Soft-market competition for Newcastle, NSW-based broker Andrew Bendeich (pictured) raises important questions of loyalty. The director of Excelsior Insurance Services is blunt about what’s happening at the coalface. “Accounts are purely on price rather than the client looking at cover," he said. "They just sit there and go, ‘That one's a lot cheaper.’” For brokers, that shift isn’t just a commercial business challenge; it can be an ethical and emotional issue too.
At the recent UAC Sydney Market Exchange, Bendeich said he still feels an obligation to support the insurers who kept capacity flowing when the market was tight.
“I suppose I probably look at it from a loyalty point of view," he said. The insurers who were there during the hard market helped you out so I try to then help them again in the soft market, but sometimes you've got to go to where the rates are.”
That tension between the insurer relationships brokers want to support and the pricing clients demand has become a defining fault line of the cycle.
In Australia’s professional indemnity space, CFC Underwriting’s Anita Lane said the SME market is “just crazy” and said she hasn’t seen competition like this “for a very long time.” Brokers who once had room to negotiate with a handful of markets now find themselves fighting to retain accounts that can move for a few hundred dollars in premium – even when cover isn’t comparable.
Meanwhile, financial lines underwriters are seeing the same pattern play out. Pen Underwriting’s Louise Soutter noted that “more and more, the price of cover is the decisive factor in placement with less focus on appropriate coverage, continuity of cover and security.” In other words, even sophisticated buyers are increasingly starting at the bottom line and working backwards – leaving brokers to explain, sometimes unsuccessfully, why a slightly higher premium may represent better long‑term value.
That’s where Bendeich sees the real danger for brokers who lean too far into discounting. “If you won them last year because you were cheaper – even if you were better – chances are you're going to lose them again purely because you're not cheaper," he said. It’s a reminder that price‑only wins are often one‑year rentals, not durable relationships. The insurance broking equivalent of living and dying by the sword.
Soft-market dynamics across the region reinforce that warning. Gallagher’s latest New Zealand market update described “a continuing soft market across most lines” with abundant capacity and active competition for business, keeping a lid on premiums even as underwriting results improve. With more capital chasing the same risks, insurers can afford to sharpen pencils – and clients quickly learn they can send their programme back out to bid.
In Australia, similar themes have emerged beyond financial lines. Commercial property brokers report more flexible pricing from insurers and renewed appetite from London markets for local risks. For clients, that looks like an easy win. For brokers, it means every renewal is live ammunition: if they can’t articulate why a long‑term partner still deserves the business, there’s always another quote waiting in the wings.
So where does that leave brokers who want to do the right thing by loyal carriers and still keep their own doors open?
One answer is to double down on the advisory role. Melbourne-based broker Simon Mison said that the crucial soft‑market conversation “isn’t about squeezing an extra few points out of the premium” but about “positioning and putting them with the right carrier now, with the right coverage.” The idea is to use the breathing space of a soft market to get clients into quality paper with robust cover, so they’re not scrambling for terms when the cycle turns.
At the same time, brokers can’t ignore cost-of-living realities. Across both Australia and New Zealand, clients face rising input costs everywhere. That’s why Bendeich insists the broker–client relationship is still the deciding factor in whether value wins out over the cheapest quote. When there’s a strong, long‑term relationship and a history of helping the client through claims or tricky renewals, he finds they’re more willing to hear the case for staying put – even if the alternative is cheaper.
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The challenge for brokers is that the very conditions making loyalty harder are also making their work more complex. More markets, more quotes, more aggressive pricing and more explaining to do when a client’s spreadsheet says one thing and their risk profile says another. In that environment, the brokers who will emerge strongest from this soft market are likely to be those who can sit in that conflict without flinching: honouring the insurers who backed them in the hard years, educating clients relentlessly on coverage and claims and accepting that sometimes, despite their best efforts, survival will still mean losing a loyal partner to a sharper rate.
