Better Broker Network

Two ombudsman decisions surfaced in August, and between them they cover the whole arc of what good broking actually looks like. The first is about what happens before a policy is placed, when a client has to understand and meet their disclosure obligations. The second is about what happens after a loss, when a claim

A builder opens a renewal that has doubled, maybe tripled, and the first call is to you. That scenario has become common enough to reach the small-business insurance inquiry, where the Housing Industry Association told the Melbourne hearing that some builders who once paid $15,000 to $20,000 a year for a construction-insurance package are now

There is a federal inquiry running into small-business insurance, and it would be easy to file it under Canberra noise and get back to your day. That would be a mistake, because the questions it is asking are the same ones your SME clients are already bringing to renewal. The Parliamentary Joint Committee is looking

Plenty of clients treat buying a cyber policy as the end of the job when it is really the start of it. You can see why the confidence is there. MinterEllison’s August 2026 Cyber Risk report found 94% of surveyed Australian organisations now hold cyber insurance, which shows how far the risk has travelled from

A client rings up wanting to trim the cyber premium, and on the face of it that sounds like a simple request. It rarely is. The market has leaned in buyers’ favour for three years running, and Gallagher Re polling at its Asia-Pacific cyber summit found 94% of participants see buyers chasing cheaper cover rather

It is easy to talk about weather risk in the abstract until you see what a single year of it actually costs, and Suncorp’s FY26 results lay that out plainly. The insurer responded to 32 weather events across Australia and New Zealand, 18 of them declared natural hazards worth more than $10 million each, and

If you’ve run your brokerage for years, here’s the question that tends to sit uncomfortably: who takes it over, and what’s it worth? Most principals can’t answer cleanly, because the value lives in their head, not the business. The relationships, the market knowledge, the sense of how it all holds together, that’s you. The number

Sooner or later a client says it. They’ve seen a direct price, or a mate who buys online, and they ask why they’re paying you when they could do it themselves. The instinct is to explain: panels, wordings, the value of advice. Resist it. A client who asks this isn’t after a lecture on what

A client sees a headline about their insurer growing its premiums and arrives at the next renewal ready for a fight, convinced the money is rolling in and the increase is pure greed. IAG’s FY26 results tell a more complicated story than that. Premiums did grow, up 7.6% to $18.412 billion, yet net profit after

Most clients forget what they paid the day after they pay it. What stays with them is how you handled things when a claim went wrong, which is why the news that NIBA has set up a dedicated Claims Committee is worth a broker’s attention. The committee is made up of eight experienced brokers drawn