Most industry conferences compete on scale - more speakers, more panels, more parallel streams. Katrina Shanks, CEO of the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF) is building the organisation's first International Summit around the opposite instinct. The February 2027 event in Sydney aims to bring the insurance ecosystem together for a "deep dive" relevant to the entire market.
"We don't have 100-plus speakers like many conferences do," Shanks said. Instead, the two-day event is structured around four concurrent streams - Macro, Technology, Innovation and Resilience - each designed to let delegates go deep on one theme rather than sample all four thinly. Macro covers the geopolitical and economic forces reshaping the market; Technology examines AI, cyber and data-driven decisions; Innovation looks at new products and business models; Resilience focuses on risk management, governance and regulation.
That design answers a common complaint about panel formats: Complex topics get compressed into slots too short to do them justice. It also explains the outside-industry speaker list. Prue Monument, general manager of code compliance at the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), brings direct relevance to the Resilience stream - AFCA is the body brokers and insurers already deal with on disputes, giving her session a regulatory edge with immediate practical stakes. Patrick Kidd, CEO of the Future Skills Organisation and a former military officer who ran the Invictus Games Sydney 2018, speaks to workforce capability - a challenge Deloitte has separately flagged as reshaping insurers' operating models.
Where most conferences build their agenda around panels, ANZIIF has stripped that back to one.
"We only have one panel in the whole event - on technology, on the second day as a breakout," Shanks said. Every other session is a single expert presenting on their own specialist ground.
The ambition is broad by design. Shanks wants the format to work regardless of a delegate's seniority - a high bar for a two-day programme spanning four distinct streams.
"Whether you've been in the sector five years or thirty years, you should walk away wowed," she said.
That's a different promise to the one most conferences make. Rather than segmenting content by seniority, ANZIIF is betting that genuine depth - not speaker volume - is what makes a session useful at any career stage. For brokers deciding whether two days out of the office is worth it, the pitch isn't networking volume; it's direct access to specialists like Monument and Kidd, whose work already intersects with the disputes and talent pressures brokers face.
ANZIIF's regulatory framing for the event points to why that density matters now - overlapping pressure from AI governance, operational resilience rules and climate risk means professionals need cross-disciplinary depth, not single-topic updates. ANZIIF has confirmed its full speaker lineup for the event, sourced deliberately from outside insurance to bring in thinking Shanks says "our profession does not hear often enough."
