Alex Lumby (pictured) took over as CEO of Gallagher Australia in February, arriving from Marsh McLennan where he was managing director and head of Mercer Marsh Benefits Pacific. Six months in, the argument he makes about where broking competition now sits should interest anyone running a book outside a capital city.
The proposition is that clients in regional Australia no longer accept a different standard of advice because of their postcode. Gallagher says it supports more than 100,000 businesses in Australia, of which more than 10,000 are in regional and remote areas, served through 35 branches.
"What we’re seeing is that clients want advisors, not just insurance brokers," Lumby said. "They want people who understand their industry, can help them anticipate emerging risks and bring specialist expertise to increasingly complex challenges.”
That client expectation could be cutting against the traditional division of labour in Australian broking, where national and global firms held the corporate accounts in Sydney and Melbourne while local independents held the relationships in the regions. If a grain handler in the Riverina or a civil contractor in Central Queensland now expects the same structure a comparable business would receive in Texas or Alberta, the basis of competition changes.
The mechanism Lumby described is proximity rather than product.
"With all of our offices on the ground in the regions, you are doing that at a much more granular level with clients than if we were just trading out of the major capital cities," he said.
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There is evidence that this granularity that brings strong broker-client relationships matters hugely. Vero's 2026 SME Insurance Index, now in its fifteenth year and based on a survey of 1,500 Australian businesses, found that 80% had used a broker in the past year and 42% had used the same broker for more than three years. Broker satisfaction sat at 69% and among businesses that used brokers heavily, 95% reported satisfaction with their claims experience.
The same research points to where the advisory gap sits. Forty-seven per cent of businesses reported a revenue decline over the previous twelve months and 75% of small businesses described their approach to risk management as ad hoc. The National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA), summarising the findings, noted that eight in ten businesses have never conducted a formal risk analysis and 42% have no business continuity plan.
Those are not capital city problems. They are also concentrated among the smaller, owner-operated businesses that make up the bulk of regional books.
The third element is sector expertise. Gallagher runs 17 separate specialties in Australia, including aviation, agriculture, construction, cyber, energy, marine, mining and financial lines.
"We support clients wherever they’re based, while connecting them with specialist capability from across the Gallagher network," he said. "We build credibility with clients because we're embedded in the communities and industries we serve and deeply understand the challenges and opportunities they face."
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This is the part of the argument that likely carries the most competitive weight. Access to specialist capability in regional areas will only earn its premium if the client would otherwise have received generalist advice and is looking for something more. For a straightforward business pack, that is a difficult case to make. For a client building a battery storage facility or contracting into a renewable energy zone, it is considerably easier.
That distinction is becoming more commercially relevant as investment moves outward. The Regional Australia Institute, which records regional Australia as home to more than 10 million people, has argued that the country's transition to net zero rests on the regions, where renewable energy and transmission projects are and will be built. Construction, energy and digital infrastructure investment is landing in postcodes that have historically been served by generalist local brokers.
For independents, the competitive question is not the footprint but Gallagher has had a regional network since it acquired OAMPS from Wesfarmers in 2014 and these branches have traded alongside local firms ever since. What is being asserted now is what travels through them: that a client in a regional centre can be connected to a sector specialist with global support rather than a generalist and that this is what clients have come to expect.
That is a claim about delivery rather than presence and it is testable. If a regional client's requirements are met by a generalist who knows the district, the specialist layer could be an overhead. If the client is contracting into a renewable energy zone or building digital infrastructure, it is more likely not be.
