A market report from Aviso Specialty has found that the gap between published insurance pricing averages and the actual outcomes experienced by individual buyers has widened considerably since late 2025, with underwriting segmentation, broking experience, and risk articulation emerging as the primary variables shaping renewal results. The report covers directors’ and officers’ (D&O), professional indemnity (PI), crime, statutory liability, and cyber liability insurance classes, and was published in the first week of May 2026 under the title Beyond Averages.
Across the Australia-Pacific region, premiums at the portfolio level have remained broadly stable or have drifted lower, underpinned by reinsurance cost decreases that have allowed insurers to put more capacity to work. Rate reductions in financial and professional lines have been recorded over several consecutive quarters. Aviso Specialty argues, however, that these figures carry limited relevance for most buyers. A concentrated group of large organisations – ASX-listed corporates, financial institutions, infrastructure groups, and multinational entities – generates a disproportionate share of the total premium pool, meaning that portfolio averages reflect their experience far more than that of a typical mid-market or SME buyer.
“Market averages reported by other brokerages are often premium-weighted rather than risk-weighted,” the report states. The comparison drawn is to the ASX itself, where index movements are heavily driven by the banking and resources sectors by virtue of their market capitalisation, rather than by the broader performance of listed companies. The report also points to insurer exits from segments of the Australian market as evidence that conditions are not as uniform as headline softening implies.
Between October 2025 and March 2026, Aviso Specialty tracked a measurable separation between renewal outcomes for risks processed as part of a broader portfolio and those where underwriters assessed each risk on a standalone basis. The latter, the report found, produced materially different results – in both price and coverage – when the individual risk profile was clearly presented. Several factors are identified as contributing to this dispersion, including narrow underwriting criteria applied to segmented risks, coverage restrictions used to make premiums appear competitive, and heightened insurer sensitivity to emerging areas such as privacy liability, AI governance, and systemic cyber scenarios. The relative experience of both the placing broker and the underwriter is also cited as a material variable.
In the D&O and management liability segments, the report identifies a range of structural and regulatory developments expected to sustain or widen these gaps through the second half of 2026. These include Australia’s new mandatory climate disclosure framework, which the report notes could expose supply-chain participants even if they are not themselves required to report; increased workplace health and safety litigation; the introduction of psychological injury laws; and the removal of the small business exemption under proposed Privacy Act amendments. Data from Safe Work Australia, cited in the report, shows that serious mental health claims cost more than four times the average physical injury claim, with a median payout of $67,400. The report notes that many standard policy sub-limits are not structured to accommodate claims of that size.
In cyber and crime insurance, overall pricing has continued to ease, though the pace of softening varies by sector given ongoing regulatory scrutiny and treaty-level restrictions applied by some reinsurers. Underwriters have placed heightened attention on the maturity of an organisation's cyber controls, with particular focus on lateral movement risk, supply-chain dependencies, backup integrity, unsupported software, incident response capability, AI exposure, and data governance frameworks. The report notes that insurers have grown increasingly concerned about systemic loss scenarios involving cloud providers and major software-as-a-service platforms, though it also observes that real-world events tend to be less uniform than modelled scenarios suggest.
According to the Australian Signals Directorate’s Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024-25, the average self-reported cost of a cybercrime incident to Australian businesses rose 50% to $80,850, with medium-sized businesses recording a 55% increase to $97,200 per incident. Aviso Specialty’s report draws a distinction between established insurers with accumulated claims management experience and newer market entrants whose policy wordings have not been tested in Australian conditions. In the former, the report says, the claims process tends to be more consistent. In mass-marketed products that bypass traditional underwriting, claims teams may have broader scope to contest disclosure or rely on policy language that favours a narrow interpretation of cover.
In the professional indemnity market, Aviso Specialty notes that pricing averages across a profession can obscure substantial variation at the individual business level. The observation that “there are engineers… and then there are engineers” – attributed in the report to experienced PI underwriters – illustrates the degree to which two businesses in the same profession can represent materially different risk profiles. Construction, healthcare, and technology have continued to face higher rates or tighter terms even as aggregate PI premiums have eased for better-performing risks. Statutory liability has followed a similar pattern. The full scope of Australia’s incoming privacy tort remains uncertain across all five lines covered in the report. These classes are also affected by structural features of the non-prescribed insurance market: policies are written on a claims-made basis with long-tail liability, no two contract wordings are identical, and there is no statutory minimum level of cover an insurer must provide.
The report outlines six approaches that Aviso Specialty says have produced better coverage and pricing outcomes for buyers in the current environment.
The report notes that long-term agreements remain available, primarily for larger and more established programs. However, it cautions against treating them as a default mechanism. If an organisation’s risk profile or business structure changes over the term of such an agreement, the original terms may no longer be appropriate, and the arrangement can give insurers greater latitude to contest claims that fall outside those original parameters.
