At 47, Walter de Oude was about to do something that no one in Singapore's insurance industry had done in years. He was proposing to fold a business almost fourteen times his own size into a company he had started only three years earlier.
He was born in South Africa and had lived in Singapore for more than fifteen years. Before he built his own insurer, he ran HSBC's insurance business in the city, which meant he knew exactly how slow and crowded a market dominated by a few big names could be. In 2017, he set up Singapore Life, called Singlife, and it was described as the first local insurer licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore since 1970.
Singlife agreed to merge with Aviva Singapore in a deal valued at about S$3.2 billion.
The early customers were not ordinary households. The company grew mostly through a digital platform and aimed first at private banking clients and wealthy individuals, a narrow niche where a new brand could earn trust. In 2018 it bought the Singapore portfolio of Zurich Life, a first sign that de Oude would grow by acquisition.
The bigger move came in 2020. Singlife agreed to merge with Aviva Singapore in a deal valued at about S$3.2 billion. Before the merger, Singlife had around S$800 million in assets. Aviva's Singapore business held about S$11.8 billion, and came with 1.5 million customers and a large network of financial advisers. After the deal TPG held 35%, Aviva 25% and Sumitomo Life 20%. The combined business, called Aviva Singlife, became the largest insurer in Singapore, and de Oude became deputy chairman. He told Reuters he hoped to expand across Southeast Asia and eventually list the company in Singapore, though he gave no timeline.
The path was not clean. Aviva decided in 2023 to leave the venture and sell its 25.9% stake and two debt instruments to Sumitomo Life, a reported S$1.4 billion deal, though the figure differs between sources. De Oude had moved to a non-executive founder director role on 1 January 2022, handing day-to-day management to Pearlyn Phau. In February 2026 the company launched physical gold-backed investment-linked policies.
How big the founder's stake ever became is not public. What is public is the sequence: a former bank executive started small, aimed at a narrow group of rich clients, bought a portfolio, then bought something far larger. For anyone building in a market with entrenched giants, the lesson is that you may not win by out-competing them. You can sometimes win by buying their business.