For Australian brokers, Liberty’s move to a “one Liberty” model across the Asia-Pacific - officially announced today - matters less as a corporate restructure than as a potential distribution and capability story at a time when insurers are fighting harder to defend business in a softer market. If specialty expertise developed in Australia is deployed more broadly across regional growth markets, brokers could benefit from improved access to decision-makers, more joined-up underwriting across jurisdictions and better solutions for clients whose risks no longer sit neatly within one market.
John McCabe (pictured), president, Australia, at Liberty said the brand change is less dramatic for Australia than for parts of Asia where multiple licensed entities are being brought together. However, he argued the unified structure will create a single go-to-market approach across the region and help Liberty extend products and underwriting expertise developed Down Under into markets including Singapore, Malaysia, China and India.
So Australia could be emerging as a key source of specialty underwriting capability as the insurer sharpens its broker pitch in a softer market. McCabe suggested this will bring a clearer regional proposition, a simpler market identity and a bigger platform for exporting products and expertise developed in Australia into Asian growth markets.
The rebrand could be a useful edge in a market where brokers are again being forced to weigh price against stability. In fact, McCabe said one of the noticeable ongoing trends during his first year as president – he started in February 2025 – is capital returning to the insurance and reinsurance markets and appetite expanding accordingly.
“What was a strong pricing, seller's market has changed over the last few years into a buyer's market,” he said.
That change is now highly visible in SME and more standardised business, but it is also influencing the broader way insurers go to market. For Liberty, McCabe said, the challenge is to hold the line on consistency and remind brokers and clients that the group is not a cyclical player that surges in when conditions are attractive and retreats when they are not.
McCabe said some competitors are returning aggressively to the market, writing business at prices they would not have entertained two years ago, leaving brokers and clients to make sense of the reversal. Liberty’s answer, he said, is to lean on its long-term presence, its mutual structure and its willingness to write through the cycle.
“We're in this for the long term,” he said.
McCabe said Liberty has spent significant time coaching younger underwriters who have come through a hard market and are now having to learn a different discipline: how to retain business, how to argue value beyond price and how to assess whether a risk is still attractive even if the premium is down sharply year on year.
The company’s retention for the 12 months to December was 90% on a policy basis, he said, which McCabe presented as evidence that those conversations are landing. His advice internally is not to become fixated on whether a renewal is down 20% but to ask instead whether the business would still be worth writing if it appeared as a new opportunity today.
For brokers, that softer-market message connects directly to Liberty’s regional overhaul. McCabe said the rebrand in Australia would be relatively straightforward because most brokers already refer to the business simply as Liberty. The bigger significance is that the insurer is trying to create one brand and one go-to-market approach across Asia-Pacific, removing the awkwardness of multiple Liberty entities appearing side by side and making it easier to extend commercial and specialty lines across borders.
Liberty is also trying to build out commercial offerings in several Asian markets using product lines and underwriting know-how that have already been developed in Australia. McCabe pointed to financial lines, professional indemnity, selected property and construction classes, and surety as examples of areas where the Australian business has experience and scale that can now be used more broadly across the region.
In practice, he said, teams in Australia are already working with colleagues in markets such as Singapore, Malaysia and China to help expand those capabilities, while a surety launch in India is also part of the broader push.
At a time when most insurance conditions, generally speaking, are still soft and competition is intensifying, Liberty is trying to give brokers another reason to stay engaged: not just local underwriting relationships but access to a broader Asia-Pacific platform backed by local authority and specialty expertise. McCabe made a point of contrasting that model with multinational rivals that pull underwriting or claims authority back offshore when conditions deteriorate.
“Many of our peers in the market, particularly when things start to go wrong, remove the underwriting authority or the claims authority from the local businesses,” he said.
Liberty’s regional model, he said, is built around local empowerment, allowing underwriters and claims teams to move faster and answer brokers and clients without waiting for approvals from New York or London.
“For the last 27 years we've been doing it this way,” he said.
That claim to continuity appears to sit at the heart of Liberty’s market argument. McCabe emphasised the advantage of mutual ownership, saying the absence of shareholder pressure gives the business more room to write for long-term profitability rather than chase premium growth at the wrong point in the cycle. In his view, that produces steadier underwriting behaviour and fewer abrupt swings in appetite. This fits with how Liberty wants brokers to think about value in a soft market.
From the underwriting side of the table, McCabe said underwriters are being encouraged to understand who really makes the decision on an account, whether that is the broker, the chief financial officer or another senior executive, and tailor the proposition accordingly. He also wants underwriters taking claims teams and risk engineers into client meetings so the discussion goes beyond price and into continuity, service and technical support.
Liberty’s regional integration and rebrand has more daily operational significance for its Asia-based business but the mutual insurer is suggesting that Australia is not just part of the regional business, but one of the engines helping shape it.
