UAC’s Wollongong Expo is on today

UAC’s Wollongong Expo is on today | Insurance Business Australia

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UAC’s Wollongong Expo is on today

“We’ve got to keep trying new ideas and new regions”

On Wednesday, the Underwriting Agencies Council (UAC) is hosting an expo in the NSW coastal city of Wollongong. The event is part of UAC’s focus on regional areas and follows other NSW expos in Wagga Wagga and Parramatta.

CEO Jenny Bax (pictured above), attends all of UAC’s expos. Bax told Insurance Business that the exhibition room at the UAC Wollongong Underwriting Expo is “filled to capacity” and almost 90 brokers are confirmed to attend.

UAC’s chair Heath Amber (pictured immediately below), said these regional expos tend to draw less people but they’re an important form of outreach.

“We’ve got to keep trying new ideas and new regions to see where we get the interest from,” said Amber. “If you look at broker and AR [authorised representative] networks out in the country – there’s a huge amount out there, so it’s getting to them.”

Wagga Wagga to Parramatta to Wollongong

Bax recalled an example of interested brokers looking for “interactions” and “meaningful conversations” with agencies.

“In Wagga, we had some brokers that completed the 10-hour return trip to attend our expo,” she said.

That expo was in April but she saw the very same group of brokers at the recent UAC Norwest Sydney Underwriting Expo in Parramatta in August.

“It impressed me to see the same group of brokers turn up twice in the space of a couple of months but just shows how keen they were,” said Bax.

Amber said brokers and ARs are willing to invest the time to get to these events because of the opportunity to see dozens of agencies exhibiting who are all offering different products and services.

“I think it’s a desire and, like Heath said, they don’t feel obliged to, but they want to be there,” said Bax. “Particularly in the regional areas where they don’t get people coming out to them and spending time talking about risks.”

She said brokers “crave that training and interaction” and “those hard conversations face to face.”

Insurers segment and agencies fill the gap

Amber said the insurance market has also changed in recent years and brokers can’t get coverage through traditional channels like they used to. As a result, he said, today “brokers are seeing it [UAC expos] as a ‘must do’ on their list.”

“These people out in the regions will come a long way because they know they have to now because they have customers that require alternative thinking,” he said. “Ten (10) years ago it was a bit more optional because most of the business would have been placed traditionally and they could get three or four insurers to partner on a particular account.”

Amber said “that’s completely flipped around and they might have one insurer who is prepared to take 10% but the rest are agencies.”

However, he said the big insurers, like QBE and CGU, are also at the expos and are “great partners”. For example, he said QBE is a premium partner of UAC.

“Talking with insurers – and I have said this to insurers – this is not a slight against them for doing less, it’s simply that their appetites and desires are changing,” said Amber.

He said this situation is creating a gap for the agencies to fill “and they [insurers] know that.”

“Insurers can only do so much,” said Amber. “They know that they are segmenting how they look after their brokers.”

He said, in years past, insurers could visit all of their brokers and ARs around the country.

“We just didn’t have that many,” said Amber. “That’s getting really hard for them.”

By contrast, agencies may only have a single office in the whole country but they’re choosing to reach lots of brokers by exhibiting at expos.

“They’re doing it differently, they’re attending Expos and the proposition is also quite a bit different and I think that’s really driving the services aspect,” he said. “Some insurers are seeing that agencies are the way forward and getting in behind an agency and deploying capital that way.”

Amber suggested that he was interested to see “how that looks in Wollongong” and also whether the event is able to draw stakeholders from the far south.

Are you attending the UAC Expo in Wollongong? Please tell us an expo highlight below.

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