Allianz Australia has redesigned its farm pack product after concluding that brokers, not just farmers, were struggling with its complexity and the need to adapt the cover to new risks. The insurer has cut its product disclosure statement (PDS) from 10 sections to five and reduced the number of ways to insure farm contents from six to three, changes it attributes directly to feedback channelled back through its broker network.
"Complexity was a key pain point," said Julie Mitchell, chief general manager of commercial and personal injury at Allianz Australia, describing a PDS that had grown unwieldy over time. The friction was most acute around motor vehicles and accessories, which previously had to be individually listed on the schedule at the point of sale.
"That was a pretty big administrative burden and also resulted in complaints at the time of claim if something was omitted or inadvertently missed, not disclosed or forgotten," Mitchell said. That's a distribution problem as much as a coverage one: A policy that's hard to quote and prone to disputes at claim time is a policy brokers hesitate to put in front of clients, particularly smaller or hobby-farm accounts where the paperwork could outweigh the premium.
The redesign consolidated the PDS into five sections: Home property, farm property, public and product liability, motor vehicles, and engineering. It also simplified the contents-insurance options from six pathways to three. Photo requirements for high-value homes were also scaled back: Previously triggered for any property over $1.5 million, they now apply only to homes over $5 million or older than 75 years, removing a step that added little for newer, well-documented properties.
Mitchell framed the overhaul as a direct response to what Allianz's specialist farm team was hearing on the ground, combined with input passed on by brokers and customers. These insights, she said, shaped every change in the redesign. Rather than a top-down product refresh, the company is positioning this as evidence that broker frustration with a product's administrative burden can move an insurer to rebuild it from the PDS up, not just tweak pricing or marketing.
That kind of feedback loop matters more broadly across rural insurance, where the Insurance Council of Australia's Find an Insurer directory lists a wide spread of farm-specific covers - contents, machinery, livestock, farm vehicle, fencing - that brokers typically have to piece together across multiple insurers. A simplified single-policy structure has real value for the broker doing that assembly work, not just the farmer at the end of it.
The changes extend to the platforms brokers actually use to quote and bind. The product sits on Allianz's Alive digital broker platform, which gives brokers full policy lifecycle access online and the insurer has confirmed a connection to the SCTP platform is planned before the end of the year, with broader broker access to trade through SCTP flagged for next year.
Question sets for brokers are also simplified specifically to cut the number of referrals back to underwriters - a direct response, Mitchell said, to complaints about how much manual back-and-forth the old product demanded at quote stage. For brokers who'd avoided recommending farm pack cover to smaller clients because of the time cost per policy, fewer referral points and a shorter PDS both work in the same direction: Less friction per placement counts for more on lower-premium business, where brokers have the least margin to justify time spent on paperwork.
