The Steadfast Convention, Australia’s biggest broker-focused insurance event, ended on Tuesday with a gala dinner after three days of broker-only sessions, presentations and marketplace networking. Under the banner “Go Beyond”, the convention brought together about 2,000 attendees, 100-plus sponsors and more than 20 speakers at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The focus was on hot topics like AI and the spillover from geopolitical risk, including the US-Iran conflict, but also on the more enduring challenges confronting brokers: claims, customer strain, natural catastrophes, cyber risk and the soft market. Insurance Business was there and found brokers and underwriters generally in high spirits despite despite the headwinds of a recessionary economy at home and global conflict abroad. Yet the gala dinner’s theme may have captured the private wish of many in the room: “A Greek Island Escape.”
And if thoughts of Greece bring to mind ancient gods, myths and legends, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that, for insurance professionals, the ever-present backdrop to this year’s gathering was the knowledge that one of their leaders who has ruled from the summit of the local broking equivalent of Mount Olympus, was about to step down.
In the months ahead, group CEO Robert Kelly, who co-founded Steadfast in 1996 and built it into the largest general insurance broker network and underwriting agency group in Australia and New Zealand, is expected to transition to the board.
“It's a bit like the old ‘who's going to step into the shoes of the great man?’” said Andrew Broughton (pictured left), CEO of Network Insurance House. “But equally, I think Robert's coming around to the idea that there will be a lot of change.”
He suggested that the support structure for much of that change will be the technology Kelly was a driving force behind building.
“I think where he's gone with the technology platform and starting to build the team, there's a chance to corporatise it more than ever before,” said Broughton.
That theme ran right through the program. Monday’s agenda moved from Adam Spencer’s keynote, “The GPT Revolution”, into Steadfast’s own technology roadmap, a session on using Steadfast apps to unlock broker efficiency, a presentation on “AI and Agents”, and a discussion on triage claims. Another session focused squarely on cyber security and data governance. By Tuesday, the program had widened out again, pairing those practical broking topics with keynote speakers including Jelena Dokic, Nasir Sobhani and Sam Bloom.
Richard Crawford, CEO of Community Broker Network, said the talk by radio personality and maths-science expert Adam Spencer about AI was “just amazing”.
“The guy’s a savant and having someone as numerate as he is appeals to all the actuaries and underwriters in the room,” said Crawford.
One of Spencer’s points was that AI models do not think so much as recognise patterns in language and then predict, often very accurately, what should come next.
Broughton also attended a Vero session on AI and said the technology’s reach is already spreading quickly through the industry.
“I think the big thing is about how underwriters and brokers are starting to use the technology available, how much it's likely to influence cost, how much it's likely to influence underwriting decisions,” he said.
Steadfast’s own framing of the issue was similarly practical rather than evangelical. In the AI session, delegates were promised tools they could use now, alongside a look at how intelligent agents may change the way brokers work without “losing the human edge”. That caveat mattered, because for all the excitement around productivity, much of the conversation on the floor still came back to service, judgment and claims.
However, while AI can drive efficiencies, the view of many brokers at the event was that, for now at least, the advice role of the broker is safe.
“Yes, absolutely,” said Broughton. “The underwriters are saying this as well. The thing that's coming out is that the role of advice is always going to be there, even if it's commoditised, you still need to give people options.”
The insurance industry still needs the human element, “that chance to speak to somebody,” he said.
One of the local industry’s biggest drivers of technology in recent years has been Kelly, but AI is likely to take insurance into places even he may only recently have imagined.
“You can drive that early stage growth as a courageous individual, but at some point the founder hands the baton on and I think the time’s right,” said Crawford. “I felt the room was both very cognisant of the amazing legacy of Robert and glad for him that it’s not all on his shoulders and that he can still contribute - but the company can go to the next step too.”
He described the months ahead as “exciting times.”
