And there’s always a thousand of those a year, and how do you, with your limited time and expertise, figure out what’s real and what’s not?

The most important thing though, in my experience, is to read widely and then just reflect on what’s going to be useful for you. A lot of times advice is good advice, but not for you, or not for your company, for your values, not for your person or your brand. Letting it come in, but then going through the processing phase which says, I wonder what the relevance is to my business and my person, in my circumstances, and you get a lot more out of that sort of approach than blindly applying the latest fad.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, I really agree with that. I remember I went through a phase when I was a younger man of really kind of having the type of adulation that you see people having for Elon Musk, for Richard Branson. And then as I started to settle down and think about a family, I was like, why am I following this guy? He keeps doing all these stupid stunts where you could easily die, and should have died about seven times, and he’d leave his kids without a father. Why would I want to follow that example?

And I think as you dig more and more into it, your own values and, hey, what are you about as a person, it’s critical, right, that if you’re going to have mentors, people that you go to for guidance and advice, that there’s that alignment around not only values and, hey, they’ve got the way I want to be, but they’ve also done it in a way in which I want to do it, whether that be, hey, treating people right, or whatever it is. And I think that’s one of the kind of challenges that we got in society, right, is people keep following false idols.

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, I think that’s right. There many, many management books out there and many, many gurus and role models, and part of the issue is that people are so different. The more biographies you read and follow, the more you see that there are parts of people, in their approach and their values, that resonate with you, part that you have a revulsion towards. The more you read, the more you can draw on what speaks to you, isolate what doesn’t.

But the second benefit of reading widely, I heard someone relate this anecdote, I can’t remember who it was, that they love reading all of these biographies of founders, and it’s not because they want to learn how that founder did it, but it’s because they want to keep teaching themselves the lesson that each founder did it differently. They did it their way, and it kind of gives you hope and inspiration and strength that there is no right way, I just have to find what my way is. And I might draw inspiration from these various people, but ultimately going to be unique, part dictated by your personality and your circumstances and your business and your partners and all of those things. The more you read, the more I think you internalise that lesson.

Dexter Cousins
It’s a brilliant point, right, because if you look at the startup scene in Australia, 99% of people in that space all trying to be the next Canva. And what did Canva do, what did Canva do?

Simon Schwarz
Well, yeah, that’s the outlier, right. In the end did both what it needed to do and what it could do, given the opportunity and the resources that it had. But your opportunity and your resource are be completely different in your circumstance, so you got to figure out what is going to work for you and do that to the best of your ability.

Dexter Cousins
Now normally what I ask people, Simon, at this point of the podcast is what’s got them excited about fintech. However, I’m going to ask you something slightly different, because there was an announcement recently: you’ve recently joined the board of Insurtech Australia, an organisation that’s very dear to my heart, having been at the very first meetups before Insurtech Australia was Insurtech Australia. And it’s been, I think, a long kind of grind for the insurtech space in Australia to start to really get some momentum, but in the last 12 months I think that we’ve really started to see now a lot more happening in that space. Some great businesses like yours and upcover and Honey all kind of starting to break through and really get some momentum now. So kind of what’s your take on the insurtech scene in Australia right now?

Simon Schwarz
Yeah, I think as you say, the insurtech scene is really humming. There’s been a lot of businesses that have made the headlines for all the right reasons. I think a lot of things have come together: the technology, the market opportunities, capital is starting to flow in, and you’ve got personnel and executives who have some experience now in prives were available to help support and grow those businesses. So I’d say there’s a lot of stars aligning wealth the insurtech industry.

I look at what’s happening in the US. It’s been a very large industry, insurtech in the US, for I’m going to say a decade now, and what that means is that both sides of the market are really, really humming. You’ve got a lot of capital coming in to a lot of businesses, a lot of deals being done, and it’s a virtuous cycle: the more capital comes in, the more deals are done, the more deals are to be done, the more capital comes in. And similarly with HR, the more successful growth and launch and valuations you get in an industry, the more people want to join that industry, the more people join industry, the more support you have to grow.

Insurtech in Australia has kind of reached that threshold where you’ve got a pretty critical mass now of both people and capital in the industry, that the businesses are really starting to take off, more and more of them. The more they take off, the more capital and human capital you can attract into the industry. So yeah, I think you got a lot of tailwinds from here.

Dexter Cousins
And what’s your sense as to the incumbents? Are they kind of starting to now become a bit easier to play with and invite people into the tent, or they still trying to kind of put the big M around their business?

Simon Schwarz
I think it depends where the insurtech, or for the matter the fintechs, are playing. Where they’re competing head-on with the incumbents, the incumbents absolutely going to try and use their scale and capital and resource advantage to try and crush the upstart opposition. I think that’s what happened with SocietyOne, frankly. If you think about insurtechs that are servicing untapped markets, using technology or distribution in a way that the incumbents cannot because of their legacy technology, because of their legacy distribution models, what you find is that those legacy players very happy to partner with the insurtech startups, because they’re doing things that the incumbents cannot.

If I look at BizCover as a prime example, BizCover is distributing standard product from QBE and Hollard and AIG into the market in a way that those incumbents can’t, because they don’t have the technology or the distribution reach the cover was able to create. Similarly with FreightInsure, we’re doing exactly the same thing. We’re not really competing with the incumbents on product, we’re just distributing into a market that they’re not able to access, and so they’re actually quite happy to distribute through us into those markets, given the chance.

Dexter Cousins
Well, I can’t believe we’re almost at the end of the show, but we’re almost at the end of the year as well. What can we expect from FreightInsure in 2025?

Simon Schwarz
So you’re going to see a lot of growth. You’re going to see organic growth, you’re going to see product growth and you’re going to see geographic market growth. Lot of really cool things on the horizon, underpinned, as I said, by the retooling our technology. We’re really looking to become much more dominant, settling in the Australian market, and then become a player globally by the end of 2025.

Dexter Cousins
We get some amazing talent listening to this podcast. We’re listened to in, I think, over 40 countries as well. If there’s anybody listening out there who likes the sound of the growth journey that you’re on and is interested in careers at FreightInsure, where’s the best place for them to go, Simon?

Simon Schwarz
Best place is to reach out directly. We are growing and we’re hiring steadily. For the right person with the right role opportunity, we definitely have a chat.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Simon, it’s been fantastic to reconnect and find out more about FreightInsure.

Simon Schwarz
Great to chat again, Dexter, really. Thank you for your time, it’s been fun.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. If you’re new to the show, make sure you give us a follow and a like. If you’re on YouTube, subscribe and hit the notification bell. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support, it really does mean a lot and it really helps me in getting great guests like Simon on the show. Until the next episode, keep well.

Fintech Chatter is brought to you by Tier One People, leaders in fintech executive search. We’ll help you bring in world-class leadership talent to build world-class fintech ventures, and you can find us at tieronepeople.com.

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