The message from insurers has become impossible to ignore as they deploy dedicated authorised representative (AR) underwriting teams, bespoke distribution channels and separate service infrastructure. The commercial logic is clear, and the investment is real, but as some insurers move beyond the decision to build and into the harder work of execution, a different question can emerge: Do they actually have the people to pull it off?
John Mutton (pictured), chief commercial officer at Community Broker Network (CBN), thinks that is precisely where the rubber meets the road.
"Most of our larger trading partners have distinct service teams or distribution teams for AR networks - it is really a reflection of the market," he said.
The structure is there. Whether the right talent sits inside it is another matter entirely.
The AR segment has a specific operating rhythm that does not map cleanly onto the corporate broking world most senior underwriters have spent their careers servicing. AR principals are typically business owners first and insurance intermediaries second - entrepreneurial operators running lean, relationship-driven practices, often carved out of larger institutional broking houses precisely because they wanted something different.
That entrepreneurial streak extends beyond client relationships. Stacy Finnegan, chair of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance’s (ANZIIF’s) Insurance Broking Faculty Advisory, has observed the same pattern from the AR principal's side. "Many authorised representative networks or even individuals within the network have been able to more easily embrace new technology than working for a large broking house working on frustrating legacy systems," she said. It is the same nimbleness - cultural as much as operational - that defines how AR businesses run and what they expect from the partners they deal with.
That profile creates specific service expectations. AR brokers want direct access to decision-makers. They want speed. They want an underwriter who understands that a client instruction that arrives at 4:30pm on a Friday is not an inconvenience - it is the job.
Mutton's assessment of what happens when insurers get the talent selection wrong is blunt.
"If you were to bring a corporate underwriter and put them in an AR network, they would probably really struggle," he said.
It is not a knock on corporate underwriters. It is an acknowledgement that the skills, instincts and cultural fluency required to effectively service an AR book are genuinely different and not necessarily transferable from a large institutional broking environment, no matter how strong the underwriter's technical credentials.
What Mutton is describing is essentially a cultural translation problem and it runs deeper than training can fix. An underwriter shaped by years of dealing with structured, corporatised broking relationships brings a set of assumptions about how business flows, how decisions get made and how relationships operate. In an AR environment, those assumptions are wrong in ways that are hard to anticipate until you are already in the role.
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AR principals are not employees of a larger organisation following internal process. They are often business owners who have chosen the AR model - often explicitly - because they wanted autonomy, speed and the ability to deal with people who make decisions rather than defer them. Zurich Financial Services Australia (Zurich) recently launched an AR-only underwriting team in Australia. Alex Morgan, Zurich's head of general insurance, Australia and New Zealand was explicit about what the right model actually looks like. "It's a decision-making, underwriter-centric model," he said. That framing leaves no room for the BDM-heavy, relationship-management approach that AR brokers have long complained leaves them waiting for an answer that never quite arrives.
An underwriter who defaults to committee sign-off, who needs to refer back to a pricing desk or who treats a relationship as a distribution function rather than a business partnership is going to feel that friction immediately.
The insurers getting this right are the ones treating AR-segment roles as a distinct talent category, not a lateral rotation from the corporate broking desk. That means recruiting differently, onboarding differently and measuring performance differently - not just on premium written but on the quality of the access and responsiveness the AR actually experiences.
For brokers evaluating which insurer relationships will genuinely serve their AR businesses over time, Mutton's point is a useful filter. The question is not just whether an insurer has built a dedicated AR team - it is whether the people staffing it actually understand what they have walked into.
The structure is table stakes. The talent is the differentiator.
