During the last few months, Australian brokers have fielded a sharp rise in premium funding requests as small and mid-sized businesses navigate one of the most uncertain operating environments in years — with elevated fuel costs, fresh interest rate rises and the long tail of ATO enforcement action all squeezing cash flow at the same time. Insolvency numbers may have stabilised after peaking in late 2025 but they remain at historically elevated levels and, say premium funders, brokers are increasingly being asked to help clients spread the cost of cover.
"We've seen a massive jump in demand for premium funding in the last quarter," said Daniel Gronert (pictured), CEO of Arteva Funding. "In March our take up of premium funding loans was up 20% year on year and in April it was up 26%."
That kind of growth, Gronert said, points to something structural happening across the SME insurance buyer base — a need for cash flow support that brokers are increasingly being asked to solve for at the point of placement.
The drivers are familiar but compounding. Fuel prices have eased from their recent peak but remain above historical norms, interest rates have moved up three times in short succession and consumer demand is softening in the sectors that can least absorb it — hospitality, construction and transport-exposed retail. Gronert was blunt about which businesses are tipping over: "any business that is blaming rising fuel costs for insolvencies in the last three months, they were probably already facing significant cash flow challenges anyway."
The implication for brokers is that the cost shock isn't creating new distress so much as exposing existing fragility. Businesses that were already running thin are now running out of room. The conversation at renewal is no longer just about cover and price — it's about whether the client can fund the premium at all without stretching working capital to breaking point.
However, it’s not all cash flow doom and gloom. What seems to be a policy shift from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Gronert said, is providing relief to some SMEs.
"We have seen the ATO wind in their aggressive stance on collecting ATO debt from SMEs in recent weeks," said Gronert. Arteva said the uptick in insolvencies during 2025 was "heavily related" to the ATO upping its enforcement actions.
"The fact that they've relaxed that slightly is no doubt going to provide a little bit of a buffer,” said Gronert.
That buffer matters. The ATO's enforcement stance through 2025, said Gronert, was one of the single biggest contributors to SME failure, and any easing — even at the margins — gives brokers' clients a little more breathing room to refinance, restructure or simply pay their premiums on time. But it doesn't reverse the broader pressure and Gronert was careful not to overstate the relief.
For brokers, the practical takeaway is that conversations need to start much earlier and run much deeper than they did a year ago. Gronert's view is that cash flow forecasting should now be a default part of the renewal conversation, not an afterthought reserved for clients who flag a problem.
"The environment is very uncertain,” he said. “So it's certainly not the time to be making assumptions around what your client's cash flow may look like in the short to mid-term."
That's a meaningful shift in the broker's role. It moves the conversation from "here's your quote" to "here's how you fund it and here's what your next twelve months might look like" — closer to advisory work than transactional placement. For brokers willing to make that pivot, premium funding becomes less a product to be offered at the end of the process and more a structural part of the proposition.
The data backs the shift. Year-on-year premium funding demand growing in the mid-20% range is not a normal market movement — it reflects a buyer base that is materially more cash-constrained than it was twelve months ago and a broker channel that is increasingly being relied on to bridge the gap.
