At the opening session of the Steadfast Convention, the biggest insurance broker gathering in Australasia, Robert Kelly used what is expected to be his last appearance at this event as group CEO to deliver an economic warning: Australia, he believes, is already in recession.
The call places the veteran insurance leader alongside a wider swell of recession concern and slowdown warnings in Australia, with economists and business leaders increasingly debating whether the country is already enduring recession-like conditions.
The remark came in a candid, wide-ranging on-stage interview with Terry McMullan, retired co-founder of Insurance News, as Kelly reflected on the shocks, missteps, risks and reinventions that shaped both his own career and the Steadfast empire he helped build.
“I would think that Australia is in technical recession,” he said.
Kelly tied that assessment directly to the pressures squeezing households and businesses, and to what he plainly sees as a gap between official rhetoric and lived reality.
“You’ve got the labour market that’s easing, you’ve got interest rates going up,” said Kelly. “ I was very disappointed in the Treasurer’s statement three weeks ago saying that they had inflation under control.”
He said the Treasurer clearly never went to the supermarket.
“I went to the supermarket and walked out with $400 worth of goods in my hand,” said Kelly. “I don’t know how somebody struggling to feed a family of four or five is surviving. The recession is here.”
For brokers, the significance of Kelly’s recession call could be that downturns reshape client behaviour in ways that can reinforce the value of advice. In hard times, he argued, fear sharpens risk awareness. Businesses and households may cut spending, but they also become more alert to what can go wrong if assets, goods and services are left exposed. That, in his telling, is why insurance and broking can remain resilient even when the broader economy buckles.
Kelly’s broader message to brokers and insurers was that the industry’s future will belong to businesses that combine trusted advice with relentless processing efficiency. On recession, he argued that insurance has historically held up because clients become more conscious of loss when economic conditions deteriorate. On technology, he made clear that the next great transformation is already under way.
“It’s going to revolutionise processing,” he said of artificial intelligence.
Kelly’s view of AI was notably unsentimental. He does not see it as a simple replacement for the adviser at the client interface. The real disruption, he suggested, is deeper inside brokerages, agencies and insurer operations, where repetitive administrative work, data movement and document handling can be automated at scale. In other words, AI’s near-term prize is not removing the broker from the relationship, but stripping friction from everything around that relationship.
That distinction matters for intermediaries. Kelly’s argument was effectively that broking’s value lies in judgment, explanation and trust, while the back office is ripe for radical redesign. He portrayed a market in which software can increasingly take over the low-value grind, leaving brokers and underwriters to focus on advice, structure and client engagement.
It was a theme that connected directly to one of the biggest long bets of his career: the Steadfast Trading Platform. Kelly recounted its origins as an answer to an old inefficiency brokers know well — the endless rekeying, paper shuffling and quote comparison that consumed time but added little value. His thesis was simple long before “digital transformation” became every boardroom cliché: if a broker could submit one piece of data once and move it cleanly through the process, the whole insurance chain would work better.
“I started the client trading platform by doing the feasibility 20 years ago,” he said.
The founding story he told was classic Kelly: conviction first, market acceptance later. An early build path fell over after insurer opposition. A large corporate partner backed away. There was no easy consensus, no eager line of carriers waiting to jump aboard. So Steadfast funded development itself, carrying the risk because Kelly believed a contestable, automated platform was the industry’s future. The breakthrough, he said, came the way many market shifts do: not with universal support, but with one believer. Get one insurer on, prove the concept, and the rest begin to follow.
That story still resonates because it underlines a larger point for brokers and insurers alike. The platform was never just about efficiency. It was also about market engagement. Kelly said clients do not simply want to be told a price; they want to understand the market, the alternatives and the reasons behind a recommendation. Technology, in that sense, should strengthen advice rather than flatten it.
His account of how Steadfast itself was founded carried the same lesson. It was born, he said, because smaller and mid-sized brokers were being sidelined by insurers chasing scale through large international players. The answer was not merely size for size’s sake, but creating a home where brokers could lift standards, build technical capability, access stronger products and present a more meaningful collective proposition to insurers. What began as an aggregation play became something broader: a distribution, training and standards machine built to give independent brokers a stronger commercial footing.
As a final convention appearance as group CEO goes, Kelly’s was fittingly unvarnished. He mixed autobiography, market history, warning and challenge. He offered a recession call, a defence of advice and a reminder that the brokers who prosper will be those who keep the client relationship human while making the machinery around it smarter.
