Daniel Waller
As the pool of insurer partners shrinks, a more deliberate approach to panel construction, one that prioritises resilience alongside product fit, is becoming critical to protecting client outcomes and business stability.
Think of your insurer panel like an investment portfolio. A client who puts everything into a single stock might be fine, until they’re not. The same logic applies to how advisers structure their insurer relationships. And with consolidation accelerating across Australia’s life insurance market, that logic has never mattered more.
Insurers are merging, acquiring and restructuring in pursuit of scale and efficiency. MLC Life Insurance and Resolution Life Australasia merged late last year to form Acenda[1], creating one of Australia’s largest life insurers. Zurich announced a $415 million acquisition of ClearView[2], expected to complete later this year. And AIA absorbed the Integrity Life portfolio[3] – a business that had already exited new advice clients – completing that transfer in early 2025. Three significant moves in the space of 18 months.
None of this is inherently problematic. Bigger players can mean stronger capital bases, broader product ranges and more invested distribution infrastructure. But for advisers, fewer players means something else entirely: concentration risk is becoming one of the most underappreciated business risks in the industry.
When fewer insurers account for a greater share of adviser business, the impact of any change, whether it’s repricing, underwriting adjustments, service disruptions or strategic shifts, becomes amplified across client portfolios. In a more concentrated market, the question is no longer just which insurer you choose. It’s how exposed your clients are to that insurer’s decisions when conditions change.
Concentration risk isn’t just a business risk – it’s a client risk
Over-reliance on a single insurer can quickly become a client experience issue at scale. This becomes particularly important during periods of merger integration or structural change. Even when the long-term rationale for a merger is sound, systems need to be combined, teams restructured and service models reset[4]. During that period, advisers may see delays in underwriting decisions, inconsistent service experiences or longer claims processing times.
These issues rarely stay operational. A delayed underwriting outcome can feel like uncertainty. A slower claims process can feel like a lack of support at the very moment clients need it most. A sudden pricing change can raise questions about whether the original recommendation still holds. Over time, those experiences affect trust, retention and the perceived value of advice.
The challenge compounds when a large proportion of clients sit with the same provider. A repricing decision, a change to the service proposition, or a shift in underwriting appetite can trigger a wave of client reviews and conversations simultaneously. What might otherwise be a manageable insurer adjustment becomes a business-wide event, affecting large segments of the client base at once and increasing the operational burden on advisers.
The issue isn’t insurer quality. Even the strongest insurers experience periods of change. The issue is concentration, and how exposed your clients are to any one provider’s decisions over time. An adviser who has placed the majority of their book with a single insurer doesn’t just face a service issue when that insurer hits turbulence. They face a client trust issue, a relationship management issue and an operational issue, often simultaneously and at scale.
What matters when assessing insurer partnerships today
Adviser panels have traditionally been built around client fit, product competitiveness and operational efficiency. In a consolidating market, those criteria aren’t sufficient on their own. The question to add is a forward-looking one: how will this insurer behave over the next three to five years, and how will my clients experience that?
That means looking beyond the usual product analysis to factors such as:
- Consistency of underwriting philosophy over time, not just current appetite but how stable it has been through previous periods of ownership change or market pressure.
- Claims reputation, particularly during disruption. Claims performance in a steady state tells you something. During an integration period, it tells you much more.
- Service capacity and responsiveness during change. How has this insurer managed continuity through previous system transitions? The answer is usually visible if you ask peers who lived through it.
- Clarity of long-term strategic intent in the advised channel. Is advice central to this insurer’s growth strategy, or a distribution priority that could be deprioritised when capital allocation decisions are made?
Ownership structure is one of the most underused lenses in panel assessment. An insurer that answers to shareholders operates under different incentives to one that answers to policyholders, and those differences show up in decisions around repricing, service investment and long-term product design. Understanding those dynamics, whether the insurer is listed, privately owned or member-owned, gives advisers a more complete picture of how a partner is likely to behave when conditions change.
A three-step lens for reviewing insurer relationships
- Look beneath the surface. Go beyond product and pricing to assess factors such as financial stability, ownership structure and long-term strategic intent. Consider how these elements shape decision-making over time, particularly in areas such as pricing, service investment and underwriting philosophy, and how aligned those decisions are with member or customer outcomes.
- Consider how change may play out. Think through how events such as mergers, acquisitions or shifts in capital priorities could affect service, underwriting and client outcomes. Focus on how those changes are likely to be experienced in practice, not just how they are communicated.
- Sense-check against real-world experience. Draw on peer insights to understand how insurers are performing through periods of change. Pay close attention to consistency across service, underwriting and claims, particularly when conditions are less stable.
Diversification enables better client outcomes, not just risk mitigation
Diversification is often treated as a defensive move – a hedge against things going wrong. But that framing undersells it.
A well-constructed panel improves the quality of advice itself, giving advisers the flexibility to match clients more precisely to the provider best suited to their needs and risk profile, adapt as insurer settings change, and avoid forced compromises when one provider shifts position.
Different insurers bring different strengths. Larger players offer scale, capital depth and product breadth. Specialist providers bring flexibility, niche expertise and responsiveness. And member focused insurers can introduce a longer-term perspective, less influenced by shareholder return dynamics and more oriented toward pricing stability and reinvestment in service[5]. A thoughtful mix of capabilities, models and incentives, rather than simply more providers, is what creates genuine resilience.
Panels can’t be static in a market that isn’t
Consolidation will continue. So will the integration periods, product resets and strategic pivots that follow. That’s not a reason for alarm, it’s a reason for intentionality.
The advisers who stand out aren’t necessarily those with the largest panels or the most provider relationships. They’re the ones who have thought carefully about what their panel is actually exposed to, and why, who stay curious about how the market is shifting, ask harder questions of their insurer partners, and treat panel construction as a living part of their practice.
A diversified investment portfolio doesn’t just protect against loss. It creates the conditions for better outcomes. A well-constructed insurer panel works the same way.
By Daniel Waller, Head of Distribution
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