As part of Insly’s expansion into the Australian market, our team recently attended the UAC 2025 Sydney Market Exchange, where we spent time meeting underwriting agencies and hearing about the opportunities and challenges they face.
Following the event, we caught up with UAC CEO, Jenny Bax, to find out more about the organisation’s origins, its key focus areas, event program, and what the future holds for the underwriting agency sector in Australia.
With over 25 years of experience leading distribution, underwriting, and operational teams, Jenny has a wealth of knowledge on the insurance sector, and the vital role that underwriting agencies play within it. This is what she had to say:
The Underwriting Agencies Council was formed 27 years ago in 1998. How has the Australian UA sector changed during that time?
UAC was never intended, by its founders, to be a big player. When six Lloyd’s brokers formed the organisation back in 1998, much of the impetus was to introduce higher levels of regulation on insurance sales in Australia. There weren’t many Australian underwriting agencies in operation at the time, and most, if not all, were underwritten by syndicates at Lloyd’s.
These underwriting agents were concerned about being lumped in with insurers when new regulations were drawn up and needed an official voice for speaking to politicians and regulators. In the early days, it was just about being visible rather than playing an active role in the sector’s development, because at that time our members were primarily focused on the international broker market.
In 27 years, we’ve grown from six members to more than 130, spanning a diverse range of sectors and focus areas, and we are still growing. It’s hard to envisage the optimum or eventual size of the underwriting agency workforce, or when and if we slow down, but we do know we’d better be ready.
What role has the Council played in helping the sector to develop and grow over the years?
The Underwriting Agencies Council (UAC) has played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the underwriting sector by providing advocacy, networking, education, and business support for its members. Advocacy & Representation
UAC has been a strong voice for underwriting agencies, ensuring their interests are represented within the broader insurance industry. The council has worked with regulators, industry bodies, and government stakeholders to advocate for fair policies and regulations that support the sector’s growth.
Networking & Business Growth Opportunities
UAC has fostered strong connections between underwriting agencies, brokers, and business service providers through our Market Exchange events. These provide a platform for members to showcase their products, form partnerships, and expand their market presence.
Professional Development & Education
Through workshops, webinars, and training sessions, UAC has helped members stay up-to-date with industry trends, regulatory changes, and best practices. This ensures that underwriting agencies continue to operate at a high standard and innovate within the market.
Supporting Emerging & Niche Markets
UAC has been instrumental in supporting specialist underwriting agencies that cater to niche markets. By providing visibility and connections to brokers, UAC has enabled these agencies to flourish and offer tailored insurance solutions that may not be available through traditional insurers.
Strengthening Industry Collaboration
Through initiatives like the WhatsApp group for CEOs & MDs and the soon-to-be-launched Member Lunch Forums, UAC has facilitated open discussions among leaders, allowing them to share insights, navigate industry challenges, and collaborate on common issues.
Member Benefits & Services
UAC continuously seeks to add value to members by offering exclusive partnerships (e.g., the Angove Family Winemakers discount), compliance resources (such as the ‘Compliance Corner’ segment), with more partnerships due to be announced in the coming months.
Elevating the Role of Underwriting Agencies
UAC has worked to increase awareness and recognition of underwriting agencies within the broader insurance sector. By partnering with industry bodies such as NIBA (National Insurance Brokers Association) for conventions and working closely with ANZIIF (The Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance), UAC has strengthened the position of underwriting agencies as essential players in the market.
UAC continues to evolve, modernising its membership structure, governance, and sponsorship approach to ensure it remains relevant and valuable to its members. As the sector faces challenges like the war on talent and regulatory changes, UAC is well-positioned to support underwriting agencies in navigating the future.
The UAC’s flagship event, the Five Sigma 2025 Sydney Market Exchange, took place on the 7 February. What can attendees expect from the event?
The Sydney event was a huge success with 156 exhibitors and around 550 brokers attending throughout the day. These events facilitate networking between agencies, brokers, and business service members while raising awareness of products and services that can help support them and their end clients. We welcomed two new agencies, and 11 new business service members as first-time exhibitors. For me, there’s nothing better than wandering around the marketplace and seeing the connections our members make on the day.
The hard market has benefitted UAs in recent years, driving an innovative and agile approach to underwriting. What will be the biggest growth opportunities for the UA sector in the next few years?
Underwriting agencies are frequently ahead of insurers themselves in having modern systems and efficient pricing models. As a result, some of our members are doing a lot of the deep portfolio analysis and segmentation for their capacity partners, to identify growth opportunities.
Underwriting agencies are generally more efficient than insurers, so expense ratios are much lower than larger players, allowing them to adapt and move into different segments faster. Agility is key to competing successfully plus agencies are more disciplined than ever, giving significant confidence to capacity providers.
As we see it, we’re operating in an economically rational market. Capacity providers expect profitable business and underwriting agencies will continue to respond, by innovating their products, delivery methods, excesses, and pricing.
UAs are facing increased regulation, including CPS230, which is due to come into force this year – what does it mean for underwriting agencies and how are they preparing?
Whilst underwriting agencies are not directly regulated by APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority), they are affected through their relationships with insurers who must comply. For agencies, CPS 230 means:
- Stronger governance over operational risk means they must ensure their risk management frameworks align with insurer expectations.
- Greater focus on resilience. Business Continuity Planning and incident responses will be under greater scrutiny.
- A need to demonstrate effective management of outsourcing and service providers.
UAC is supporting our agencies in preparing for CPS 230 through webinars, conducted by Business Service Members, and a checklist on being CPS 230 ready. We want to ensure they’re thinking about the implications and requirements well before their capacity provider knocks on their door asking what they have in place.
UAs are known for leading the insurance market for technology. What innovations will define the success of the Australian UA sector in the next few years?
Underwriting agencies have invested a lot in technology and innovation in recent years and there are still numerous opportunities to take over insurer portfolios. By leveraging their capacity in underwriting and claims, distribution, and technology platforms, insurers can enhance the customer and broker experience, and improve pricing models, allowing better optimisation in real-time.
Both traditional insurers and agencies are exploring how AI can be leveraged to improve our industry. Possible use cases include portfolio decision-making, where data analysis is beyond human capabilities, and streamlined underwriting where analysis is completed and cross-referenced by AI before being reviewed by a human underwriter. Ultimately, the use of technology may reinvent how we assess risk as an industry.
At the same time, agencies will need to keep up to speed with regulatory oversight of AI and guidelines on how it should be used responsibly. While machine learning and AI can aid efficiency there is a concern about a lack of human oversight of AI processes and the possibility that it can self-loop and feed itself, impacting the reliability and accuracy of outputs and decision-making.
Agencies are trying to build as much automation into the quote and bind process as possible, allowing them to spend more time advising customers. On average, currently, 15% of personal lines quotes require referral to an underwriter. Through automation, we have agencies with referral rates for both personal lines and SMEs sitting at around 2%, with the aim of reaching less than 1% by continuously chipping away at the edges.
Automation is also driving efficiency in other areas, for example, agencies are connecting their quote and bind systems with external data sources to pre-fill answers, while removing the use of free-form text, which can’t be analysed effectively. These efficiency savings mean underwriters have more time to spend on complex cases where manual underwriting is essential because the teams are not buried under mountains of referrals.
Alongside the benefits, it is also important to consider the human impact of these technologies and how they will influence insurance skills going forward. Agencies are known for creating market ‘specialists’ throughout the industry and, at a time when many fear new technology will replace some insurance roles, we have an opportunity to look at how talent is accessed, engaged, and developed to ensure we remain relevant.
What are the UAC’s key priorities for growing the organisation and supporting the UA sector in 2025 and beyond?
We launched our three-year strategic plan in 2023 and since then the reputation of the UAC and its members has grown significantly. A core focus of our Strategic Plan is to place our members at the centre of everything we do, and our aim is to increase our members’ scale, reach, and reputation.
To that end, we will continue to focus on our four key pillars:
- Connected:
- Increasing the connection between members and brokers in a growing and more complex marketplace.
- Making and growing connections for business innovation.
- Identifying and connecting expert businesses to aid understanding of the market and our industry and offer best practice products or services.
- Influential:
We will continue to build advocacy that allows our members to influence the regulatory environment and shape how we talk about the emerging issues and opportunities in our space. Many people don’t understand underwriting agencies’ role in insurance placement. This pillar aims to change that and provide a stronger voice for our members and their needs. Over the past 12 months, we have been developing an advocacy strategy and have commenced executing this to drive our position forward.
- Future Fit:
We provide essential resources, information, and support to ensure our members are ‘future fit’. We are busy developing our ‘Class of 26’ program, which will support sector ‘superstars’ and help them develop as leaders and innovators. I am also working to establish The Aspiring Leaders Collective, a dedicated committee to empower and engage the younger generation and ensure good communication between them and the board to help drive our vision forward.
- Viable:
We are working on reinforcing our governance, policy development, performance metrics, compliance frameworks, and transparency. Last year we conducted a ‘benchmark’ members survey and this year we will further analyse how members rate the top challenges and opportunities facing their businesses over the next three years. Based on this research, we will prioritise initiatives that support members in these challenges, including enhancing the relevance and value of our ‘market exchanges’.
An exciting future ahead
The Australian underwriting agency sector is thriving, and that is a testament to the work of the UAC in building connections, and recognition across the wider insurance sector. A big thank you to Jenny for sharing her insights with us and, now that Insly is part of the UAC community, we look forward to hearing about future developments and exploring more opportunities to collaborate in the future.
