In a soft market, a top insurance brokerage is defined less by the premium it places than by the advice it gives. A soft market is a period in which high insurer capacity and competition push premiums down and loosen policy terms, which makes price easy to compare and harder to compete on. 

For Katherine Wilson, chief executive of the Insurance Brokers Association of New Zealand (IBANZ), the industry association for New Zealand’s insurance brokers and intermediaries, the definition of strong performance has already changed. 

“There is a clear shift underway from policy updates and rollovers to proactive risk and governance advisory,” she says. “The broking profession is increasingly viewed as a key strategic adviser and brokerages that adapt quickly to that change in mindset and skillset will continue to perform strongly.” 

The market backdrop makes that shift more urgent. Australia’s commercial insurance market remained soft through the first half of 2026, with pricing easing across property, financial lines, liability and cyber, according to Australian broker EBM Insurance & Risk’s Insurance market trends and outlook report for May 2026. Falling premiums are good news for clients, but they compress the commission a brokerage earns on each policy and make price the easiest comparison for a client to reach for. As brokers are being pushed to prove their value in the soft market, the ones pulling ahead are those giving clients a reason to stay that has nothing to do with the lowest quote. 

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IBANZ’s Wilson says the expectations clients have of New Zealand’s insurance brokers are moving in the same direction. “Clients increasingly need and expect advice, not just tick-box policy renewals,” she says. “Brokers are continuing to reorient their service offering towards an advisory role. Passive will no longer cut it; brokers need to be actively engaging and checking in with clients; partnering with them to truly understand their business and its specific needs.” 

That advisory role is also what allows some brokerages to grow quickly without losing quality. “What sets successful brokerages apart is that they have a client-centric model as the purpose, backed up by a shared vision of quality risk advice and client support during claims time,” Wilson says.

Technology is the other half of the picture for insurance brokerages in Australia and New Zealand. “There’s no doubt that the broking industry is undergoing a significant technology-driven transformation,” Wilson says. “High-performing brokerages are already using technology to help streamline administrative processes and improve client experiences and outcomes and that will only increase.” 

She is candid that adoption is uneven. “Various brokerages are at different stages of embracing technology,” she says. “AI shifts and legacy systems can play an inhibiting role that can make technology change more difficult to integrate but change is happening nonetheless.” 

For New Zealand brokerages, regulation adds another layer of uncertainty. Wilson notes that “the need for clarity and certainty is high on the agenda as New Zealand moves through the political cycle,” with the official 2026 General Election timetable published by New Zealand’s Electoral Commission, setting polling day for Saturday, 7 November 2026. 

This year’s results show two distinct ways of acting on Wilson’s diagnosis. Shielded Insurance Brokers has made the transaction itself faster and cheaper to run, using technology it built itself to strip out administration so its people can focus on clients. Prestige Insurance Broker Services has rejected the renewal-and-cheapest-quote model and focuses on what happens between renewals. Their methods differ, but both are built on what the broker does for the client, not what the policy costs.

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Shielded Insurance Brokers, one of the Top Brokerages 2026 winners, is rewriting the broking playbook by using technology it built in-house to automate the administrative work that traditionally consumes a broker’s day, freeing its brokers to advise clients and win new business. 

Headquartered in Queensland, the brokerage ranks third in Top Brokerages 2026 and is also named a Fast Brokerage. Its GWP rose 18.6% to $178.9 million over the 12 months to 31 May 2026, revenue grew 23% to $33.2 million and the brokerage brought on 11,454 new clients while writing 55,988 policies. Its broker headcount grew to 54 from 41, and the business now runs five offices around Australia, with three opened in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in the first half of 2026. 

Shielded marked 10 years in business in September 2026, and principal and co-founder Joshua Scutts is clear that the strategy behind its growth has not changed in that time. 

Shielded doesn’t avoid the transaction – it perfects it. Scutts sees the soft market as a chance to win clients from brokers who aren’t shopping the market properly for them, and his aim is to make buying insurance fast and easy. The payoff for clients is what that efficiency frees up: more of each broker’s day spent on the client rather than the paperwork.

Scutts describes the business as a young, driven team “operating in this dinosaur industry that’s ripe for innovation and disruption”. The clearest example of that disruption is how Shielded develops brokers. 

“When I first started out in broking, to become an insurance broker, you had to become like an assistant to an insurance broker for several years before you were even given the opportunity to go and run accounts on your own,” he says. Shielded takes a different view: “No, that’s not the way we operate.” 

Instead, new team members join a niche. “We have niches or segments in the business,” Scutts says, with teams dedicated solely to construction, transport and logistics, or personal lines. Brokers learn through repetition in one segment before moving up, and after 12 to 18 months they are fully capable of running accounts. Scutts pairs that structure with a mindset he wants every broker to share with clients: “Just like your company certificate, your insurance is your certificate to operate.” 

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Coding has been a hobby for Scutts since he was 15, and he built the Queensland brokerage’s technology himself. The platform was rebuilt from the ground up and launched in the 2024–25 financial year, and its purpose is simple. “At its core, it’s taking away the grunt work from the brokers so they can earn more and win more clients,” he says. 

That platform now runs 26 background technology and AI agents that dispatch quotes, process sales and documents, create client records, chase debtors, reconcile commissions and coach the team. Shielded estimates that agents absorb work equivalent to 18 full-time roles and save more than $2 million in payroll a year. 

Scutts is careful not to chase technology for its own sake. While some brokerages wait for insurers to build application programming interfaces for instant quoting, Shielded mines its own history. “I’ve got 10 years of data of every single quote we’ve done,” he says. A broker with a first scaffolding client in Queensland can see where the last 50 similar risks were placed. “Why would you give it to tech and wait five minutes, wait 10 minutes for it to go do the quote when you already know the answer?” he says. 

He is equally sceptical of automating the human side of the job. “People still buy from people,” he says. His approach is closer to systems engineering: “It’s a very systems-thinking approach, and I’ll often pull apart our processes and re-engineer them.”

Speed only works if it is safe, and Scutts puts compliance at the centre of the model. “Compliance is like a lung. We need to live and breathe compliance,” he says. 

Shielded’s AI compliance system rebuilds the full story of each sale – calls, questions, quote and paperwork – and grades it against the brokerage’s compliance rules, citing the evidence behind every finding. Scutts challenges the industry’s reliance on sampling and comments, “Compliance shouldn’t be a sample-based spot-check anymore. The technology now exists to review 100% of sales, so ‘we audit a random 5%’ should no longer be an acceptable standard.”

Scutts pushes back when his firm is labelled an “AI brokerage”. He says, “I think people would kill for our technology, but it’s the people and culture that sits alongside that technology.” 

That culture is built on feedback loops. “It’s at the end of each day, every single person gets an alert and they can give their feedback of what’s blocking them for the day,” he says. “And then our management’s job is to just clear blockers so they can do better the next day.” Common blockers, such as slow responses from a particular insurer, are raised directly with that insurer’s business development manager. 

Staff work in sub-teams of around 10, and people are matched to the roles that suit them, whether that is claims advocacy, back-office administration or new business. When a client leaves a one-star review, Scutts says, “it’s all hands on deck” for the management team to resolve it.
 

 

What are the biggest challenges your brokerage is facing, and how are you addressing them? 

Our two real challenges are a softening market and scaling without losing quality. As premiums come off the back of the hard market, commission per policy compresses, [and] we’ve leaned on the things that are [within] our control. Because our own technology handles the admin behind roughly 100,000 quotes and 60,000 policies a year, our cost to process a policy is coming down, still allowing us to scale with confidence. 

Which area of your business has grown the most? 

The area that’s grown the most is our capacity to grow. In a traditional brokerage, growth and headcount are tied together. The most significant thing we’ve built is the ability to break that link. By treating the brokerage as a system and automating the deterministic, repetitive work that usually consumes a broker’s day, we’ve been able to scale volume dramatically without scaling cost or headcount at the same rate. 

Growth for us has been not only about doing more of the same with more people but also about removing the ceiling that headcount usually places on a services business. 

What’s one thing the broader industry should do differently? 

Be honest about how much of broking is deterministic admin and stop spending brokers’ time on it. Too much of the industry treats technology as a front-end gimmick while the back-office plumbing stays manual. Take control of the document-shuffling, the chasing, the reconciling, the compliance checking, so brokers are freed to do the one thing technology can’t – advise clients and build relationships. 

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Prestige Insurance Broker Services is proving its value in New Zealand’s construction slowdown by acting as a year-round risk and claims adviser to its clients, rather than a service that simply shops the market at renewal. 

The Auckland-based brokerage, led by managing director Rick Hao, is another Top Brokerages 2026 winner. The eight-year-old business specialises in New Zealand’s construction sector. Over the 12 months to 31 May 2026, it grew its active client base 18% and lifted revenue by 11.7% with a steady team of nine brokers, while GWP rose by 4.2%.  

Those results came in a difficult market. Hao points to the combination of a softening insurance market and a slowdown in New Zealand’s construction sector, with clients facing reduced building activity, fewer new developments and tighter financing conditions. 

Hao is blunt about the kind of broker Prestige refuses to be. “We don’t want to simply be the broker that obtains three quotes at renewal and recommends the cheapest one,” he comments. “Particularly with construction clients, we want to understand how they operate, where their risks are, what contracts they are signing and, importantly, be there when something goes wrong.” 

He sees the award as confirmation of that approach rather than a reason to change it. “I don’t think the recognition changes how we position ourselves, but it does validate the model we’ve been building,” he says.

Most of that client growth came from new business, with 545 clients added over the year. Hao’s strategy, though, is to go deeper with each client once they arrive. 

Liability insurance has been the fastest-growing line for Prestige Insurance Broker Services in the 18 months to mid-2026, spanning general, statutory, employers and management liability as well as professional indemnity. Hao says the shift reflects how construction clients now think about risk. “They’re increasingly recognising that some of the biggest exposures to their business aren’t necessarily physical assets.” 

Contracts are part of the driver, with principals, head contractors and financiers setting more demanding insurance requirements. But Hao wants clients to buy for the right reasons. “We don’t want clients to buy a liability policy simply because somebody has told them they need it in a contract. We want them to understand why they need it and what exposure it is actually protecting them against,” he says.

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For the firm, advice starts well before anything goes wrong. “For us, risk management isn’t just about helping a client after a claim happens. A big part of what we do is trying to prevent the loss from happening in the first place,” Hao says. 

The brokerage runs industry presentations, client seminars and webinars on topics such as how health and safety obligations interact with insurance, and how breaches of resource management requirements create both regulatory and insurance exposures. “To me, that’s where the broker’s role is changing,” he says. 

When something does go wrong, Prestige’s dedicated claims team provides claims advocacy – representing the client’s interests with the insurer throughout the life of a claim. In Prestige’s entry, Hao said the brokerage regularly helps clients through complex claims, contractual disputes, WorkSafe New Zealand investigations, statutory liability matters, council enforcement actions and Resource Management Act 1991 prosecutions, working alongside insurers, loss adjusters, lawyers and engineers.
 

 

Prestige Insurance Broker Services uses AI to review and compare policy wordings, research regulatory changes, summarise technical information and analyse claims correspondence, which Hao says has noticeably improved turnaround times, although the brokerage has not measured the gain as a percentage. The line is clearly drawn, though. “We are very clear internally that AI doesn’t replace broker judgement,” he says. 

Language is another part of the service. Hao estimates that more than 80% of Prestige’s clients benefit from its multilingual capability, which he says goes beyond translation. “It’s about being able to have quite technical conversations with clients in the language they’re most comfortable with.”

Which areas of growth are you proudest of, and why? 

We are bringing on new clients, and a lot of that comes through referrals, which we are very proud of. But growth for us isn’t just about constantly adding new clients. A big part of it has come from developing deeper relationships with our existing clients and understanding more of their overall risk. 

For example, a client may initially come to us for contract works and liability, but as we get to understand their business and their people, we may identify other exposures such as management liability, cyber liability, corporate travel, team life and health insurance, or even the directors’ personal insurance. 

I don’t really see that as cross-selling for the sake of selling more policies. The objective is to look at the client as a whole and identify genuine gaps in their insurance program, so that as far as reasonably possible they are protected against the insurable risks they face. 

What’s the signal you watch most closely to tell whether a construction client is heading into difficulty? 

Cash flow is probably the biggest one, but we also look closely at patterns in claims and changes in the way the business is operating. 

Claims can tell you a lot as well. If we start seeing an increase in theft, accidental damage, workmanship issues or other incidents, we want to understand whether there is an underlying reason rather than just treating each claim in isolation. It can sometimes point to pressure on supervision, site security, quality control or other parts of the business. 

How do you show broker value when premiums are falling and price is the easy comparison? 

A soft market is actually when brokers need to demonstrate their value more clearly, because almost everyone can come back with a cheaper premium. 

For us, the conversation isn’t just about how much we can save the client. We use the increased competition between insurers to negotiate better outcomes – that could be broader cover, lower excesses, removal or improvement of restrictive endorsements, as well as a more competitive premium. 

The cheapest quote isn’t always the best outcome. Saving 10% on premium doesn’t mean much if the client later has a major claim and discovers that an important exposure wasn’t properly covered. 

If you could change one industry-wide practice around broker remuneration, what would it be? 

I think broker remuneration should better recognise the value of the work we do throughout the year, rather than being so closely linked to placing a policy at renewal. 

Our role can go well beyond arranging the insurance. When a serious issue arises, I’ve sat alongside clients and their lawyers in meetings with WorkSafe or local councils, helping them work through the insurance and risk implications of the situation. In those situations, we’re not there to sell another policy. We’re there to support the client because we understand their business, their insurance program and how the issue could potentially affect their cover.

The top insurance brokerages in Australia and New Zealand head into 2027 facing a soft market that looks set to last a while yet. EBM Insurance & Risk’s May 2026 outlook projected soft buying conditions would extend into the second half of 2026 for most industries, although the pace of softening is expected to moderate. That keeps the pressure on brokerages to show clients what they are paying for beyond the policy itself. 

For Queensland-based Shielded Insurance Brokers, the next phase adds acquisitions to organic growth. The brokerage completed its first acquisition in 2026 and, principal Joshua Scutts says, is fielding “quite a few knocks on the door” from brokers looking to sell. He sees Shielded’s platform as the draw for the staff of those firms: “We’ll take the staff, the founder can leave and now the staff can enter an environment where they can earn more, be more efficient.” He expects headline growth rates to ease as the business gets bigger – “you can’t expect the same sort of percentage growth” – with Shielded on track to pass $200 million of invoices in the 2026–27 financial year. 

The plan at Auckland’s Prestige Insurance Broker Services centres on depth: expanding its specialist construction expertise, broadening the services it offers clients and investing in its claims team and broker support. “As we grow, our goal is not simply to become larger, but to become more valuable to the clients and communities we serve,” managing director Rick Hao said in the brokerage’s entry. 

IBANZ’s Wilson has advice for brokerages heading into 2027 that applies to both models. “Look up and out! It’s easy to become very inwardly focused on your own business operation, but it’s crucial for leaders to be constantly scanning the horizon to identify significant trends and understand the potential impact of factors such as upcoming government policy changes,” she says. “Insurance is a global business, events elsewhere can have impacts at home and it’s important to identify these early.”  

It is advice the top and fastest-growing insurance brokerages in Australia and New Zealand already appear to be following, whether through in-house technology or deeper risk advice for their clients. 
 

Top and Fastest-growing Insurance Brokerages in Australia and New Zealand

• 
  Prestige Insurance Broker Services
   
  
• 
  Shielded Insurance Brokers
   
  
• 
  Eternity Insurance and Financial Services
   
  
• 
  Ideal Insurance Brokers
   
  

Top Brokerages by rank 

• 1 Community Broker Network NZ
• 2 McLardy McShane Group

• 
  3 Shielded Insurance Brokers
   
  

• 4 Gerrard's Insurance Brokers
• 5 KeyInsure

• 
  6 Eternity Insurance and Financial Services
   
  

• 7 (tied) 111 Insurance Services
• 7 (tied) Elliott Insurance – The Green Broker
• 9 (tied) Grace Insurance Brokers
• 9 (tied) Guardian Insurance Brokers

• 
  11 Prestige Insurance Broker Services
   
  
• 
  12 Ideal Insurance Brokers
   
  

• 13 ProTrades Insurance
• 14 West Rock Insurance Brokers
• 15 Strata Insurance Solutions
• 16 Delmont Insurance Group
• 17 Bresland Insurance & Risk Specialists
• 18 O’Connor Warren Insurance Brokers
• 19 Reliable Financial Group
• 20 PSC Reliance Partners Baulkham Hills

Fast Brokerages

• 
  Shielded Insurance
   
  
• x
  Eternity Insurance and Financial Services
   
  
• 
  Ideal Insurance Brokers
   
  

• 111 Insurance Services
• Bresland Insurance & Risk Specialists
• Community Broker Network NZ
• Delmont Insurance Group
• KeyInsure
• Gerrard's Insurance Brokers
• McLardy McShane Group
• ProTrades Insurance
• Strata Insurance Solutions
• West Rock Insurance Brokers

Fast Starters

• 111 Insurance Services
• ProTrades Insurance
• Community Broker Network NZ