Sydney based Agile Underwriting Services (Agile) has launched a wholesale team to help brokers find coverage for hard to place risks.
“Despite the fact that Agile does most of its business through its 13 binders with 15 Lloyd’s syndicates and two local insurers, we also see a significant volume of approaches from brokers who are struggling to find any markets to quote those risks that are a bit quirkier,” said James Crowther (pictured), Agile’s head of wholesale and emerging risks.
He said launching a wholesale team is formalising their approach to this business.
Read more: What is a wholesale insurance broker?
“The differentiator for us is a lot of our underwriting team have worked in the underwriting room at Lloyd’s, we do have deep connections there, and can often get stuff placed with people we know well – insurance is, after all, a relationship of trust,” he said.
Crowther said their focus areas include professional indemnity for financial institutions, directors and officers (D&O) for ASX public companies, management liability, fintech, crypto and parametric weather.
“What we’re doing is providing solutions for those risks where the local market has little or no appetite,” he said.
He added that Agile has the underwriting expertise to extract the information that’s required from the customer via the retail broker.
“We explain to the retail broker that for us to be able to help you with the placement you need to provide us with this additional information because we understand what information is required for these particular deals and the broker might not because the broker might be a generalist, whereas we’re more specialized,” he explained.
Then, said Crowther, Agile can help the broker present their proposal to the insurers in a much more robust and thorough way.
“That’s our unique point of difference,” he said.
“A general broker might just ask a customer to fill out an application form and then go and find them a quote. But as you can appreciate with the hard to place, distressed or difficult risks, you need to do a bit more than just the basics.”
Agile has individual underwriters that underwrite, assess and accept risk. However, said Crowther, if they don’t have the appetite for accepting a particular risk, they can help the broker find a market in London.
He said an important part of their approach is asking lots of questions.
“So we’re not just relying on a paper or pdf document which asks very general risk questions,” he noted. “With the experience we’ve got as underwriters ourselves, we can ask the questions which an underwriter can ask and then be able to pre-empt and be able to put together a submission to the Lloyd’s underwriters which is far more robust.”
Crowther said that gives the Lloyd’s underwriters the ability to quickly understand whether it’s a risk that they want to write and if so what terms and conditions to put on it.
Wholesale broking isn’t as common in Australia as it is in other countries like the United Kingdom. It provides another option for retail brokers in the ongoing hard market.
“We have had some dislocated pricing in certain areas that has drastically changed and that has really been a consequence of years of under pricing in certain areas,” he said. “It will eventually return to a mean, but it’s gone from being far below where it should be to far above where it should be. At some point it will settle on more economical numbers.”
He said the current market conditions are definitely part of the insurance cycle.
So when the pricing returns to more acceptable levels, will Agile need to close down its wholesale facility?
“That’s a good question,” he responded. “We may find that the demand is less. But we like to build long term partnerships with the broker and their client, so we’d like to think that as long as we’re adding value and providing competitive terms we’ll continue to have the wholesale department servicing those renewals.”
However, he said if the capacity and appetite for new business in the local market returned then new business opportunities would reduce.
In recent months, Agile has been expanding its product range, launching construction insurance and two new accident and health (A&H) policies. Early in December, the firm launched a platform for vacant land coverage.
