Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Investor Day. My nose is running, not because of why most people's nose run in Sydney, but because of the everybody's cold hands shaking hands with me on it. This is something that we should have probably been doing a little bit more frequently. We have, so we will just... Is it working? Oh, no, the green one, but the green one's not working. No? Can't have everything. Huh? Ah, okay. That one's not working. That one's not working, but that one is, oh, okay. Can we get them all working? Be good. Okay. Well, I should welcome the acknowledgment of country and reflect on the fact that we stand on Gadigal Land. Gadigal Land's impressive.
It's got a better-- We'd call it the Sydney Basin. It's from the Hawkesbury in the north to the Nepean at the south, and down to the Cooks River in the Nepean in the west and the Cooks River in the south. So, we're part-- The Gadigal is a part of the Eora Nation. They're the people that probably developed Sydney Cove till we came. So we'd like to acknowledge that this is Aboriginal land, and I guess it always was, it is, and I guess it will be into the future, and also pay our respects to the people who the elders that have passed and the ones that have the responsibility to today to work with us over this land, and, of course, the emerging elders.
So thanks very much, everybody. Be good if you could get all the screens to run. But, I got a bit of that thing inside me where I like paper straightened and things like that, and not having fucking screens that work pisses me off unmercifully. Okay. But I'll work with it. Okay. Good day, mate. Today is about letting you have a look at what our bench strength is. I think Stephen and I go around the world, seeing our investors and, and, and all around Australia, and you know exactly probably what we like, or you form views on what we like. Okay, it's all go now. Terrific.
And that, that means that from, when people say to me, "What's your succession like?" We look at one another as if to say, succession, we've been working on it probably since 1996. So today, I thought we'd, we'd show you some of the, key people, that run Steadfast and that, that are behind us. And, we did, a couple of years ago, really, really pay attention to succession. We went through the executive, we went through the key people, and we came up with some gaps, and we came up with some things that we had to do. And Nigel will really go through exactly how he's bringing that into fruition, and I think you'll be impressed by what, by what we've done and how we've gone forward with it.
I mean, that's—that always then says something about me. I get sick of repeating what my current arrangements with Steadfast are, because I hope people would take them down when I tell them. I said I would never resign before the 31st of December 2026, and that at 25, I mean, and that I would have to give a year's notice, so I'm actually committed till the end of 2026. So then that'll make you all say to yourselves, well, does that mean that you're gonna block Nigel, and, and then the, he—you're gonna get in the road, and you're gonna be shoving one another out of the road? Well, he can explain whether he thinks that's the case, okay? It's certainly not the case.
We're working very much, very strongly in concert to do what we've done to take this business, not to its next iteration, but to make sure that for the next 20 years, it's well versed. There's a couple of things that I want to address. Firstly, there was a lot of confusion, not in our mind, about the renewal of the CHU binder. We finalized the renewal of the binder on the 31st of March this year, and the team reached agreement with QBE at that particular time.
I must say that about nine months ago, Andrew Horton and I sat down and said, "It's not in either of our interests for this to move out of QBE and for you to move away from QBE." And what I said at that stage was, "I need to be sure, a year out from that binder, that it's secure." And so we had an agreement that we'd get it done by the thirty-first of March. We did get the agreement done by the thirty-first of March, and last week, I was able to sign an agreement the first week of April, which was a year ahead of when the, when it falls through. So that's been completed and put to bed.
From that point of view, the other thing that we get being told is that the markets prices are falling. That's not our experience. Then I want you to reflect on when we floated Steadfast and the conditions that we floated this company into, the lowest market conditions that we'd ever seen, that went on for a period of about five or six years. Ridiculously low, okay? Then you say to yourself, if you're a spreadsheet junkie, and you're sitting there going: Well, what if that drops, their EBIT will go there off. You say: How come an organization in a market which is so soft can do really great figures and compoundingly get better growth and go forward?
And the simple answer is... If you look at volume during hard markets, volume grows up very little. It goes up in small percentages. But if you look at sales, sales go up dramatically. So you make more money by keeping your portfolio intact and accretively growing a bit. When the market eases and competition comes back into the market, you sell more business because you sell to more people, because more people want to check whether their price is correct or not. So what happens in a soft market is growth comes from sales. In a hard market, growth comes from people staying with you and not going forward. So that's all I've got to say at this stage. I promise... Where are we? Wait a sec. It's a bit slow. That's me. Okay, just to run through what we'll do. Okay.
Samantha Holman's on holidays overseas. She booked the holiday two years ago, and we pulled this day on three months ago. So it was either her ruin her holiday with her husband, which was ruined by COVID and stuff like that. So she'll come in. She's recorded something, and she'll be on the line to take some questions. Then we'll have Nigel Fitzgerald. Okay. Yeah, for those who don't know, we've known one another a long time. We've done business in iterations in various... When he was running a Lloyd's syndicate, when he was working for Fairfax. So the idea to bring somebody in like him germinated with me about several years ago and took me a fair while to get him to come along.
He wanted to go and prove that he could turn AIJ, II, AIG. Oh, I better be careful on the I and the A. AIG around. It's a Freudian slip. Please don't somebody say, "Oh, why did he say IAG? Was there something we should know?" There isn't, okay? So Nigel will show you, completely and utterly, what the structure of what we're doing internally, okay? He'll show you what the paths we're going down. So that when you say to me, "What's your bench strength like?" I think you'll understand what it is. And then, of course, we'll run down Sure Shaw. Everybody asks about Sure. And then Brad's here. Where are you, Brad? Okay. He is open for questions and stuff like that.
And then, Nick, about the network, our relationship with the insurers. And also, we get asked periodically about what we do with premium funding. So Wayne Tower. Wayne? Wayne's the CEO of Accumulate. We got a lend of him from Macquarie several years ago, and Dean Firth rang me up and said, "You're not trying to get him to work for you full time, are you?" I went, "No, Dean. I figured if banks could lie to you, you could lie to banks." So I... And then Helen Telopas. What is it? Telopas, is it? Helen runs Gold Seal for us, okay?
And people looked at us when we invested in Gold Seal, and we went down a pathway of compliance and a pathway of things that we were, "Well, is that really necessary?" Okay. Have a look around at the compliance regime that we started building, what are we? 4, 5, nearly 4 years ago, okay? We started building, of course, we could foresee. And then Stephen, he only gets a 5-minute slot just to talk to you about the thing that people say is that your runway's run out, okay? Your M&A is over. There's no... What, what are you gonna do? Well, Stephen will just show you how we perceive our runway and let you make your own decisions on that. So okay, and then we'll do some questions and close.
Okay, so without further ado, welcome to the. Well, we're all on the stage, aren't we? Okay. Where is she? Where are you? Is it... Is she coming in? Okay.
Hi, everyone. I'm Samantha Holman. I'm the CEO of International at Steadfast. Firstly, let me apologize that I'm not there in person. I'm actually in Europe on a holiday with my husband and my three adult children, which was booked in long before this event was booked in. So my apologies, I'm not here in person, but I will be jumping on live from the Dolomites in Italy to answer any Q&A that might result at the end of this presentation. So all things international. Steadfast expanded internationally outside of their Australian network back in 2015 into New Zealand. And from there, it proved that our model was scalable and replicable around the world. And since the success of New Zealand and Singapore, we had had desires to also expand further afield into other areas of the globe.
We needed to actually have a focused energy on that strategic expansion initiative, and as a result, we've established a team that is focusing on international, our international expansion strategy. That's headed up by myself. I was the COO of Steadfast for the previous seven to eight years, and when Robert Kelly approached me and said: "The time is now, Sam, we really want to focus on the international, and we need somebody to really be dedicated to that and really drive it," and asked if I'd do the role. And of course, I jumped at the opportunity because I can see such incredible opportunity there. And so I moved out of the COO role, and I've been performing full-time the international role for the last year.
But we've been dabbling in all things USA for a good, good 12 months plus before that. It's actually nice to have that dedicated focus now on this international expansion strategy. But of course, we needed to establish a really great team to support what we're doing there, and we've brought in Nick McKee, who is actually an Australian guy who lived and worked for 23 years in New York. He has held vast roles from insurance industry into the technology side of Insurtech as well, and will be an incredibly valuable asset to the team, US resident and Australian resident. He is located back here in Australia now and working alongside myself and Eimear McKeever, who's our CFO of International.
She's been at Steadfast for over 11 years, underling to Stephen Humphrys, being groomed to start taking on a CFO role, and the international is an exciting part of this organization opportunity for her to be involved as well. So that's the core team at the moment, of course, with expanding out to utilizing other expertise within the Steadfast group at the moment, and, working hand in hand with our CEOs located across all of our international jurisdictions. So international, what is our responsibility? What is our remit? It's basically everything outside of Australia. So it's New Zealand, it's Singapore, it's London, it's Germany, and it's the USA. So out of those five geographies that we have responsibility for, two of those businesses are businesses that service our networks, and the other three are actually broker networks, exactly the same as our Australian network.
What we've developed here, we've replicated that into other jurisdictions. Now, I'm really excited to be part of all of this now because I have been at Steadfast for 24 years. I think I was the second employee here, and I've actually had a hand in setting up all of these geographies. So even though my remit wasn't international, I assisted setting up New Zealand and Singapore. I did the deal in Unison Steadfast in Germany, assisted the London set up, and did the deal in the US. So I've actually been across all of these from the beginning. It now just falls into my total remit to now develop those strategies out and grow those areas of international responsibility.
So if I jump straight into it, I'll start with the two businesses that aren't the networks first, the businesses that we have located internationally that serve our networks and our businesses. And the first one is Steadfast Placements. Steadfast Placements is an operation located with teams in both Australia and also in London. Steadfast Placements is an experienced team of wholesale placement brokers, which are part of the Steadfast Group. So they basically assist all of our members in our networks that are placing large limit, high value, complex risks within the U.K. market. So we've established an office over there in London, which is a Lloyd's of London broker, registered broker, and we've got trading agreements with 70+ different markets there in the U.S.
What it allows is, it allows our networks in Australia and New Zealand, when they cannot find markets in Australia to place business for their clients, they can go into our Steadfast Placements operation in London, and we can try and place those risks into alternate markets outside of their regions. So it's proved really successful. It's helped our brokers be able to keep their clients and place those international, more complex risks. We also place business into the Australian market, so if there's complexity in the Australian market that it suits Australia rather than London, we will place it into the Australian market as well. It's a service to assist our brokers when they struggle to find markets elsewhere. But we're seeing this as an unbelievable opportunity for ISU, our USA network as well, to now place business directly into our Lloyd’s of London.
So we actually see our London strategy growing. We see our business in London growing, and we're working on a strategy in the next 12 months to achieve that. I think our next business unit to discuss is Unison Steadfast. Unison Steadfast is a broker network, but it's not traditionally the broker network as we know it in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the U.S. So Unison Steadfast is a group of global general insurance brokers, who are all independent brokers, but offer multi-jurisdictional coverage. For example, if you are a broker in Australia and you've got a client that has international business with an office in Spain and an office in France, you legally cannot place that business in Spain and France.
You need to have the ability to call on a network to be able to have brokers in those regions and geographies place that part of the business. We went into a 60% stake of Unison Steadfast, which used to be called Unison Brokers. With our 60% majority stake, we changed the name and started to get a global brand with out into the global market, and it was Unison Steadfast. It's done two things for us. It's allowed our brokers in Australia and New Zealand, our network, that ability to not turn down clients with international business. We've had over 700 referrals go forward and backward between the two networks to help brokers place business, which has just been phenomenal.
But we've also had that ability to change that name from Unison Brokers to Unison Steadfast and create that global brand as a starting point. We have three of Steadfast, including myself, sit on the supervisory board of that organization, and it is very much a medium to long-term strategy. We will keep the remit of that network as it is at the moment. There's about 270 brokers in the network across about 120 different geographies. We will keep it as a multi-jurisdictional placement facility. But we'll, we... You know, there's obviously a lot of brokers around the world, and we'll see what can happen with that opportunity.... Now, if I jump onto the broker networks, New Zealand.
New Zealand was our first foray out of the Australian market, and it's proved a really great business for us. It's proved to us that the model that we have is a great model. It's not anywhere else in the world, and the success of going into the New Zealand market has proved that for us and been the catalyst, in all respect, of expanding into other geographical regions. So if we look at New Zealand, you know, New Zealand was set up in 2015. We've now got 66 brokers in that network. We've got GWP of about AUD 800 million at the end of calendar year 2023. We've got our MGAs starting to get a real presence over there in the market.
We've got four MGAs that have entered the market in New Zealand, and we definitely have strategic plans to develop that out further. We have incredible buy-in and support in the New Zealand market. We've been received really well over there and what we offer as distribution. We have 19 different insurers and underwriting agency partners and two premium funders supporting us. Supporting us and our members, supporting us with professional service fees that they're paying, and seven of the insurer partners are utilizing those agreed Steadfast wordings that we've put out into the market to benefit the members and their clients. We've also introduced the SCTP in that market. We've got five partners supporting BizPack.
Yes, it appears it's only one product, but BizPack has six different lines under it that you can write a certain element of those on an individual basis as well. SCTP is crucial for ongoing success in New Zealand, and it's proved really valuable. The other technology platform that we have that is just proving to be sensational is Insight, our agency management system, bespoke software that we have available. We have 57 out of the 66 brokers in New Zealand utilizing that platform, which is incredible. And both of those technologies are also proving to be incredible, not only attraction, but retention of members coming into our network as well. It's got quite the buzz out in the NZ market of the value of now being a Steadfast broker member.
Of course, with trapped capital, we have six equity investments in brokers, which has been done by the Steadfast Group, with another couple that we've also done as investments, which we've tucked into existing members there. So what's the future focus and future opportunity for NZ? Obviously, to grow that network more. Sure, it's a smaller network than Australia, but it's a really great network and a great industry down there. So we want to grow that network. We want to grow our partners. We want to grow that product range as well. We definitely want to develop new capacity in markets.
New Zealand has been experiencing a little bit of a, a sort of shrinking of certain markets and certain products, and we see that as a real opportunity for MGAs of Steadfast to come into that market. You know, as I mentioned, we already have four, but, you know, we're definitely looking at more that we can bring in over the years. SCT expansion, I think I've just mentioned, but it will actually be a really crucial factor of the continued success of New Zealand. We see that as a incredible tool, creating amazing efficiencies and really attracting people, not just member, broker members, but also partner, insurer partners, wanting to do business with us. So we see that as a really great element of our continued success and growth in New Zealand.
Of course, trapped capital, we will continue to support the succession planning and business needs of our network brokers through Steadfast equity interest in those members and compliance, support for members also. In New Zealand, they're undergoing a new regime of some conduct of financial institution requirements, which is gonna be implemented in March 2025. So we want to help support our members with that compliance and training requirements to meet those new needs going forward next year. Singapore. New Zealand was the catalyst. Singapore was the next one in 2017. Singapore is a conservative market, it is a smaller market, and you need to do your dues in that time. We've been there for seven years, and we really feel like we're at the point now where we're hitting our straps. We've earned that trust, we've earned that reputation.
We've earned that we're not coming into that market, and if we're not making squillions of money, we're bailing in an instant. That's not what we're about in the Asian market. We had desire and dreams to come into Asia, but we chose Singapore as our first destination to expand into. It's like us. It's really highly regulated and legislated, and it made an environment that we were very comfortable to go into and open in Asia. We have 30 brokers in the network in Asia. We have strong buy-in from partners there as well. There's 9 insurer partners, all paying professional service fees and using the agreed Steadfast wordings. Steadfast Underwriting Agencies also has a foray with one that's operational already into the Singapore market. And trapped capital, we have two equity investments in...
that we've done with two of our members, and we'll obviously keep continuing to look at those opportunities going forward. So what's our future growth plans in Singapore? So we obviously, same as New Zealand, we want to grow that network, we want to grow the partners, we want to grow the products. The more distribution we have there, the better the opportunities that come our way. And of course, we want to expand an employee benefits Steadfast offering that we launched in June last year. It was a bespoke wording of nothing that's in the market at the moment, and we've done it in conjunction with QBE. We actually led the charge and got them to partner with us. It's proving to really gain traction, and again, it's also proving to be an attraction tool.
We've had a couple of members approach us to join the network just so they can get access to this bespoke product. So we're hoping to continue to roll that out and see future growth and expansion via that product. Trapped capital is also another one, same as New Zealand and in Australia. You know, it's that succession planning and offering that we can have, moving forward to cement those brokers into our networks and continue to help them grow. And of course, compliance services is the other one. We have a great offering where we conduct compliance services at a fee, and it has been growing and growing in the amount of members who have been wanting to utilize that service. So that brings me to the USA.
And the USA is our newest baby, our newest addition, and it's a very exciting opportunity for us. We've had a desire to expand into the US for a number of years, and Robert and myself were looking into it quite seriously until COVID hit. And then when COVID hit, we decided to pull back for a couple of years because you can't do business and build relationships when you can't be face-to-face in front of everybody. So we've picked it up, hence the new role, and in October last year, we acquired 100% of an agency network called ISU Group in the United States. It's been an exciting opportunity for us, which I will delve into, but I'll just give you a little bit of background information on ISU.
So it was established first back in 1979, ISU Insurance Agency at that time, and they morphed into another area of their business, a second stream in 2000, which is the insurance network. That's the part of the business we've bought. The whole business, but that's the part of the business is very much simpatico with what we how we started here in Australia with our network, Steadfast, originally. It is one of the largest and most reputable insurance agency networks in the U.S., and it is a network of independent agents. So they're still independent, but just like the ethos of Steadfast, they've all joined together to use the power of their gross written premium to create better deals and access to carrier relationships. That is 100% what ISU is about.
It is about what Steadfast was when we first started. That need to still have independent businesses that are all competitors, but to come together under that one umbrella of gross written premium, and that one umbrella is ISU Group. They all have access to carriers that we have relationships with and deals with on products and product access, and that is the sole rationale of ISU at the moment. We believe there's an incredible opportunity to do what we've done with Steadfast and build that out further. If you look at the culture of ISU, the philosophy is to help independent agents thrive. Their catchphrase is, "Independence, strength and united." They have a really great quality management team that we're continuing to work with, who will all remain post-acquisition.
So we didn't buy into ISU because it was a broken network that we thought we could come in and fix. Actually, quite the opposite. We wanted to go into the US market with an already really reputable and established broken network. A broken network and distribution that was strong, with an executive team that was strong, with carrier relationships that was strong, and a reputation and ethos that matched what Steadfast is all about, which is helping those independent agents thrive and grow through the size and scale that we can create and the insurance and product solutions that we can deliver. So we were simpatico in the way we operate. We just operate on other sides of the world, and I would have to say they're us pre-listing.
They're us before we decided to go and raise capital to be able to do more of the things we needed to grow this business, and that's where we see the opportunity with the ISU Group in the USA. So if you just have a little bit look at the average member in ISU, you know, just to give you a little bit of context. You know, their annual revenue is about $3 million. Their book is 75 commercial, 25 personal, and their clientele, generally, they deal in that small commercial and personal market, which is sort of categorized as clients' business under $25 million in sales, which is revenue. If you look at the network as a whole, the network has 43 employees. There's 233 members.
They're located across 43 states, but they're licensed to operate across all the 50 states, which is another benefit of belonging to the ISU network, is that you have those opportunities to deal in the states you might not necessarily be licensed in, but the ISU Group are. So it's another benefit to belong to it. If you look at the ISU network, at the moment, they control about $6 billion in premiums generated by the members, of which about $4.8 billion is in the P&C premium market. And they have relationships, contracted relationships, with about 75 different insurer carriers with contracts with them. So that's just a snapshot of who ISU are. That brings me on to the market opportunity in the US.
You know, we believe that there's an incredible opportunity there for expansion into this market, and it will present us as Steadfast, that opportunity to deliver our strategy and unique business model to a significantly larger market. If you look at their population alone, their population is 12.5 times that of Australia. So you don't have to have a lot of market presence. You could have 1%, in that market and still have a vast population and opportunity with that, with that small market share. But it's not just the population. Like, you know, if you look at the industry itself, you know, the U.S. insurance broker and agency market size is approximately $213 billion, versus $24 billion in Australia. So it is vastly bigger than that, than us.
Plus, there's 40,000 different independent property and casualty agents and brokers in the U.S., and there's still a lot of them that are still acting as independent. They're not part of a network. Well, they're not being swallowed up by private equity. So there is still a lot of independent agents in that market that we could utilize and bring into the ISU group. And of course, 50% of the agencies in ISU are using—in America as well, not just in ISU, they're using wholesale brokers and MGAs for their commercial lines. Now, that also creates a really great opportunity for Steadfast with their MGAs and expanding into those markets and those alternate insurer carrier markets as well. So that's sort of the market dynamics that support the opportunity in the U.S.
Combine that with stable pricing that we believe will be happening in that market, and also our research that has indicated that the US and the agency and insurance market is very, very much behind us in our technology and digitalization in Australia. So we believe there's incredible opportunity for also our software platforms to be able to see what we could do in the US with that. Of course, all of this is an exciting opportunity and exciting market opportunity, but we do need to state that while it is an exciting opportunity, the complexity of the market dynamics requires a long and detailed evaluation period. You know, we're, we're not going into this guns blazing. We're going into this with a really considered approach of what could be done in the US.
We will evaluate the market properly, we will do our appropriate R&D, and we will take the time before we launch into the US market with all of the opportunities that we believe exist. I think these charts just support some of that market opportunity and what I was just talking about, you know, that bottom one supporting sort of that stability in the pricing, and that top one's really supporting the growth, the median sort of organic growth for brokers in the US, and it's been stable, and it's risen, and it's been consistent. So we've looked at all of these factors when entering into the US market. And the last sort of market research opportunity that we're looking at is obviously on the M&A side. You know, we have our trapped capital program.
We are known here already as being really established and astute at taking equity investments in insurance brokers and in MGAs. We will review the potential opportunity to do that in the U.S. as well. I think two things that are really helping play into that opportunity is the fact that although there's been unbelievably robust M&A opportunity and activity that's happened in the U.S. over the last 15 years, and it's really, really ramped up, you know, there still is no player in the middle market space that has significant market share, and that middle market is the space we're gonna be playing in. So we feel like there is an opportunity there for us to come in with our trapped capital program.
I think the other thing that's really exciting for our potential trapped capital program is that, you know, owner-operator model that we have and that we're so successful here in Australia and New Zealand and Singapore with. That ability for us to, you know, not come in as a PE firm and buy 100% of the business and rip out expenses and sell it on in three years' time. We are a partner in growth and a partner in profit to our members, and we... That proposition in the US of just buying a percentage of a business, working with that business short term, medium term, long term, to grow that business and partner with them in that growth, is what we're all about. And that proposition isn't something that is in the US market at the moment.
So we really believe that's a point of differentiation that could also work in our favor and provide us with a potential opportunity of trapped capital in the U.S. So when you consider all of those market opportunities, and we now know what we're playing with in the U.S. with that acquisition of ISU Group, we've now used this last six months to really get under the hood of that business and see what that business is about, to further evaluate the U.S. market and see you know, what the opportunities are, and what we have in our toolkit already at Steadfast that we could utilize, export, or what we could consider to even innovate down the track. And we've come up with what we're calling our vision for the U.S. and for ISU Group.
And that vision is to be the network of choice for independent insurance agencies in the United States, delivering comprehensive services and solutions to support agency perpetuation, competitiveness, and growth, while managing successful long-term strategic partnerships with carriers and other market participants. And to achieve that, we've broken our strategic initiatives into three core pillars, and they are: grow our membership, expand services and solutions, and evolve our organization. So if I just take you through each of those briefly, the first strategic pillar is grow our membership. Yes, we have 233 independent agents in the network at the moment. We believe that we can expand that and grow those numbers. But what we will always keep forefront in our mind is quality over quantity.
So we're not going in there to mass market and just grow our numbers for the sake of saying we are the largest network in the USA. That's not what we're about, and it's not our strategy. Our strategy is to retain the quality, which is what we do here in Australia, and New Zealand, and Singapore as well, to keep the quality of agent. There's a very rigorous vetting process to get into the ISU network. A lot of agents are rejected. So it's exactly like Steadfast. They pick the ones that are gonna keep their reputations strong. So we will keep that, retain the integrity of the vetting process, keep the reputation strong, but we will grow the network. We will grow that through a number of ways. We will let ourself do the talking on our behalf.
We will have an enhanced value proposition that Steadfast will bring by exporting and expanding some of our insurance solutions and products and services, and our expertise that we have of what we've developed already in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Like I said, we are a good 10, 12 years ahead of where they're at in the US in that insurance market with our technology, with our distribution, with our services and solutions. So we will look at all of that value proposition, which we believe will assist bringing new members into the network. We will also refresh and revamp that value proposition messaging. We will refresh and revamp the website as part of supporting that messaging. So there's numbers of things that we're going to be doing to grow that network over time. We will also look at acquisitions and partnerships.
You know, there might be a few, you know, a few other smaller networks around that we could look at also partnering with or, or acquiring if, if that made sense. We would be open to all of those initiatives and would evaluate all those initiatives. Of course, the key is also, obviously, you need to enhance your retention of membership. With the PE market being so volatile in the U.S., and attacking and purchasing a lot of members, of ISU and agents in general, we wanna make sure we protect our patch, and we believe that that value proposition and implementing trapped capital to keep succession in that business and keep them in the network is what we can do to just not only retain the numbers but also grow the membership numbers.
Our second key strategic pillar is expand our services and solutions, and I think this is a really massive one for Steadfast. With everything that we've developed in our intel, intel and our toolkit over the years of what we can now put into the US market. And of course, all of these things will be an evaluation process, but these are the things we've just listed as items that we will be considering and reviewing. And I think, you know, the first one and the biggest one is, you know, it's market access. It's those carrier relationships. You know, ISU have incredibly strong carrier relationships already with over 75 contracts and building them. You know, it's a little bit different to the Australian market, where Steadfast are known to have quite a big global presence of global providers.
In ISU at the moment, in the USA, because they're state-by-state scenario, they have a lot of regional players that we need to consider to service the needs of members in those geographies of states as well. But what we can do is we can build and develop on those carrier relationships that ISU already have, but we can also build on the relationships that Steadfast has globally and start asking them to look at us as a global powerhouse. And could we start bringing them into the carrier space of relationships that support ISU network, and what we can do further from there? The other area of market access that we could be considering is wholesale business and also business into our London placement.
So at the moment, with the industry in the U.S., there's a lot of carriers due to affordability there and carrier profitability. They're retreating out of certain geographies, and they're retreating out of certain product lines. So the biggest call-out from the ISU network is, if you can help us with market access and carrier relationships, they would love us pretty much and help them build and grow their business and service their client needs. Now, we have that opportunity to consider what we can do there in the wholesale space. You know, do we consolidate and rationalize and work with a couple of key players there? Do we look at doing something on our own in that space? All of these things need to be evaluated and considered. But we also have the option of Steadfast Placements in London.
It's an alternate market that if the US brokers cannot place it in the US, we are now providing them with direct access into our London Steadfast Placements operation, and they're reviewing and considering and placing the business back on behalf of the ISU network. So we see that as an opportunity, and opened that up to the network just recently, already. MGAs is that other opportunity I mentioned. You know, there, there is definitely a trend, not only here in Australia, but in the US, there is more and more usage of MGAs than there's ever been before, compared to just going the traditional carrier option, and we see that as definitely an option for Steadfast.
Whether it is setting up our own MGAs in the US, whether it is starting our own, whether it is taking equity in one that's over there, we will again evaluate and consider all options moving forward of what that could mean. The other is trapped capital. I've been through trapped capital, but trapped capital will help us retain and give us a competitive edge to other networks, for members to join our network. So we see that as a possible opportunity for Steadfast to take equity investments- in independent agents in the US as well. Our technology solutions, I've mentioned, you know, the SCTP and Insight, the technology is way behind in the US. They do have their own, ISU do have their own quote and bind system. You know, we've done a full review of that.
We'll look at what we could do to build on that versus what we have with the SCTP, and we'll do a full market evaluation of the players in the US and whether it made sense for us to also consider bringing our technologies into the US. You know, another consideration could be our premium funding company. Should we transport that to the US? That's another consideration we could take. Preferred arrangements. You know, could we help, like what we do here with Steadfast Business Solutions, could we help with that back office processing and side that could create efficiencies for network members and agencies, allowing them more time to focus on sales and growth? That's something we will consider as far as preferred arrangements as well. There's also an opportunity on the health and benefits side.
ISU have quite strong carrier relationships on all of the P&C side of the members' business, business, but not on the EB side. So we see that as an opportunity to partner and create partner opportunities and relationships to start capitalizing on that EB business that's flowing through the network as well. And of course, we'll also consider down the track, other business solutions. You know, we provide Steadfast brokers over 160 different products and solutions in, in Australia. You know, whether that's marketing support, you know, business planning, all of those things we'll consider down the track as well of implementing into ISU. So I think the third and final pillar is a really important one, and that's evolve the ISU organization. You know, it's a small, lean team, great team.
We're working really harmoniously together, which is brilliant, but we just need to make sure we put really stable frameworks in place to make sure we have a great base to continue to grow from. So we're just reviewing all of the structures, roles, responsibilities, determining how we're working between our international team, you know, myself, their CEO, their teams. So we're just putting really a lot of structure into the place. We're identifying the talent management there, making sure we're supporting talent management. We're also implemented Steadfast resources into ISU.
We know we're, we're across some of their people and culture initiatives, we're across their marketing and communication initiatives, legal initiatives, and of course, very importantly, we're implementing operational and financial management into the organization as well to make sure we're meeting all of Steadfast's stringent ASX requirements, and we're happy with how everything's unfolding in that space. So I think, you know, just to sort of wrap up the strategy and the priority areas of what we're going to be doing, you know, over this sort of next three-year identified strategic process that will roll on each year. You know, if we look at where we really need to focus our energies, because we, we believe the opportunities are vast, but we've got to make sure we're really focusing our energies on what's really going to turn the needle and make the most impact.
That is these four areas. It is that market access. It's what can we do to grow those carrier relationships, the London placements, the MGAs, the wholesale business. If we can deliver on the issues that ISU members are having at the moment in market access, then we can really show that the rubber hits the road, and our success will be, you know, born on how we react to the market solutions in the US and what we can deliver to combat that and be a leading initiative and innovator of insurance agency networks in the US. Obviously, I mentioned, too, that network growth. Let's grow that network.
Let's build the network to be strong, grow the distribution, and with all of that distribution, that also brings incredible opportunities our way, and that we've found that in Australia and New Zealand and Singapore, and we'll replicate that same ethos in the US. Of course, agency perpetuation, I mentioned, trapped capital, opportunity for Steadfast to potentially invest in, in insurance agents over there, but also to retain them in the network. We believe our offering of trapped capital is like nothing else structured in the US market being offered at the moment. And of course, the technology solutions, that opportunity of us being so progressed in the way that we're transferring business between insurers, clients, and agents is second to none, and we'll consider what we can do there to build that and transport that into the US market.
So I guess in summary of the U.S., you know, it is a potential future runway of opportunities for Steadfast to capitalize. That's how we see it. It is a really exciting opportunity, but it is a very considered opportunity for us. We won't be going in guns a blazing. We will be going in with full R&D on everything that we're doing, and we will consider all of these strategic opportunities that I just mentioned, and we will look at what we can deliver and what makes sense going forward. So I think, you know, just in summary, we will continue to evaluate everything in the U.S. and that ISU opportunity. It is progressing really well at the moment, financially, strategically, and operationally, so we're really pleased. It's only been six months since we've bought it, but we've made really great headway, and we're making...
We're working very harmoniously with the team over there, and we're really happy with the growth that's been displayed in the business so far. So most importantly, and really pleasingly, is that we've had really great positive support from members, carriers, and staff. You know, when you buy a business, you're basically doing the due diligence on paper and finances. So it was really, really pleasing for us when we bought the company on the Friday, the sixth of October, we were over there on Tuesday, the tenth of October, and over that fortnight, we did a series of four regional meetings with all of the members, and staff and carriers. They all went into that meeting with a little bit of trepidation as to who this Australian firm is and what changes are they going to make, and how is this gonna impact me?
Walking out of those meetings with great excitement of what the partnership and opportunity meant for them. You know, the carrier functions afterwards, the reports back from them were: "You chose the right network to do business with. They are reputable, they are professional, and what they say they do, they deliver on and they do." So from our perspective, there was 100% no buyer's remorse. It was a great organization we'd bought into, and we've only just come back from the ISU annual conference, where we got to be in front of all the members, staff, and carriers again. And again, we received overwhelming support of what we're doing. So that gives us a great foundation to continue to move forward in this partnership and grow this opportunity.
Of course, I've mentioned before, the potential is vast, but we are approaching this in a very considered way. It is definitely a long-term strategy for Steadfast. So I hope that's given you enough information and an update on international. We're really excited by the opportunities ahead, and I'll hand over to you for any Q&A. Thank you.
Okay, we've got one. Who got... Is that you, Sid? Okay. Oh, good. Okay. We've got one from Sid. Yeah.
Hi, it's Sid Parameswaran from J.P. Morgan , that presentation. Question, just a... If you could, perhaps just describe the economics of all the regions that you're in. Where are most of the revenues? And if we look forward over the next three years, where are you going to be deploying capital between those three regions? And just, you know, how to think about what the business might look like in terms of revenues in three years versus where we are now.
Yeah. Hi. Look, I think the vast majority of members in California, that's where ISU sort of initiated originally in the state of California. But in saying that, I'd say the members are spread really quite evenly across the US in relation to, you know, on the Northeast Coast in New York, there's some larger members there, more profitable members. So we're not actually gonna focus our energies in any particular region. We're focusing our energies on ISU USA, across the USA, to make sure we're strong in all areas of that country. So there is no dedicated particular interest that we're showing. We're gonna grow the network across all regions and support the network across all regions.
It is a three-year strategy that we are looking at, and at the moment, we're not looking at what the revenues are going to be in three years. We're looking at what is possible in the regions, and we're evaluating and all of those opportunities to see what we can deliver in this three-year strategic focus that we have.
Sorry, Sam, I actually meant just, New Zealand versus the US, et cetera. I presume most of the efforts over the next three years are in the US. Is that right?
Yes.
So capital-
Sorry if I misunderstood that. Yes, the main game is definitely the US.
Yeah.
The main game is definitely the US. That is where we believe the greatest opportunity is. In saying that, we will also be looking at expanding in London. We see an opportunity to expand our business there. New Zealand is a great opportunity, and of course, Singapore is slow and steady, but we won't take our eye off the game there. But USA is the main focus where most of our attention's being directed for the next couple of years.
Yeah, and, and just that question on economics, how much capital, how much incremental capital are you gonna put in? Can you talk about the economics of...
The USA, we're gonna see what opportunities present to us, and if we think they're viable opportunities to move forward, whether that's a M&A scenario of, of members or whether it's, MGA, or whether it's transporting one of our MGAs, all of that will be reviewed, but there will be no, there's no predefined amount of capital that's being put into what we're doing in the US, until we have the full picture of what makes the most sense.
I mean, the development of ISU, it pays its own way. It's got its own infrastructure, so we don't have to tip any capital into it. It doesn't need capital support from that point of view. Hang on. Yep, there's two up here. Here you go.
Thanks. Jason here from Taylor Collison. Sam, appreciate your time on your family holiday. I just had one question: In respect of the carrier agreements, can you maybe talk to the additional carrier agreements you've been able to struck up in the early days and the benefits that will provide to the ISU network?
Sure. So currently, there's about 75-80 carrier relationships that ISU already had with the existing carriers. They don't necessarily have the relationships with the global players, like the AIGs, the Allianz, the Chubb. So we do see that that's an opportunity that we could bring those relationships into the network and create a contract with them. What we have done, though, is through various different avenues and relationships that we might already have. For example, ISU didn't have a strong relationship with Cincinnati, who were a great carrier partner in the US. Robert had a contact in on Cincinnati through the ACORD board. We've organized a week's trip where we went and visited 7 different carriers, and already there's now a relationship starting to be formed with Cincinnati, with Great American.
All of that came out of that trip with learning the benefits of now ISU being associated with Steadfast and what opportunity that could give us. We've now got more carriers interested in that proposition. We will definitely be developing that over the next 12 months.
I guess, with AmTrust, too. AmTrust was doing a little bit of business with them, but knew of us, in terms of, the relationships we'd had with AmTrust in London and the success we'd had with them supporting us in the London market, and were most keen for us to actually, look at the, MGA side of what we're bringing in as well. And then, of course, Great American were in its-- was in its infancy stage and had done a lot of research, Sam, hadn't they? And when we met with Great American, that was- that's something that's reached, reached fruition. But we're, we're back there, what, in another month, aren't we? doing the balance of them.
I mean, it was an interesting scenario to go to Chubb, and ISU was sort of a small player with Chubb. When we met with Chubb in New York, we met with met Chubb in New York, as the greatest supplier of GWP to Chubb in Australia and New Zealand. So we lift up the level of interest that carriers have when we've got the backing of it.
Kieran Chidgey from Jarden. Just a couple of questions. Sam, you talked about a very considered approach in terms of, you know, continuing to expand in the US. Just wondering if you can give us some feeling around the time horizon, around some of the key steps, like taking equity stakes within the ISU, ISU network. Is that 6 months, 12 months, multiple years away?
Propositions open now. We actually spoke to the ISU network, on what that meant really early on in October, when we sort of said, "This is Steadfast, and this is our offering." But again, we addressed it at their regional conference in April last year and said, "We are open for business. If you guys are looking for a different proposition to what's currently in the US, you've now learned about Steadfast. You've... We've, you know, we've gained your trust. If you wanted to have skin in the game, stay in your business, but have capital put into your business to help you grow, then we are your partner to start looking at." Now, we've had a few members already contact us in relation to that.
They.. Some of those members were already down the road, quite established down the road in selling their businesses, so it didn't come to fruition. But Nick McKee, who's the COO of the international team, he's been actually across various different areas of the US, visited 37 or so different members already in their offices, talking about the Steadfast proposition and touching on trapped capital to see what is there to develop in the future. So that is already open for business.
The London market access into Steadfast Placements is already open for business, and all of the other propositions, like the technology in particular, the development of carriers' relationships, is already on the table, but we'll be looking at things like that technology further. We've got an MGA we're already considering to transport into the US. So a lot is happening, but there's a lot of evaluation and behind-the-scenes requirements to enter the U.S. So more and more will be divulged, but things are happening now.
For instance, on the technology, they spent three-quarters of a million dollars with Coverforce. I see Jim Angelos up the back. Hi, Jim, how are you? Not your Coverforce or our Coverforce now, Jim, as I should say. That was based on basically the premise of how the client training platform worked, and but adapting it more for the way the US market works. So we were sort of forerunners there. They didn't take equity in Coverforce because it's a start-up, and wants to float, and we're probably going to ride the next tech bubble or bust, whatever it's going to be. So that we're working alongside that guy.
We're helping him with what our technology is, but we don't need to... For 70% of the transactions that ISU does, we don't need to bring in any of our technology just yet to do that, but we need to support the Coverforce proposition. I mean, I mean, Nick, you've spent a bit of time there. Have you got, in regards to what they feel about the potential of having a friendly buyer from our point of view?
Hi, everyone. It's a very different proposition. Certainly, trapped capital, that is, it's long term. It's not like the private equity solution, as Sam mentioned. They get multiple calls a day from private equity and, you know, every one of the 50 backed, private equity-backed consolidators in the US today. So there's a lot of options, obviously, on that front. But there's no one providing that long-term capital solution that we do that really is focused around building a business and perpetuating a business, handing it on to the next generation, bringing in new producers, all of those sort of things. So that's been a great conversation. On that front, so really, this is we're in the building trust period. They don't know us, right? They know us from a conference, they know us from regional conferences.
But getting out and actually in their offices and understanding their businesses, helping them with their businesses, having strategic conversations, has been very key to that. And then we're taking a measured approach around, we'll see what comes out, but that's been fantastic reception so far.
Just a second related question, maybe Rob or Steven, from a group point of view, how do you think about capital allocation in terms of, you know, pursuing step-ups in the US compared to further investments here?
Yeah, I think. You hear? Okay, great. Thank you. So look, capital allocation is, you know, let's get this context. US investment we've made is circa 2% of our earnings at the moment, okay? And our first aim is to develop the existing proposition further. So in the very short term, we're not going to. I don't see us moving the needle significantly there, particularly when you've got a whole range of opportunities domestically that we can execute on.
I think it's more of a medium to a longer-term strategy. The allocation of capital, percentage-wise, et cetera, it will really come down to have we got the right cultural, business strategic rationale, let alone a financial operation. You know, we want to get EPS accretion on each acquisition; therefore, that does put us in a particular space, as you know, in Australia, on multiples that we are seeking to, you know, be similar to. So it's got to tick those buckets first, and if it does, then we start moving forward.
But to do what we want to do, it's got its own capital base, its own revenue stream, and we're just— So we're not tipping any money in to run it or to do what we've just said here. It would only be if we do a trapped capital. Yeah.
Hi, I'm Scott Hudson from MST. Samantha, can I understand why Unison Steadfast has been sort of put on the back burner? It seemed like the strategy that you're deploying in the US is, would have been, is replicable across Unison Steadfast, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Can I just understand why?
For sure. Both the networks are incredibly different propositions. So Unison Steadfast is all about our network of brokers across the globe that rely on one another to place business for their clients that have international geography. So if you're, you know, the broker in Germany and you've got a business also in Spain, you can't write the business. You need a broker in Spain. The purpose of those brokers belonging to that network is they purely wanted to belong to that network for that purpose. So in the original early days, when we did pitch the proposition of utilizing the power of GWP and all coming together, they weren't wanting that out of the Unison Steadfast network.
What that has done for us, though, has given us an incredible global brand, which allowed us that platform into operating in the US, plus it gave us the opportunity for all of our network brokers in Australia and New Zealand to be able to write business for international clients. So from that point of view, it's been a total success. But when we were entering into the US, and we really wanted to duplicate the success of the model and business strategy that's very unique that we have at Steadfast in the US, we had to choose a network that was like us, that was a network of independent insurance agents that have chosen to come together under the umbrella of one GWP to have those carrier market access and opportunities. That's the really core difference between Unison Steadfast and ISU.
ISU are a network who have already come together to do what we want to do at Steadfast, whereas Unison Steadfast have a very different purpose and focus.
Yeah, and I think to that point, Scott, that in the ISU network, only 30% of their sales go through the master agencies that they've got. So it's very similar to Steadfast, where the other 70%, they put it wherever they want to do. It's almost identical to the conundrum we found back there in the early 1990s in Australia, where they were all doing different things. And what we were able to do with Steadfast in April 1996 was to say, "If you come together, we will make something strong." Now, that's the proposition that they're pitching to them at the moment, and that was the thrust of what we did at their conference. I said, Sam carried that, was to say, "You know what?
Have a look at what you would look like if 70% of your business went through our master agencies, and the cost to do that for Unison Steadfast is nil, okay? It's just a matter of them agreeing to... There's no huge cost in anything to do with technology. It's literally, that's not quite as simple, changing the code that you put in when you place your business to an area. So from our point of view, we wanna make sure that, now, apart from all the things that Sam's just articulated, we wanna make sure that we change that perspective around so that maybe 70% of their business goes through the master agency. If we were to do that today, we would triple our revenue without increasing any costs whatsoever contained within ISU.
Okay, thanks. And then just a second question. I can't remember the stat, but it seems like a lot of the ISU business is placed through wholesale brokers. Does that mean, you would need to invest in a wholesale broker to, I guess, capture the value chain?
Not necessarily. That could be an option, but what we could do is, at the moment, we have ISU members dealing across a huge variety of wholesalers. We could look at what we have done here in Steadfast, which is consolidate some of those players. So we could have discussions and agreements that instead of ISU members placing business across, you know, 35 different providers, what if we brought that back to two or three or four and started directing business into those that we have partnerships with and providing better service, but providing better opportunities and revenue back into our members and back into ISU?
That would be the first point of call that we would look in, was that consolidation piece, before we would look at whether, if that wasn't to work or another opportunity, whether we would go into our own wholesaler. But first and foremost, the business opportunity is already there. We think we just need to consolidate the opportunity to make it grow.
I mean, the interesting part about that is that those wholesalers in North America have become so powerful that you virtually ring up, and you're a little guy from Tallahassee, and you wanna know if you can insure... What did you do for the guy from Baltimore, wasn't it? That he who Sam was approached to-- They couldn't get a dairy insured. We got the dairy insured for them through the London market, which was quite hard to do, but we got it done for them. So some of those wholesalers, they're actually looking, like money talks, they're looking for the agents that give them the most turnover before they give them the service. So if you don't give much turnover to them, you've almost got a-. T ake a ticket and wait for them to ring you back.
What the exciting part for these guys is how we've built stuff like that, and they're saying, "If you build something for us, we will support you as part of ISU." So interestingly, Sam, you're probably not up with it because you've been working so hard over in Europe. So, well, leaving us here, allow us to do everything here. It's great, fantastic. Enjoy your time on the Dolomites. No, she works very hard, and she we had. She said, "I'll come back, and I and do this." I said, "No, no, no.
We'll be able to do this by leaving your family intact." But the interesting part is that the Emergence has had all of its capacity increased to be able to write in North America. So the Emergence network will be the first one of our MGAs, which will start, which is reasonably simple because it's cyber. We, Emergence is the biggest cyber writer in Australia, ever. It did that in five and a half years, so we're pretty excited.
Good morning, guys, Julian from Goldman Sachs. Just a first question from me. Can you maybe just comment on what has driven just the acquisition multiples higher over the last 10 years? And then secondly, also, just expectations from here, given the sort of delayed implementation of-
It's really simple to answer: free money. If you're getting your money for nothing, then you can pay a big multiple, okay? So if people don't value their capital, and I mean, seriously, then we were seeing offers of money around the world, which were, I mean, I was frightened somebody was gonna ring up and say, "Well, we'll give you money, but you only have to give us back 99.1% of it, not 100% of it." But the money was so cheap and so free around, and the opportunities seemed vast, so the multiples blew out crazily at this particular time.
But you know, I was in London ten days ago with David Howden on a particular issue that we're working on together, and he said, "Aren't these multiples bloody bullshit, Robert?" And I said, "David, you started it," right? And he said, "Oh, well, but hang on, that was a few years ago. The market's changed dramatically from that point." And I think, as money starts to increase, the multiples will start to rationalize. I mean, it's just an equation, isn't it, Steven? I mean, it's nuts how we're seeing it. I mean, for instance, we looked at...
You've just seen, there's been some transactions done in Australia recently where people said, "we bought it, but it's not EPS accretive." Geez, so anyway, I'd hate to, I'd hate to go overboard and say, "The good news is we bought it," but there's no you're not gonna gain anything for the shareholders.
I'd hate to sit here in front of you all and say, "Yeah, we spent a lot, a lot of your money, but you're not gonna get any growth there." So I think there is some respite coming in certain sectors, and the sectors that we see the respite coming in, in multiples is probably people were gonna get 15x on a small business, say 2 years ago, 18 months ago, are now talking 12x and 13x internationally, okay? Still here, we seem to... We're completing our prep capital at 10x EBITDA in Australia.
Then just in terms of the difference between multiples in the Australian market versus multiples in the U.S. market and just the differential, what do you attribute as the drivers in terms of just the differential? Is it market structure? Is it competition?
No, I think, I mean, competition may be one part of it, but not... No, I think it's the structure of the market. When you've got various forms of capital being filled into the PE market, you know, sometimes there's long funds that have, say, "Well, okay, you can-we'll give you this, and we need it back in six years or five years' time," or something like that, then you can roll the dice if you're in a PE environment to say, "Well, okay, we'll pay more for it because we'll strip it all out, and we'll be able to package it up.
And so if we pay 15x now, by the time we strip it all out, I guess it's not too dissimilar to the businesses we bought back in 2013, at 6.9x-7.5x. Now, if you were to look at those businesses today, 10 years on or nearly 11 years on, okay? That EBITDA would be nowhere near 7.5x. It would, it would be probbly, Stephen?
At least half. So if you think we had... So just, hypothesize this: If we had 10-year fund money, and we paid 7.5x for it 10 years ago, and we had to settle now, that multiple actually is about 3.5x on today's- on the profit that those businesses are making. So I think that's the game that you do. We'll get in, we'll pay a bit more for it. We've got long money. We don't have to get pay it back for 5 years, or we've got rotation, or we can do this in 5 years. So I think that's the reason that the multiples went up, and the re- and the reason why some of the multiples are coming back, because the cost of borrowed money now, particularly out of the U.S., is horrific.
It's almost impossible to go and borrow some money and pay a high multiple for it. I hope that helps.
Thank you.
Thank you. This will be our last question, Robert.
Yep e me.
Good morning, Andrei Stadni k from Morgan Stanley. Can I ask just one question in the interests of time? Sam, you mentioned that ISU is probabl, you know, 10 years behind in terms of technology offerings versus, an analytics offerings versus Steadfast in Australia. You know, what are some of the first tools you want to bring into ISU?
Yeah, when we were looking at buying an organization, ISU, and doing all the due diligence of the U.S. market at the time, we saw an incredible opportunity for Steadfast Client Trading Platform, mainly because it is a fully developed full cycle system. So in the U.S., at the moment, they have and claim to have a lot of quote and bind systems, but it is purely that, it is purely the quote and the bind. They're unable to do the endorsements at the end or issue the certificates of currency. With the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, you can do the whole lot on one platform from the beginning to the end. In the U.S., that's not the case. You can do the quote, the bind, but you can't do alterations, endorsements, certificate of currency.
So it is, the SCTP is superior to the offerings that are currently in the US market, and that's where we see an opportunity for us to come in with our system. The other interesting point was that although we knew Insight, our agency management system, was great, and when you combine that in conjunction with the Steadfast Client Trading Platform, it makes it incredibly powerful technology solution. But we were going to be putting the Insight agency management system a little bit on the back burner behind the Client Trading Platform, until we went over there in October and started talking to all the members, and it was overwhelming in all the four different regions of the US that they really didn't like the agency management systems being offered in the US.
There's two main players, but they've got their flaws, and they were overwhelmingly asking us to bring our agency management system to the U.S. So we've now elevated that as well, and we're considering both of those technology platforms on what the best way of bringing that into the U.S. is, whether it's our systems we're gonna bring in, whether it's another system we'll build upon with our own, IP onto it. All of that's being evaluated, but the opportunity for both of those working in sympatico together is a powerful tech solution that currently does not exist in the U.S. market.
Interestingly, from the point of view of data analysis, that they're very sophisticated at ISU in terms of who does what with who and how much they make out of it, and what the loss ratio looks like, and what the profit commission should be, and they monitor that. So we don't have to rebuild our data warehouse from that point of view. We have to use the smarts that we've developed over the last 28 years, okay, and bring it in there and show them ways to move together. So it's quite powerful from that point of view.
Okay, I think that's it, Samantha. I think we're gonna let you go to bed now. And Nigel?
I know the time, but I think if everybody was really interested in what we've done in America, and we needed to socialize it with you, so I'm sorry if it dragged a bit. And also, you needed to understand Sam, okay? I've had 25 years now here putting up with it, so I know exactly what it's like, okay. She's, she's not on the line anymore.
Still with you.
I can say that. Hey, what? Oh, God.
Hi, hi, hi.
You are still there. Oh, oh, I misspoke.
Great. Actually, we don't have a timer, so let me make sure I get my phone out, so I can keep an eye on time.
I'll go.
Just cut me off. Yes, good morning, everyone. Quick introduction. I guess I've been with the business a little over a year now, a year and three months. I started on April Fool's Day, so not sure what to make of that, but, first of April, start date. Prior to Steadfast, I've been in the insurance industry about 25 years. Spent a long period of that overseas, over 10 years in the U.S. and over 5 years living in London, in the U.K. I've seen insurance from all angles: reinsurance, personal lines, commercial lines, and all geographies and all distribution types, ranging from digital, to agency, to broker, to direct to consumer. As Robert mentioned, I met Robert along the way.
I was working for a company that's not completely different to Steadfast in terms of a decentralized ethos, entrepreneurial, founder-led business in Fairfax Financial. And so when I met Robert, it was quite easy to draw parallels towards where Steadfast was going and my mission at the company that I was working for. And so struck up a relationship with Robert, where we invested in a JV together. We acquired a company here in Australia together. I've ended up selling assets to Robert. And then when I took over an Australian insurance company that was loss-making, obviously, I had distribution challenges with everybody, Steadfast, not alone, and ended up needing to go through, you know, some interesting insurer broker relationship periods with Robert.
I didn't find any... and that you kicked out some of the MGAs. I found it annoying.
So what I'm trying to say is, I guess we got to see each other in the trenches, got to see each other in all different types of guises. And, you know, when the opportunity came to join Steadfast, it was a really easy decision for me. A, I'm a proud Australian, so to be based here in Australia, working for a company with international ambitions was appealing. The decentralized business model, I've worked in a similar business model, as I mentioned, for over 10 years and saw that from all aspects. I pitched a startup to that organization, so they put capital into my startup. I ended up running a large subsidiary, and then I ended up working in group. So I saw a decentralized business model from all aspects, and really had admiration for Steadfast and what Robert was doing.
The idea of working for an entrepreneurial founder, obviously, also highly appealing, and I'm really pleased to say that I guess the working relationship that I had with Robert and the Steadfast exec prior to joining is exactly the same one that I have after joining. So Robert alluded to, sometimes we do get the question as to how do you have, you know, two people that are used to running businesses, operating side by side? And I think the answer is pretty simple, is that we have, A, a complementary skill set, but, B, Steadfast's size and breadth today means that we're both beyond busy, in a good way, you know, running our respective responsibilities within the company. So for better or worse, we actually run really well together, and so, really, really happy to be here.
I guess, where do we start? And that would be that every sort of February, April period, February, March, April, we start refreshing our three-year strategy. So we're here talking to you after a number of engagements with our exec and our board through the last three months, resetting the, the three years ahead. And, one of the first things I think is important to do is validate whether you've got the right strategy. Are we on the right track? Has anything changed? Does anything mean we need to, to alter course? We, we talk a lot about the our Kodak moment, you know, what could it be and how do we avoid it? And, you know, we went through some pretty simple validations, I guess. You know, the, the value of the broker, is it still there? Does it exist?
And, actually, the more that we looked into it, the more that we saw that the value of the broker is actually increasing. In Australia, the stats are clear: the intermediated market is taking market share off the direct market. I'll talk about, in a slide or two's time, that the insurers have a lot on. They're genuinely well-intended with customer service, but they've got a lot on, and that is leading to the increased want for advocacy. So I think you'll see through a couple of slides here that the value of the broker here, New Zealand, America, all of our core markets, is continuing to increase.
The relevance of the MGA, I think simply put, a broker now needs to expect that an insurer may have a change in appetite of some sort, to one of their individual policies, and so therefore, a broker doing a good job needs to make sure that it has alternatives ready to go. Can't find out about the need for an alternative late. And so therefore, with the MGAs, which Nick will talk about a little later, one of their most defined value proposition points is real clarity about what they do and what they're good at. And so what we've seen is inflows to MGAs do nothing but increase. And in our own portfolio, we still see a trend of, insurer business moving more towards MGAs. That's not to suggest that the insurers aren't critical to the ecosystem.
I think it's just showing that they're getting more and more comfortable with the relationship that they have with MGAs and, and therefore, business models like ours. Insurer discipline, for better or worse, I do let the businesses that I've walked into know that I've been a bit of a regulation curse. I moved to America right as Sarbanes-Oxley was implemented, and so I had to run a large North American business to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I then moved to the UK right after Solvency II and had to take a business there from behind the curve to Solvency II compliance, and then I moved home in 2018. What happened here in 2018, in the Hayne Royal Commission and, you know, saw and oversaw all of that regulation change here in Australia.
If I was to describe the Hayne Royal Commission regulation for insurers, is I'd tell you that they implemented Solvency II, 'cause we tend to steal off our, our, English and European brethren, but in about half the time. So the insurers have been implementing the equivalent of Solvency II, both from a prudential and conduct point of view, in about half the time. So I think what that does is the increased sophistication around data and analytics, and I'll talk a little bit about shareholder expectations. When you combine the two together, we see an ongoing relationship with discipline and the insurers. They're, they're far more on top of where their performance is than they've ever been before.
And so while the competitive nature of an insurance market will always exist, you're going to find that the insurers are very quick to recognize where they are and aren't making money. And IFRS 17 makes them actually reserve capital and hold capital right down to that individual line basis. So seeing ongoing discipline in the insurers is obviously a stable environment for us, is a good environment. And then, as you heard Sam mention, lots of reasons why America is a great market for us to be evaluating, just its size and scale. But I, I hope you took away from Sam's, you know, presentation, that we've got our ego in check. We know where we're at. We're dotting our I's, we're crossing our T's. This isn't growth for growth's sake.
This is us trying to make sure that we fit our value proposition to the demand of the market. Being such a large, complex market, it'll take a little while, but we're putting a lot of time and effort into our strategy there, and I think our value proposition fits quite nicely over the long run. As I mentioned, the value of the broker continues to increase. One of the key points that I didn't mention in my opening there was complexity. While there's been a lot of effort through conduct regulation to improve the explanation or simplicity of, say, a home and auto policy, it's still finding its way into business insurance. Our business insurance policy is still 120 pages long and can take you up to three hours to read.
So I don't know too many small businesses that are interested in, you know, embarking on buying their own insurance without some level of affirmation from an expert to tell them that they've actually bought the right policies, and that they're navigating the market the right way. So, you know, with complexity not improving at a rate of knots, you've got increased regulation, which is still upon the insurers, both Prudential and Conduct. You've also got risk complexity, so, you know, there's all the talk about climate change, and I'll throw a couple of others in there.
Inflation, both real and social inflation, is still a variable that you need to have a prediction model trying to work with you to get some level of normalization out of, and then you've also got things like cyber and other complex insurance. So portfolio management for insurers is still, you know, an ongoing complexity that they need to wrestle with. And then you know, they're all quite open about their operation and technology journey that they need to go on. So very interesting time for customers, and as a result, the customers are really looking towards brokers to help them navigate while the insurers continue to you know, ready themselves for their own future state. So a couple of important stats here.
The light blue bar, relative to the blue bar, is the intermediated market versus the overall, direct market. And you can see that, the intermediated market has grown to 53%, up from 44% in FY 2015. So, you know, what happened since 2015, where we had a very long, hard market? We had all of those complexities that I mentioned occurring for insurers, and therefore, not surprising, the use of the broker has increased. So you're seeing CAGR on the intermediated market growing at about 9% over that period. And I'm going to talk about organic growth and the strength of our value proposition, but I think one of the best stats I can give you around that is that our CAGR as a network is far outpacing that even of intermediated.
You've got three really important things happening there. The intermediated market is growing against the direct market. You've got the overall market still sustaining some level of growth, and then you have the Steadfast network outgrowing pace-wise the intermediated market in general. We concluded going through our strategy that it remains, you know, a good time to be in broking. As I mentioned, Nick will talk about the MGAs, but you see very similar, you know, good statistical support for being an owner of an MGA business. Insurer discipline. I put this up just to give you a feel for where their results are at. You can see on the right chart there, obviously, 100 is a break-even point before investment income for insurers.
If you look ahead to the improved results in FY 23, you do have a couple of things still underlying that are likely to force them to need more margin. One would be ongoing inflation. Now, we're still seeing real inflation, you know, north of 5%, and you're still seeing social inflation, thanks to our lack of tort reform here, Australia and America, in particular, driving an increase in tail liability for their liability policies. So, if you combine that risk with risk-free rates, you know, being where they are, I would say a return on capital expectation for an insurer at the moment is probably, like, 15%. So that's probably needing to drive results of no more than 90% on a combined ratio basis.
So to think that the insurers are, you know, done with their journey of looking for margin within their business, I think is a fallacy. So there will be a competitive nature to our market. That's the insurance market in general, but it is underpinned by a different environment, one which is, capital related and driven by shareholder expectations, and the other is the increased sophistication of their businesses, you know, I think largely thanks to a lot of regulation change that has been, you know, pushed through. So still a lot going on that I think whilst there'll be your normal market forces and underpinning discipline, in the overall market. One of the, cool things for me, I guess, coming into Steadfast and getting to see what was behind the curtain, was actually learning that the strength of the value proposition is real.
I'm not sure there's any competitor out there that you can point to like us, that has actually invested properly in a value proposition. We talk a lot about our technology, SCTP and Insight. No mean feat to pull both of those technologies off and to get them living harmoniously together. But there's also things that I'll call out here, like our risk group, you know, our mutuals and captives, business, you know, providing real difference of, of opportunity for, for our clients. We also have, you know, capabilities ranging from valuations to surveys to, to ERM to workplace risk. You know, genuine value add to, to clients and brokers. You know, we're the largest network provider here, third in Australia and growing in America.
Our overall insurer relationships are providing differentiation in terms of product that we can negotiate, relationship services that we can negotiate, and we're very, very proactive in our engagement with our partners, ensuring that we get that, you know, win-win-win relationship. So when you combine the fact that we've got grassroots distribution run, in large part by owner-operators, and that is meeting great capability, whether it be the services that we provide in the network and or the offerings via our MGAs. I think we're well suited to a competitive environment in terms of growing the customer. As Robert mentioned, we may have had a good run of growth as a result of market prices going up, but we're very well organized to continue growth through customer acquisition.
We've increased all of the data and analytics and governance that we have around looking at customer acquisition and ensuring that organic growth for us is really leveraging this value proposition, and that we're getting full value from it. You'll see, as I go through a couple more slides here, that we're not just meeting that with ambition and saying that, "Hey, we've got a great value proposition. We think it'll equal on its own, just generating organic growth." One of the big things we've been doing behind the scenes is actually putting in place a very strong structure. Through the last 12 months, we've found some very good, you know, offsetting changes in our operating model, which is helping us fund a great resource within the business.
I will say coming in, the owner-operator model does generate a lot of discipline in the overall operating costs of our companies. I was pleasantly surprised at, I guess, how little, you know, there was inefficiency in the overall way that the businesses operate. I guess that alignment of the owner-operator means that they're looking for every available saving, too, in how they run their business. But we're now a large organization, and that doesn't mean that we don't have great opportunity to consider, you know, more macro solutions that we can bring, to those, to the overall business model.
So a couple of key things that I would call out here is that we've appointed a head of subsidiary performance, a really strong lady by the name of Rhiannon Toohey, who grew up in our finance business, has most recently been front and center in our M&A business, and now we've moved her into running subsidiary performance. strong FPA finance background, has done a lot of M&A, thinking about post-acquisition synergies and disciplines, and now we've put her over the top of thinking about overall subsidiary performance. And so to marry that up with the businesses, we held our first subsidiary council this year. So we obviously have our network and our network members, and we get them together regularly.
This year, we actually got our top 30 operating companies together and started talking about not their individual businesses, but us together as Steadfast, and how we can collectively build relationships within our businesses to where they, A, can work together to drive better cooperative solutions where it makes sense. But, B, get them used to how we're operating and what we're thinking about, so that we can see future improvements as a win-win. That's gone really well. Now pointing all of our data and analytic capabilities in support of that, because we have over 12 people just thinking about data and information, and now prioritizing their efforts around the granular review of our overall businesses. So sharing best practices across the group, looking at increasing operating models where it makes sense around selective shared services.
So not pushing it for unnecessary reasons, but if there's sensible shared services that add value to either margin or the customer service experience, you know, we're more organized now to consider those. That would be going into the operational leadership changes that we're making. I'll talk a little later in the presentation about the addition of Noelene Palmer. We've brought in a very strong operations leader with a COO background that starts at the end of July. We've also started a head of procurement. Michael was DHL's regional leader for procurement in Asia Pacific. He's been on board three months now and already identifying tremendous opportunities to get the best out of our buying power.
We have had, in the last 2 weeks, a head of EPMO join so that we can drive both operational and strategic projects across our multifaceted business with a lot of focus and discipline. We've got a very clear strategy for AI in terms of knowing that we need to be front and center on AI solutions around the world that are deriving either operational effectiveness and efficiency improvement or providing a better customer experience. So I don't see us being an early adopter. I don't know that we would suggest that that's always the best place to be when you're seeing rapid technology change. But being right at the forefront of knowing what's going on and having the option to adopt what's working well is exactly where we'll be.
In a nutshell, we're developing small teams of highly experienced experts to work with our businesses, not generate a head office that's seeing itself as the army, but seeing itself as the SWAT. So how do we bring really talented solutions and people with experience to drive those solutions to the businesses we own? So we've managed broadly all of this cost within our normal, expected run rate of the holding company by prioritizing where we're investing our money. So there's been a good transformation of overall group investment in the last 12+ months, and that's aligned to, you know, future-proofing the operating model and driving, you know, a lot of continued improvement. If I talk about maintaining our competitive advantage here in Australia and New Zealand, inside the Steadfast Trading Platform, 7,000 users.
growing at 24.7% year-on-year, up to AUD 1.4 billion. We have about a AUD 5.3 billion addressable market, so I see no reason why that runway won't continue. I'm also really excited to say that, when I first joined Steadfast, we had a lot of critique on the insurers, feeling that their capability of enablement was the main thing that was slowing us down. There are now major insurers with Australia having proper capability and proper budget, across Australia and New Zealand to drive increased product capability. So our pipeline for adding new product and capability to SCTP is deep, and I'll see that, we'll continue to add more product, in the next 12-24 months. And we'll even start to think about how we push up into the middle market.
So it might end up being a negotiated transaction, but how do we get everybody the efficiency and effectiveness of the technologies being linked and talking to each other to get that full efficiency benefit? So may remain negotiated, but we still get you know greater efficiency in customer service. So good runway in the non-negotiated traditional SME products, and we'll also start turning our attention to what we can do above that. As Sam mentioned, with the US, this capability we have to understand building both agency technology and contestable trading platform technology puts us in a great position to continue to analyze America. Do we build? Do we develop? Do we augment? Do we complement? We are looking at all of those strategies and considering that as we continue to do strong evaluation in the US.
So I would say our biggest asset is our know-how, and using that know-how to navigate the best solution for us and our businesses is exactly where we're positioned, as we consider our way forward in the US. So I mentioned before, a lot of strong operational skill set coming into the organization. We're also looking at our executive alignment and our Australasian networks. You heard Sam talk very positively about Singapore and New Zealand. We obviously have the largest network here in Australia.
With the US and London, you know, taking a lot of strategic focus for the international team, and us here in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, looking at how we can get greater efficiency and effectiveness, we believe now is the perfect time to align those networks under one of our executives, being Nick Cook. I like to refer to Nick as an industry stalwart, and I say that with all due respect. He's been there, done that, and really represents the DNA of Steadfast. He's been with Steadfast since 2015.
He was already running the Australian network, and it just makes sense that Sam and I have worked together to identify that the efficiency and effectiveness out of running our networks collectively in Australasia will provide tremendous benefit to how we maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the service, services, the insurer relationships, and the customer experience. So as we're moving into thinking about strongly customer acquisition growth, this is a great time for us to be combining the forces of our Australasian networks. By Nick taking on this broader role, he was also responsible for our 100% owned underwriting agencies, and we've seen that this is a great time to, you know, move our 100% owned underwriting agencies into an overall agency strategy.
I'm so pleased to say that this morning, we've announced that Mark Sienkiewicz will join us on the first of July. Mark will be EGM, Underwriting Agencies, Reinsurance, and Life. So he'll be looking at the strategy for all of our overall underwriting agencies, including direct responsibility for the 100% owned underwriting agencies. Mark, 25+ years industry experience. He was CEO within the Swiss Re infrastructure for over 15 years, running individual countries, but for his last 5 years, actually ran Asia Pacific. So Mark, coming in with real CEO credentials, strong underwriting strategy and governance background, comes in to complement Nick's new, broader role and give us, you know, strong, specific focus on our underwriting-related businesses, which does include our mutuals and captives.
So you have our underwriting agencies, our mutuals, captives, our claims, reinsurance, and life businesses, all getting very strong focus from Mark joining. Chris Rouse, who was leading our technology business, has got a personal venture that has piqued his interest, that he's going to be moving into. And so that gave us an opportunity to recruit Megan Jeffery . Megan is a 30-year technology experienced executive. She's most recently been the global CIO of Talent International. Very strong software management and general IT discipline experience. We bring Megan in, I think, at a really exciting time for our technology journey, and we're just thrilled that she's chosen Steadfast to come and join, and really add some considerable experience and strength to our to our tech business. And then I mentioned a little earlier, Noelene Palmer.
So we bring Noelene in, 20-plus years experience, 18 of those specific to insurance, and she's come from financial crime and fraud at Westpac. So Noelene brings strong operations, services experience, as well as, strong operational and, structural design experience, having strong shared services experience, in her track record. So yeah, really pleased to say that we've announced three strong executives joining us, in the month of July, and positions us really, really well for, the next part of our journey. Just thought I'd share with you, at a very high level, the strategy on a page. I think the important part here is the, beyond the vision, mission, and purpose, which, anchor our, strategy on a page, is the clarity of our strategic pillars.
We really think hard about what we're here for and, our business direction, and we ladder everything off that we deem a priority to revalidate that it fits these pillars, in terms of our overall focus. So at the moment, we have about 70 key initiatives happening within the organization. All very well governed by our Head of Strategic Development, who's in the room today with Demelza. And we make sure that they're, they're laddering off our overall strategy, so that we're ensuring that we're getting, you know, good alignment to, to where we've proposed we're heading and, and where we're going. And then I'll back that up with some very strong frameworks that support our strategic execution and our financial management.
So I think what's important here is that you note that we think about organic growth and margin improvement in parallel to inorganic growth, and we get the relationship between the two, you know, very well-recognized internally. So we are laser-like focused on our organic growth and margin improvement, and as Steven will talk about during his presentation, we've put a lot of time and effort into defining and identifying our inorganic growth opportunities. And between our strategy on our page and our strategic execution and financial management frameworks, I would say we are incredibly well organized at the moment in terms of where we're going and how we're operating, and what we're looking to achieve to support the overall business performance.
And as I mentioned, we're pushing that into governance, so our subsidiary boards have had a refresh in terms of key KPIs and measurements that we want coming through. As a new player in the last 15 months, I will also share with you, I was incredibly impressed with the discipline that occurs in the subsidiary boards. The reporting and information that comes forward was of really high quality or is of really high quality. But all we've done is continue to mature that, so that we make sure that the important KPIs are evolving and aligning to where we're going. And so we have very strong strategic governance across how the individual businesses are performing and how they're aligning to our overall strategy as Steadfast Group.
So I know I threw a lot at you there, and I tend to have a habit of talking very quickly, but I was mindful that we wanted to stay on time, so I apologize if I flew over anything a little bit too quickly, but thanks for your time.
Thanks, Nigel. It's about permission from JPMorgan. A couple of quick questions, if I can. Firstly, just in terms of the strategy you outlined, it looks like you have actually put in quite a few extra layers in the organization for risk management and to drive operational improvement. You did talk about margin expansion. Just in terms of the numbers we see and the targets you're being set from 2025 to 2027, can you just talk about whether we will see margin expansion or your targets are for margin expansion? And maybe, Stephen, if you can just talk about it, you know, should we be expecting margin expansion at an EBIT level in the group?
It's as you can tell, these are all resources starting, you know, broadly in July, but we've been thinking about it hard for the last 12 months. So we are driving already improvement that you're seeing, you know, through our, you know, our guidance and, and, projections, and, we've absorbed the majority of the cost in our normal expected run rate for, you know, the group. So there hasn't been a significant increase in cost to add the the resources. And right now, we're laser-like focused on identifying those margins within the subsidiary and overall business model. So, to give you any specifics would be a little bit too premature, other than there's a lot of exciting initiatives going on, and you'll see the benefit of that through our guidance for the, for the next 12 months.
Okay. If I could just ask a related question, I mean, given the structure of Steadfast, where you have ownership stakes in various businesses, with all this overlay that you're placing, how are you actually going to... Are you going to charge for these services to the individual businesses? Because you don't have a hundred percent the economics in this. So, from a group, if you're providing all these services, just how are you managing these extra services you're providing to them?
Yeah. As I mentioned, we've maintained basically the same run rate. So, these resources are principally focused on our equity businesses, albeit will provide value to the network. In the equity businesses, we do have, by far, the majority interest, and so these resources will be targeted primarily where we would get the benefit of the earnings through the rollup. So we are very mindful of where we're spending our time and effort, and targeting it at where we actually realize most of the benefit, if not all of the benefit, as a result of those activities. So there's a very intentional alignment between what those resources are doing and our bottom line.
So, what resources have gone to fund this? Just what are you prioritizing from to?
Well, procurement's an easy one, right? So we're all over the top of, you know, our vendor management at the moment. Are we getting full recognition of our size and scale? And that might range from things like licensing services, to telecom services, to travel services. You know, there's a great opportunity there for us to be taking benefit of the improved reporting we get through the adoption of Insight and our overall, you know, rollup of our businesses and making sure that the vendors that we work with are handled in a coordinated and negotiated way. So we see great runway just in traditional procurement.
I mean, we—you could say that one thing that procurement did cover procurement's costs for the next 12 months. One thing, and they've got about 12 in play.
No further questions? We'll make this our last question, and then we'll break for morning tea, Robert.
Oh, good.
Thanks. Jason Palmer here from Taylor Collison. Nigel, one question was just around protecting the culture of the brokerages, the entrepreneurial culture, versus the additional layer of focus that they're now getting with these additional resources.
Yeah, it's a really good question. That's why we took the initiative of the Subsidiary Council. We wanted them to be a part of the operating model design and how we would work together to maintain the decentralization. I think I actually put that on as the title of one of the slides, is Protecting the Value of Decentralization. The entrepreneurial spirit is, is obviously one element that comes with the decentralization, but the other one is the accountability and the empowerment. These businesses do not wait for us to be instructing them on how they go after improving their businesses. They're doing that on a daily basis. So our efforts are definitely intended to complement. And what I'm finding is they're embracing it, because to get access to some of these skill sets, they don't need for us to push them down.
They look at them and go, "Oh, wow, that's somebody exciting, somebody that can add value to my business. How do I get access to it?" So actually, I'm challenged the other way around at the moment. They all want immediate access, and they all wanna be able to, you know, benefit from the improved services. So the key is for us, as a group, is to be dependable and be reliable in terms of delivering on their expectations. So now I'm actually seeing happy marriage. Because of that alignment, because of the decentralized nature, these people are looking for every way that they can improve their business. So, it's far from a top-down push. It's more that we're improving the capability that we can offer, and they're biting our arm of f for it.
Actually, it was amazing, wasn't it? To get 30 people in a room, which was 80% of our revenue, have them sit down for 2.5 days, have them all interact. It was amazing. They all knew one another, but didn't know one another intimately, and they were all cynical about, "Ah, two days out of our life, what are we gonna get out of it?" Right? 'Cause they're all entrepreneurial, and they're all, "Well, I'll get back to the coal face and do it." But it was an amazing interaction of 30 highly successful people.
You know, there were people in that room that ran, one, one ran a AUD 1.1 billion business, one ran a AUD 900 million business, two or three ran between AUD 450 million and AUD 550 million businesses, and there was a whole running between AUD 150 million and AUD 200 million businesses. So you weren't dealing with a range of people that were, as I'm referred to sometimes, so you've got the moms and dads. There's not a lot of moms and dads run a AUD 150 million business. So it was amazing. I, I think that the feeling of are we—is Big Brother coming?
No, I'd say the feeling was that with the whole cohort of the 30 of them was saying, "Well, can we do some business? Are you doing so and so? Well, yeah, we did that before." It was amazingly powerful. We all left that meeting invigorated, didn't we? A mazing.
I only touched on it lightly, but I'll reinforce it. We're very mindful of group investment. We're the SWAT team. We're not the army. So we're not looking to build corporation-style capabilities, that group office, and start trying to run the business from head office. What we're trying to do is provide a differentiated level of expertise that can benefit these businesses to implement it themselves. So that's why we've been very mindful to do all of this within our, you know, general level of investment that we'd like in, in group. And so that ethos is, you know, I guess, led by me, but, we're very, very clear that we don't want to start running this like a corporation, but we can provide differentiating level of expertise that supports the overall operating model.
Okay, I think we'll take a quick 10-minute break for morning tea and be back at 10 past.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, good morning, everyone, and thanks for coming back. Look, we thought the best way to start talking about the Sure Insurance business was to show a brief timeline history of Sure Insurance over the past 5 years from inception. Now, the idea for Sure came along, was in the making for several years and before we commenced writing in July 2019. So it did take a couple of years prior to that to start the process and go through all the stand-up processes for systems and binder acquisition and what have you. Now, the basic proposition for Sure was a specialization model for domestic property insurance, using all available sources of data, risk selection via sophisticated algorithms, and also a robust low claims cost business model.
That was about driving the insurance value chain for a quality but low cost product for our customers. It, it's also a business model with a very, very strong emphasis on risk and compliance and accessing good people, both inside and outside the business. As I said, this is a, the single focus or, or a specialization, if you like, on domestic property insurance, and all of its value chain components are key to the success of Sure. Essentially, it was to build what we more, more likely or more refer to as a, a managing underwriting agency, as opposed to a managing general agency. Essentially, an underwriting model with all the functional components necessary to operate an end-to-end personal lines book, all contained inside the Sure operation.
Now, from a zero policy base, the brand and the business has grown strongly, and with it, the underlying processes and all of our systems and all of our people. For us, that continuous improvement and development of capability and capacity has been and will remain ongoing as we go into the future, into our fourth... sixth year of operation next week.
Sure's been built on a number of fundamental principles of value chain excellence, and those things that we know from our past experience have been fundamental to the success of a personal lines operation. It was very much an advantage for Sure, being a greenfields operation without a legacy portfolio and without a legacy ICT system, and that remains a significant advantage to our agility going forward.
This allowed us to set up the business components in a very, very deliberate way. There's a lot of focus on discipline of a personal lines end-to-end value chain, in the same way you would see inside, perhaps another APRA insurer, or not another, but an APRA insurer. We set out the components on this slide that we focus on for the operation of Sure. If I can just call out a few key ones that we think are fundamental to the performance of Sure. Pricing excellence is obviously one of the cornerstones of what we do at Sure, and not just for technical pricing, but also for quality, risk selection. Now, these are separate, but at the same time intertwined and are fundamental to loss ratio performance and consequently to our binder performance. Essentially, it's a blend of sophisticated algorithms and strong peril rating.
We use data from several key sources for peril rating and combine this with customer data and other open source data into our pricing algorithms. The strong control of both the cost and quality of outcome of claim outcomes for our customers are key. A key part of this is the focus on effective loss adjusting processes and the direct management of our repair panels. Most loss adjusting work is handled by in-house adjusters, and this is important for our customer service and for our claims base. Sure consistently demonstrates a lower claims cost than our competitors based on Insurance Statistics Australia numbers, and this, along with our pricing, is a key in supporting our binder providers through lower loss ratios. Now, Sure has a robust tool, also a robust risk and compliance regime to support the binder providers and obviously for Sure itself.
Now, this important competency is critical to binder support through the transparency it gives to our binder providers. And moving forward, we know with APRA and CPS 230, that will increasingly become more relevant. It's important to note that the strategic imperatives on this slide were deliberately designed to create what is referred to as an insurance light model, and to be ultimately able to be leveraged for a disciplined national rollout. Sure has come a long way since we wrote the first policy in the first week of July 2019. So if we can just perhaps for a moment have a look at how we've developed the brand. The brand rollout, we think, has been quite successful, driven by some key pillars and their component parts, and we show on these here on this slide and also the previous slide.
Our first step for us was to obtain a very deep market understanding. That's across customers, across competitors, and of course, the portfolio risk itself. Added to that has been many years of personal lines insurance experience within the Sure team. Second was the brand marketing and development of brand assets across many channels. We've had great success through our partners across marketing, across advertising, public relations, social media, and all the different channels we've utilized and leveraged to get the Sure name out there. And we think this could be repeated via localization into new markets using a similar formula. I'd invite people to have a look at the Sure YouTube channel. It shows our marketing collateral and, in particular, our customer testimonials. These are real, they're unscripted, and in my opinion, having been through this process in another insurer, represent excellent marketing execution.
We think this all leads to the ability to repeat this by localizing expansion plans and previously mentioned Sure components, and also the range of underwriting and claims assets that we've developed along the way. If we turn to the current Sure priorities, I'd summarize these as a focus on continuous improvement of our processes and our systems to help our people serve our customers better. Disciplined, continuous improvement is a key component of any successful personal lines operation, and we've been resourcing this to create a mature CI model into the future to support BAU and expansion opportunity. If I can distill a few from this page, it'd enhance our ability to grow and be more efficient. The key one is, of course, IT systems development, and that's the same for any personal lines insurer.
This has occurred and continues across, across the customer-facing claims and sales part of our operation. It gives our team a great ability, a greater ability to serve our customers and increases productivity gains and also our acquisition of new business. It's also to create customer and broker portals that support the proposition across our claims operation as well, and we intend to leverage this and, and continue to leverage this and further invest in those areas. We refer to the leveraging of growth and operational efficiency on the slide, and I'll talk about growth leaders, growth levers a little bit further on. On the efficiency side, we'll be accessing the Steadfast assets available to us and pushing on, pushing on to utilize those over the coming period as they become available.
A key one for any, any agency is binder management, and it's akin to a capital management strategy that you would see inside an insurer. The Sure portfolio performance is a key factor, of course, in supporting the capital management of our binders and our reinsurer partners. So it's a performance-driven, symbiotic relationship, and Sure has an acknowledged and now proven capability and capacity in that area. Binder provider appetite changes, and historically, Sure's have come and gone in North Queensland. So for Sure, this is a permanent cycle of existing and new binder management and acquisition, and the same for the reinsurers who back those binder providers. Sure directly manages these relationships, and these discussions are ongoing as we speak.
Part of that is to ensure we have good diversification across the binder, the quota share, and the excess of loss reinsurance capabilities and capacities, and that we're continually looking to access the best terms we can for Sure on an ongoing basis. To support this process, I've just returned from our fourth annual marketing trip, visiting more than 45 incumbent and potential reinsurers across the world market. I think it's clear that the Sure market continues, the Sure model continues to resonate very highly with these markets. We've got long-term experience with many of these reinsurers and insurers in Australia and overseas, some of that predating Sure, and we continue to manage these relationships very carefully. The other advantage now is that we have 5 years of successful and demonstrable performance to show to these reinsurers.
So across our binder and reinsurer panel, we now have around 15 high-profile insurers backing this business in different capacities, so it's fundamental that we stay connected with incumbents and to recruit new capacity. And we are expecting changes to capacity, our capacity providers from 1 July, with several of our panel looking to increase their shares. All of these current priorities support the ultimate plan to drive national growth opportunities and excess efficiency gains along the way. So to answer the question as to why we partnered with Steadfast, we think they would be reasonably self-explanatory, but certainly worth repeating. To support the expansion, Steadfast was the natural partner to do this. The Steadfast approach to business, their ethos, their professionalism, made it very clearly the right choice in our view.
SCTP, the Steadfast Trading Platform, and the broker reach of Steadfast is a key aspect to leverage for Sure going forward. We're able to use the platform to quickly roll out quickly in other states and pivot quickly in each market as we need to. I think today you heard a strong flavor of this in the ISU presentation as well. Steadfast's relationship with existing and new capacity providers is also clearly an advantage for Sure, and we'll be progressing that over the short and longer term. So it's clear to us that Steadfast is able to provide many key advantages to the Sure value chain via the Steadfast distribution networks and platforms. Essentially, this is about getting to the true potential of the brand and the assets that we've developed over the last five years.
Turning to Cyclone Jasper and Kirrily earlier this year, now, we saw two, some would say three, large events in December and January, if you separate the post-Jasper flooding, resulting in more than 3,000 additional claims. And as you'd expect for our first major event, there are lots of valuable insights and learnings. And also, as you'd expect, it stretched operational capacity with three back-to-back events. As at today, we've successfully onboarded many new people and increased staff to over 50 in the claims department and are pushing hard now to finalization of both of those events before the next summer. We've made some high-value, targeted workflow changes, both for manual systems and for our claims IT systems as well, and this is part, I think, of our ability as a small specialist to pivot quickly and drive through change very, very quickly.
I've seen the other side of this from a large insurer, and I know we are very agile in this space. There's been lots of commentary, of course, on the pool performance. I think we're all disappointed in how the pool design responded in dealing with the post-Jasper flooding, and we in the industry continue to lobby to have this changed and the pool made more relevant. Pleasingly, adjusting and repair models stood up well during the event, and this is a key competency that can be emulated. It's an important aspect for both our customers and for our claims cost performance. We've also done extensive modeling of our loss profile.
It's clear that our loss size underrepresents our market share, which is clearly a good thing, and that's the clear strategy for Sure and for our binder and reinsurance capacities. The system changes have been implemented with more to come, and we remain ready for any future events and are well on track with event finalization. This slide's intended to show some of the range of growth levers available to Sure across geographic and product dimensions. There's a few specifics I'd like to call out, if I may. We have our known organic opportunities, which now include greater strata site level capacity to AUD 20 million from 1 April with our fourth binder, and also the ability to move into the Southeast Queensland market for strata as well.
Other product cat-subcategories are on the table, such as landlord, product tiering, product tier-tiering, and other, and other, and other similar things. We've mentioned geographic expansion via SCTP and the Steadfast network already, so I won't go into that further. Essentially, there are a broad range of opportunities available to leverage the Sure assets that we've developed against. So in summary, the Sure, the Sure strategy is the continued optimization of the Sure Insurance value chain to drive greater performance and the preparation and development of expansion opportunities across different horizons. So ladies and gentlemen, that's what I hope to cover today. Of course, happy to take any questions later on.
Well, good morning, everyone. Today, I'm going to tell you a bit about myself, but give you a little bit around the grounds of where Steadfast are on platforms, on our broker services, on our networks, and just to finish on a high, I'll talk about some regulatory and compliance we should also be aware of. And I know you're looking forward to that. So just a little bit about myself: grew up in the Hunter Valley, started my insurance career in Newcastle, and then after a short while, was moved up to Tamworth, where I reopened an office there. Then, the insurer I was with got bought out, moved back to Newcastle, ran the corporate branch. Then in late nineties, moved to Sydney, where I ran the workers' comp company.
Did such a good job, we sold it, and then moved on to a variety of distribution roles, ultimately culminating in the product and proposition to market for one of the leading global insurers here in Australia. So I paint that picture just to really give you an Insight that I've been in markets that have been really instrumental in forming my views of what brokers and intermediaries need, not just here in Elizabeth Street, but also across every high street in Australia. And for the Steadfast network, that's really important because that is who we represent. That is our network. So it's been a great formative stages. Nigel said I've been with Steadfast since early 2015. It's been the best 9.5 years of my career. I can say that unequivocally, thanks to Robert.
Thank you.
So, it's been fantastic. So let's keep moving on with the presentation. So our unique advantage. Nigel put up a great slide, and it really sets the picture of all the services, tools, support our brokers have.... And you might think: Well, why is that important? Why can't you just cut that cost out? But that's our DNA. For Steadfast, that's what attracts brokers to us, and it retains brokers with us. And distribution has changed. Distribution going back 10 years ago were brokers with their names above the door, the brokers that are now trapped capital opportunities for us. But what has changed is the growth of the authorized rep channel. Now, if you go back 6 years, we had in our network under 1,000 ARs. Fast forward to today, that's 3,500 ARs that's grown. So our distribution pattern has changed.
We still have those brokers with their name above the door, but we've also got 3,500 ARs and the people they employ all across Australia. So the level of support, services, and how we can make them be the most professional intermediary they can be, are critical to our ongoing success. So for—in respect to our services, we never sit still. We're seeing this generational change come on, but we're also seeing, as well as the DNA of Erato, the PI scheme, triage, help with a claim, all the broker support lines, all the tools, all the training, we're seeing now a moving to a requirement for lifestyle, for lifestyle services.
So we're looking at travel, bringing in different things that help a broker feel more inclusive as part of being in their business, being able to offer their staff these advantages of being part of the Steadfast network. So this is really where we're seeing this evolution. We're seeing an evolution in distribution, where we're both dealing with a hybrid of the brokers as we traditionally knew them and this growing channel of authorized reps. And those needs are different, but certainly in respect to where we see our distribution partners going, our, our brokers, our ARs, it's about how we can make the most inclusive offering to them and ensure that that Steadfast character, that our DNA is, is retained. That's what it's all going to be about because we've just gone through the Quality Advice Review.
Brokers, intermediaries, have had commission retained, which is a fantastic outcome, but that came as a result of a lot of work and a lot of meetings. Robert's met plenty of politicians along this journey to get where we are now. But this is a vote of faith. They've agreed to this because they see the value that a broker brings. Our role, Steadfast, is to ensure our brokers are best equipped to deliver on that vote of faith that the government authority is having us. So really looking forward to getting involved with our New Zealand, Singapore, and the Australian broker networks. There are strengths in each of these networks when I look at them. The ability of the New Zealand network to get Insight to such a high level there, to attract brokers, they're on a really good trajectory on attracting brokers to the network in New Zealand.
In Singapore, it's product development. They last year produced the M Care Plus product, employee benefits, and that whole exercise and the product they developed, for me, is going to be a great insight to what we could do across our networks. So what I want ultimately is for our brokers, wherever they might be, in Australia, and any part of Australia, or New Zealand, or Singapore, to have a seamless experience of Steadfast. To know that when they're being a part of Steadfast network, wherever they may be, wherever they choose to trade, utilizing the U.K., the U.S., wherever they choose to trade, they can hold their heads high as the most professional brokers going around.
So across these areas, you see here, services, carrier management, trapped capital, compliance, technology, this is really where we gather the strength of Steadfast, where all those components that we've built, all those differentiators that we have, they all come together into an overall, as I said, seamless experience. That's gonna be the real focus and strength of us, how we can get that efficiency across our network, ensure that, as I said, we retain and attract brokers to our network. It's a pretty exciting time. MGAs, underwriting agencies, it's their time. Why is it their time? A number of things have happened since COVID. We've had generational change, and that's the trapped capital opportunity I spoke about. But there's also been this change in respect to how brokers are choosing to do business.
At a time when the insurers, post-COVID, forgot where their office was, where they don't know whether their staff are in the office or where they are. At a time when calls aren't being returned, when claims aren't being turned around, where the basics aren't being delivered, and where risk appetite has narrowed, MGAs have filled that space because they provide service, they do the basics well, and indeed, their risk appetite has grown. Really importantly, they can articulate their risk appetite. An MGA knows, Brad knows exactly what he's doing. Exactly, of anyone, Brad knows what he's doing. But an insurer is still this place where I'll get someone to look at it for you. Now, as I said, this is where a number of these factors come together.
If I'm an AR working from my kitchen table or in a small office, I don't have time for that. I want to get on to someone who says, "That's yes, that's no, and here's your response." So at that time, the MGAs have really grown in respect to their viability and their suitability for brokers. Service, risk appetite, channel conflict. This is a big issue for brokers. A number of our major partners, broking is just one distribution channel for them. They may have an agri channel, they may have a direct channel, and they're tripping themselves up on that. So for me, the MGA space is one that we're seeing considerable growth. Now, let me paint the picture for that for you a little bit clearer.
On this graph, you can see, I'll go to the middle line, the insurers have gone up over the last 12 months, about 9%. Policy movement, actually gone backwards about 5 points. Contrast that with the MGA. MGAs have gone up 19% on premium volume and up just short of 10% on policy movement. Now, this manifests itself in the share of portfolio, where the insurers currently are around about 53% of the portfolio, the Steadfast portfolio, and MGA is 45%. Now, that doesn't add to 100 because you have mutuals and captives that make up the balance. But that shows the change that we're seeing across our portfolio. Now, a lot of our network would say, "Yeah, I deal with CGU, QBE," whoever it might be, and that's true, they do.
But increasingly, as you can see here, MGAs are forming a vital part of the broker's risk appetite mix because of service, because of clarity of risk appetite, because of the people and the relationships they're able to build. So a really interesting space to be. The other place to be is platforms. Another thread for you. Once again, we are living most of our lives, our personal lives, through our devices. We have the capability at Steadfast for someone, and they have done it because there's a reason I'm telling this anecdote, of using Insight to access SCTP to place a policy while they're catching a flight on using the Wi-Fi. Now, that might sound a little bit fanciful.
It happens, but for me, the underpinning of that is that we are in an always-on environment now, that brokers are wanting to be able to do business when their clients want them to. To have the technology through Insight and SCTP to achieve that is key, and it really fits nicely is where, as I said, distribution is going. I went back when I was preparing for the presentation to our tender document, Robert, that we did in September 2016 on the SCTP. So in the name of the SCTP, this is the first product we went to market with. That was just in September 2016. As Nigel said, we're now at AUD 1.4 billion going through the SCTP. That's an unbelievable number. We don't know the asset that we've got with SCTP. We have 10 MGAs currently on the SCTP.
We're talking with 5 additional. We're talking with underwriters, but Nigel also spoke to underwriters. Their legacy technology is preventing them from moving quick enough. An MGA can come on to the SCTP inside 12 months. So for us, that's the exciting part that we've got. More partners wanting to be on the SCTP, more products we want to roll out. So for us, there is great headroom in where we can take SCTP, both here, New Zealand, Singapore, the States, a tremendous opportunity and a wonderful asset that we have. Just to bring us home, as I said, regulatory environment. Quality Advice Review has ceased. We've now got the legislation that's now been redrafted, because the first draft was a bit unfortunate, actually ruling commissions out, but that's in, that's okay. It's all back on track.
So that's the kind of last, last big piece in respect to the Quality Advice Review. But environmentally, we have new leadership across ICA. Andrew Hall, he's really reinvigorated the ICA. Katrina Shanks has come into ANZIIF. Jenny Bax at the UAC, that growing Underwriting Agencies Council, and NIBA, where we have Richard Klipin, who really joined us about a fortnight ago and already making great strides at NIBA. I set this scene that we're through this kind of focus on the regulatory, but for all the right reasons, this group of leaders will be great focus on customer advocacy, professionalism in our industry, and a voice for our industry. And I think we're in a fortunate space. We, we have a great group of leaders.
Stephen Jones had a fantastic trip with the CEOs of some of the insurers around the world, reinsurance markets, so we have a government who I think really is understanding how insurance works. Once again, it was pleasing to hear that the building ministers across all states have agreed to include climate resilience as part of their building codes. That was announced this morning. We're seeing a new phase coming in. We're seeing greater focus on customer advocacy, but also a greater awareness on community and where insurance plays a role, a critical role. In respect to planning, in respect to advocacy, we're in a really fortunate place. Expect to hear more louder voices coming through our industry, but all for the right purpose of ensuring consumers are protected.
Last piece of regulation that we really are now starting to deal with is something called CPS 230. So CPS 230 is in transition from 1 July. As brokers, we will be responding and supporting the insurers, because in a nutshell, CPS 230 will put the onus on the insurer to ensure their distribution is well protected and in line with proper practice. We've started those initial conversations with the insurers. We've said to the insurers that we will manage it centrally for Steadfast. You're going to hear from Helen, we've already got wonderful tools in place that can give the insurers the data they're after. But for us, with the underwriting agencies, we believe there's a strong opportunity here. There's over 160 underwriting agencies here in Australia. CPS 230 will put a pressure on some of those smaller ones that are subscale.
So we believe over the next couple of years, as CPS 230 kicks in, that we'll be in a fortunate position, certainly in respect to our MGA space. We provide actuarial, risk management, legal, product, market management, all in-house on our MGAs. We have a very strong regime, a very strong discipline, and we believe an opportunity exists for us with 230 . So thank you, everyone, and I'd now like to pass to Wayne. No questions?
Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. Just going to talk about Accumulate, and somewhat unique within the Steadfast Group, we're a lending business. We provide finance to the end customer, and I'll just give you a brief overview of the product, the market, and our organization. I'll talk about our funding facilities in terms of how we finance our books, and I'll do a quick overview of our regulatory compliance and risk environment. So we're a lending business. We extend credit largely to small to medium enterprises, both here and in New Zealand. We originate loans on short terms, and that coincides with policy periods because we take security over the unearned premium of those underlying policies.
In most cases, those policies are secured with some unearned premium available to us, but we do take some credit risk in certain instances, depending on the nature of policies that we fund. So on top of our risk management process, we do also take a trade credit insurance policy, which protects our book, which is subject to aggregate deductibles and qualifying loss thresholds, mainly from an administrative perspective. As we only do lending for insurance policies, the risk profile is really sound. Insurance is a non-discretionary expense for a lot of business, so we find that our customers have a very high propensity to pay. From an organizational point of view, we run a board with experience ranging from underwriting, insurance broking, and commercial lending.
We run a separate risk committee, which also meets alongside the board with three independent members, as well as business delegates. And internally, we've got a management team that has a really strong tenure and experience within the business, and they lead all role functions that you can see up here on the screen. So in terms of our distribution strategy, 99% of what we do is distributed through insurance brokers to the end customer. We're an open market business, and by that I mean we don't just transact with Steadfast network brokers. We have strong relationships with a raft of self-licensed brokers, both within the Steadfast network and with other networks. The authorized representative space is growing, as Nick mentioned, and we've got quite strong relationships with a series of AR networks.
And we also transact with some international brokers that operate here in Australia. We automate the delivery of our product as much as we can, and that means connectivity through to broker management platforms such as Insight, but we integrate with all major platforms that are in Australia and New Zealand. We enjoy a huge amount of support through the Steadfast network. We're the largest premium funder in that market, but sitting on a panel, it does ensure that brokers can access very competitive outcomes for their customers. From a financing perspective, we were a joint venture with Macquarie, and upon that dissolving, we had to set up our own financing arrangements, and we elected to go down the path of a credit-rated warehouse, and that's been in place for almost four years.
We've been able to tinker and evolve and optimize the structure of the warehouse to bring that senior note component down from 3.5% at origination to 2.2% today. So we've been enjoying a lot of support from two major banking institutions, which take up the Class A or the senior tranche, and Industry Funds Management fronts our warehouse on behalf of a series of underlying funds, and they take all three layers of our mezzanine notes. The structure is limited recourse and bankruptcy remote, so it doesn't have any support from Accumulate companies or Steadfast by way of guarantee.
And the assets upon sale into the warehouse are subject to eligibility criteria, and they're monitored ongoing through a raft of parameters, which measure, among other things, concentration with underwriters, industry of our underlying borrowers, non-cancelable percentage of the total book, as well as arrears. Different style of loan in New Zealand, given the book is somewhat smaller. We have a straight corporate loan with ANZ, who've been supporting us from day one, but there's a lot of similarities in that. It's a rolling 12-month term, secured against the receivables only, and no recourse to Steadfast Group. And again, it has ongoing covenants that we need to adhere to, to measure and monitor concentration, arrears, et cetera. We've got a really strong focus on risk in our business.
So I'll just give you a quick overview of the governance compliance environment that we operate under. So our risk appetite is approved by the board, and each quarter, our metrics that we present to the board by way of a scorecard include, you know, financial, operational, regulatory, compliance, and technology risk. The board has approved a lot of delegation into the business to support decisioning, and we are very, very mindful of having separation between sales and credit from a discretion point of view. So creates that healthy tension I think you need when you're running a lending business to make sure you originate the risk that you want. Internally, we run committees that deal with people and strategy, treasury, which is a big part of our business.
At the moment, we're going through our renewal process as we speak, risk and compliance, and tech. We've got a very documented and detailed risk management framework, and that's got responsibilities allocated through the leadership team for all aspects of compliance to that. And over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of work done at an industry level to develop codes of practice, which, you know, the insurers have had for a long time. We've got a code of practice now in Australia, which we've been accredited under since 2022, and more recently in New Zealand. And I'm really pleased that the industry is taking steps forward to provide a greater level of transparency and support for customers in need.
Not everybody's participating in that, but rather-
Not everyone, no, which is unfortunate. The majority of players in the market are signed up. However, there's a few not yet across the line, but we're very hopeful that will be the case very shortly.
That's been going for 2 years, so they're a bit slow to the mark.
Yeah. Disappointing from an industry perspective, but, yeah, we're hopeful. Hopeful.
We were hopeful two years ago.
Yes, we were. So we do operate a small consumer lending book in Australia and New Zealand. And to do that, we have sought exemptions from both ASIC and the Commerce Commission in New Zealand to seek relief from certain aspects of that code. We do also have a raft of other reporting obligations, APRA being one of those. We're not regulated, but given the size of our receivables book, we have to report on a monthly basis. And while premium funding operates under a general exemption from anti-money laundering, there are instances where we need to undertake AML and KYC activity, and we are members of complaints authorities both here and in New Zealand, which is a condition of having those exemptions, for consumer lending.
Internally, our risk appetite scorecard, as I mentioned, is presented to the board each quarter. We do have a strong focus on risk, and the whole business owns that, so we do provide a comprehensive monthly risk report to all of the business, and that goes to the board on a monthly basis as well. Our risk and controls register was just subjected to an external review, and we're very pleased with the way that we've come through that. We've also been doing a lot of work on the automation space to try and enhance our operational effectiveness, but one of the first pieces of automation we did was plugging into a credit bureau to try and get a bit more visibility over the risk that we're originating.
Now we've had about 3.5-4 years of data, we're starting the process of back testing our scored origination with our portfolio performance to try and understand if there's any areas of how we originate that we can potentially automate or, or lighten up the risk assessment process. And obviously, there's an increasing attention on cyber, given the environment that we are in at the moment. A lot of focus for us on mitigation strategies, and response readiness in the event that something could occur. So from a portfolio perspective, I've been really pleased with the way the book has behaved over the last 5 years. The very left-hand side of that chart is the pre-COVID years.
Obviously, COVID was an impact on a lot of businesses, and we didn't know where this was gonna land, but we saw some of our record low arrears rates, month-on-month through the middle of COVID. I'm not just saying that was a result of the government stimulus that was thrown at business. We had changed our originations process by way of that visibility with credit bureau integrations. We've changed our collections process, and you can see there that very light gray, light green, component of our arrears balance... is very minimal these days, which is our aged debt, and we've changed the way we manage and deal with our aged debt.
So probably seeing a return to what we'd see as a new normal at the moment, but definitely not in the ranges of what we saw pre-COVID from a arrears perspective. We write about 85,000 loans a year, so we do get the ability to have a look across all geographies and a lot of industries to see if there's any any signs of stress. And I'm really happy to say that despite having economic, I guess, uncertainty and interest rates rising, we're not seeing any particular areas of concern, both from a geographical point of view or at industry level.
So the book, which I said before, is predominantly SMEs, is proving to be very resilient for us, and consequence of that stronger risk performance has meant that our loss ratio against our trade credit policy has been zero for the last four years.
It's interesting because this is a litmus test when people say to me: "How's the Australian economy going?" Okay. That's a great point. I go back to our arrears on people who are borrowing money to finance their insurance premiums, and I look at the performance of their small to medium enterprise business in Australia, and you just saw the facts that prove that our resilience in that area is unbelievable, even through COVID.
Yeah, it's been a very resilient book of clients, so we're very pleased with that. I'm running out of time, but I'm going to reclaim about 30 seconds from Rob.
Go.
In the short term, we are focused on sensible growth, so we aim for about 10% revenue growth year-on-year. With some of the automation we're doing, we're trying to enhance the ability to provide more scale on our platform. So any future growth we're getting, we're very confident it's going to be earnings accretive to not just us, but the Steadfast Group. We refreshed our three-year strategy last year, so very quickly, growth of people in our customer base is one area. Operational efficiencies through automation is the second one, and then the third one is a bit of blue sky, but exploration of new distribution channels, and we didn't know the ISU opportunity was going to come to be when we put this down on paper.
But we have been starting to work with Nick, Sam, and the ISU team over the last few months. Very formative stages of our discovery process, but really excited to explore what might be possible for us in the US markets. So, thank you for your time and attention. I'll be happy to take questions at the end of the session. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. I'll run a bit under, so you'll get your 30 seconds back, Rob. Okay. It's been my name is Helen, and I'm the general manager of operations for Gold Seal. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what Gold Seal does and the services that we provide to align with Steadfast's strategic framework that they have in place. So it's been almost 4 years since we were purchased by Steadfast Group, and Gold Seal specialized in the areas of training, education, compliance, and HR services to the general insurance intermediaries for over 25 years.
At the time we were purchased, several months away, and by several, I mean maybe 6-12 months, there were six new laws being implemented by the regulators of the industry. Gold Seal's focus since then has been to build on Steadfast's internal capability in these areas and provide the network with the systems and resources they needed to navigate the changing regulatory environment we were now faced with. So to tell you a little bit about why we do what we do and how we do it. So I talked about regulators. I think every single speaker today has spoken about regulators, and that's the environment we currently live in. Where we base ourselves here is how do we help the network deliver these services that they require while staying compliant and also making a profit?
And so what we've managed to do at Steadfast is implement Gold Seal's core services that they had and build on those, and implement systems as well to support them. So the services that we offer in all our areas, so in HR and in compliance especially, we have helplines that the brokers can access, and that's now becoming available to the agencies as well. We also developed systems, so I'll talk to you later about a little bit later about the Learning Hub, but I'll concentrate on CCX360. So CCX360 is our compliance management system.
It literally made everything that a broker has to do to remain compliant with their AFSL obligations available on one platform, okay, when it came to their compliance obligations. So it helped them adhere to these regulatory changes. It allowed for them to streamline any complaints and breach changes that were in place in terms of reporting and recording in forms. It automated all the reminders they required to have over the time frames that ASIC had set. But it also helped us assist with the regulation and the updates and keeping up to date with all these changes in their businesses, where we were able to update one system, and all of them that were accessing it had that update available to them without actually having to do much to align it into their business. Okay?
The other areas that Steadfast assisted were, Steadfast Gold Seal, I should say, assisted were in, providing webinars and training modules for any updates or changes that were occurring. We also, updated our, our range of resources. So we provide the network in the HR space and also in the compliance space with manuals and templates and, broker file transaction, templates on how to manage clients, in that space. By doing this, we assist the brokers throughout every process that we, that they are required to follow in this compliance environment. To speak a little bit more about the Learning Hub: Now, the Learning Hub we launched in 2023. It was designed and administered by the Steadfast Gold Seal team and the Steadfast Tech team, and it's specifically for brokers to maintain and grow industry skills and knowledge.
These brokers can access online courses, webinars, Steadfast events, and record CPD points, and I'll cover a bit more about its success later on. Gold Seal is also a registered training organization, fully owned by Steadfast, and is authorized to deliver the Diploma of Insurance Broking, as well as Tier Two in General Insurance and Tier One in Insurance Broking. Another way that we assist the network stay compliant and educated in their field and industry. Oh, I went too forward. Sorry! I don't know what happened there. Here we go. So the Audit and Review program. What we've done, and I mentioned earlier, is we've delivered over 45% of the Steadfast Equity Audit program so far in the broker activity review space.
What we concentrate on here is actually the policies and procedures that they've implemented into their businesses when managing the client. We also review the regulatory requirements that are now in place even more when looking after the client and ensuring that we're providing a fair and honest customer service. So these helplines I mentioned earlier, which I'll quickly skip ahead so I don't go over time. The Compliance Helpline, financial year to date, has had over 640 queries, and what we noticed is every time there's a change or a mention of a change in the news, our numbers spike, and it really shows that the effect that we have in supporting the brokers in these changes. The same occurs in the HR space.
We know how hard it is to manage people, and it always makes life easier to have someone to talk to. And Leanne Blumink, who runs our helpline for HR for the network, has received over 660 calls, just in the financial year past. So the Learning Hub, this one's really blown us away. Launched again, I'll remind you, in 2023, and in the past financial year, we've issued over 74,700 CPD points through the Learning Hub. That's from over 19,700 online courses completed and over 30,000 webinar certificates issued. We're all really proud of these figures and stats and the level of engagement that we have from the whole network across all of Gold Seal services and look forward to seeing continued growth in this future in these areas. Thank you.
You don't need an introduction about who I am. That's fine. So when we took Steadfast, when we took you to the IPO, we said there were two limbs of growth: acquisition as well as organic growth. So let's focus here a bit more on the acquisition. Now, the key important aspect here we're starting with is the network, because the network is one of the competitive advantages that no one else in our space actually has. There's a whole lake of opportunities that are tied to our network. So the vast quantum of services that we provide, you're hearing some of those today, is so compelling, why would you leave, especially if we, as a person who has more than just a checkbook, pay fair value? So I call it the Hotel California. You've heard me use that expression.
You know, why would you, why would you ever want to leave? It also means we have great knowledge of the businesses we're about to, to invest into. And importantly, if anybody else wanted to actually buy the asset, they'd actually have to, as they would come out of the network, they'd actually have to replace a whole range of these services that we provide, which means they have to put more expense into the acquisition they've put in. So how's the network grown over time? Well, the AUD 4 billion we took at IPO is now over AUD 12 billion. What about the stakes of ownership that we've got in the network? You see, we're creeping very much now towards 50%. We've grown from 32% to 38% to 49% in these last few years.
The only time it's gone backwards was when we actually had growth in network outstripping what we're acquiring, which is particularly when we bought IBNA there in 2020. So what's the opportunity for investment? We particularly have highlighted to you on the left-hand side, maybe there's some opportunities there in the orange, which we don't expect to actually ever invest into and may be owned by PE, et cetera. But there's this opportunity in that dark blue there, where you see we've often quoted, there's another AUD 190 million of EBITDA that we think is available for acquisition over time, on top of the 50-odd million dollars that comes from those brokers who are, we are now having discussions with, be it a discussion on valuation, or we've now entered a term sheet or into due diligence.
So there's a whole runway of opportunities that comes from that. But there are actually two further areas that we've never really, I guess, highlighted, which is on what about the brokers that we've actually already bought? So that's in that light blue area. There's first of all, as you know, we have a co-owner model, and roughly 72%, we own and 28% owned by those co-owners. But over time, part of our trapped capital program is where some of those co-owners take further equity off the table and we invest. So there's another AUD 100 million of opportunities that actually exist within what is on the right-hand side there. But also the equity brokers side, there's actually roughly AUD 2 billion that relates to the authorized rep network, which Nick has highlighted, has been a very fast-growing area.
In the past, Coverforce, particularly, has had an equity model to acquire interest within the ARs, but we own the ARs themselves, and only AUD 500 million of that AUD 2 billion do we actually have an equity stake in. There's another AUD 1.5 billion of AR policies written that actually, over time, we could take an actual stake in. And Jim, thank you, who's now on the CBN board, helped institute that into that business, which does over AUD 1 billion worth of GWP. That in itself is worth potentially another AUD 90 million. Now, how do I derive these figures? It's a rule of thumb, okay? So we're being very large picture here. 20% of GWP is fee and commission, and maybe a 30% EBITDA margin attached to it. That's how we derive these figures. Understand the context here.
When you bought a network, which we had, maybe doing sub-AUD 10 million profit, we have now acquired over or grown that into AUD 300 million worth of earnings that we now have in the group, and there's another AUD 400 million odd of opportunities still to go. So that is purely on the broking side of things. That's got nothing to do yet with the opportunities that actually exist in the underwriting agency world, where as that regulation comes along, I think you're also going to need that mothership type of support services that Steadfast provides for brokers. You also will need that for the underwriting agencies. So us partnering with underwriting agencies as an equity owner to access those services, I can see the opportunity coming through there. But what do we also buy in America?
We bought a network, and we start with 0% ownership of that particular circle and know that over time, we will get there. But of course, what's our first task there? Hotel California. No pun intended for the US people. How do you make sure that they are so ingratiated with what we do, and we get to know them first, and then knowing what you want to acquire and at, and at the right prices? And of course, just a reminder, it's not just a matter of buying upfront earnings, it's also a matter of making sure that the companies that you are buying also has a growth profile for the future. So one of our tests is, do we believe we can grow the earnings?
We've said already how if you look at the earnings of the businesses we bought in the first eight years of being listed, they're now doing double what we paid for them. So how's that been delivered? A whole range of reasons. The skills of the co-owners, the management teams, well thought through business plans that we supported, utilizing our network capabilities, merging businesses together to gain those cost synergies, the revenue synergies, where underwriting agencies and funders have more ability, generally, to create the businesses in our network. Might be the automation via the robotics, might be through the machine learnings, through AI for the future, utilizing the SCTP and insight, leveraging the best practice initiatives, making use of our back-office capabilities through our SBS offering.
All that, plus all the things that Nigel is working on to continue to grow the earnings of what we have acquired. So we've already told you that there's... In our investor sessions before, that there's a 4% of earnings growth in 2025 for the businesses we bought last year or this current year, as they flow into next year. That's before you look at the opportunities that are actually on this slide. We continue to invest. The runway is still very, very strong. And of course, when you're debt funded at roughly 6%, there's a fair bit of earnings accretion to be gained there. Have we actually executed on our 10x multiple, excluding the vTery large businesses that we've acquired on these general run-of-the-mill acquisitions? 2022, sub 9x. 2023, sub 10x.
This year will come in at sub 10x. So that 10x, we've not actually ever gone above that as a general across-the-board, portfolio-weighted acquisition. So we can see EPS accretion continuing to come from the acquisition front, let alone, of course, the obvious impact on return on capital, particularly with the next range of acquisitions being debt-funded. Thank you.
T hat's it, isn't it? Any more? No. Can I have the flicker one second? So I hope we've proved to you that there's more than Stephen and I . And I hope that you've got a view about what we're talking about in terms of the future of this business. The premium cycle. There isn't a premium cycle. There's a strategic allocation of capital that's absolutely around the world, predicated by very strong regulators who have changed their mind over the last decade about people and how they allocate their capital. It's. We've been seeing it coming. We've watched it occur. It started with John Neal at Lloyd's.
You may remember, John said, "I think there's been too much paid to, by way of commission, to the intermediaries," and, we faced a barrage of questions in those days, Stephen and I: "Are you gonna lose commission?" And I said, "No, the commission's gonna come back to what we're getting from what they're paying over there." 37% was coming back to 35%, to 33%, to around the 30% mark. Lloyd’s has achieved that, I believe, okay? And the market here is very much as, as, as Nigel pointed out, very much under the thumb from APRA about how it allocates its capital, how it makes its profit, and how we, as their subcontractor distribution, handle the consumer. So there's no pricing cycle anymore. There's compliance with regulation and how you use your capital.
So when you if you think there's gonna be a, a waterfall, there is not gonna be a waterfall. There'll be a, perhaps, a plateau coming, but in reality, you're gonna see steady growth each year in the, in the premium that comes through. So... And as I said earlier, what happens if the price starts to level? That means a little bit of competition comes into the market, which means we will sell more product. We won't go backwards in what we do. Organic growth. If you don't understand how we're working on organic growth after, after Nigel's presentation, then, we'll give you a personal evaluation of that by ringing up, okay? This is what we've been working on as a corporation, probably for about the last five years, which we've just started to implement.
We got to our plateau. We got to controlling AUD 14 billion worth of business going out to the Australian market. We had to change slightly where we want, and we've got some fantastic people involved in the business to do it, okay? The trapped capital. Okay, if you don't understand what this, what Stephen just showed you here, this, I've been saying, we've been saying that there's a hole in that pie. There's a whole section still out there to get. It's for... We think, at 20% commission and 30% EBITDA margin, okay, that there's AUD 435 million worth of viable people in our network that will want to sell over a foreseeable period. So when people say, "I think they're running out of steam," that's complete and utter crap, okay?
If you think that that's running out of steam, then we don't think it is, okay? We think that's a full head of steam, and we think we've done a fantastic job. I might be able to do it now. Coming around, the light blue, is it, Stephen? The light blue to the funny color, which the 0.9 is, to the... I'm color blind, so every time I do a freaking presentation like this, I've got to hope that I've said the right color. Okay, so our execution on what we've bought has really used your money that you've given us very well. Whoops! We're getting back to where I am. Just a couple of observations. Do you think QBE let us deploy over AUD 6 billion of their capital over the last 10 years and didn't make any money out of it? Seriously?
Somebody stand up and tell me out of this that you think that's the way QBE went. They made plenty of money out of CHU after, over the last 10 years. I know the facts, which I can't tell you. So please, when you hear people make statements like that, really? Seriously? And then renew for another 10 years to give us another opportunity, which, on the current basis, would be AUD 10 billion worth of their capital to deploy. For God's sake, we have, I have to put up with this sort of crap that gets pushed out about us, but in reality... That's one of my observations. If you want to know anything about this business, ask us. Don't ask somebody else.
And if we tell you something and it's wrong, we can go to jail for doing it, unlike a lot of the fund managers in other countries of the world that get away with it, we can't. I hope you understand Steadfast better. I hope you understand we've still got the passion for this business that we had back in 28 years ago. Oh, right. Yeah, 27 years ago, I got the idea to do this, okay? Yep, I could retire. Yes, I've got enough money. Yeah, I could go and race my yacht. Yeah, but I still get off on what we do. This is an incredible business full of fantastic people, full of people that have backed us for decades to do this. And, yeah, eventually, I will retire, and eventually, if I get a tap, I'll go.
But at the moment, we're still alive and want to drive the business. So thanks for coming. There's some lunch if you want to stay.
Robert, we might just see if there's any questions before we break for lunch.
I was trying to get out of the questions. Hang on, Sid, how many have you had? Wait a sec. Go, go on. I'm only being mean to you, Sid.
Maybe a couple of quick ones, Robert.
Sure.
Just, the cycle. So you have, you haven't previously talked about what comes after the very strong cycle, but you have mentioned it today. Just the signs of the cycle tempering. Could you just give us your observations?
Yep.
on 30 June, and
If reinsurance starts to collapse, okay? I think reinsurance has been... It's gonna be a very interesting thirtieth of June, okay? If I was an analyst, okay, or an investor in public insurance companies, I'd watch what happens for the thirtieth of June in the Australian market with how the reinsurance gets set. I think you might find there's gonna be some changes, and I would follow the money if I were you. Reinsurance coming back, lack of attritional claims, lack of weather events, that's about it. Regulators saying you can make less money out of what you do, they're all signs that it'll collapse. It's not gonna collapse again. Seriously.
The inflationary effect on claims is frightening, and that. So let's say it did flatten tomorrow, then the job of the broker is to make sure that the underinsured value, in other words, the building or the asset that was insured for AUD 100 last year or the year before, should be insured for maybe AUD 130 or AUD 140. So if the rate stays the same, let's say it stays the same, doesn't go up with inflation, doesn't go up because they're trying to maintain a combined of 93 or something like that and stays flat, all of a sudden, the same volume is going to cost 20%-40% more to get by the consumer. That's the next iteration of what's coming.
So sorry, just to be clear, does that mean the cycle is getting softer for 30 June, or?
Well, ours is running at the moment, 9.3%.
The GWP growth, is it? Okay.
Yeah-
Thank you.
9.3%.
Okay, that's great. Thank you very much. Just a second question, just around ACCC's thoughts around creeping acquisition, acquisitions. I think Chalmers has talked about that. Just, does Steadfast get caught up in this at all?
I think everybody will be caught up with in some way or shape. But I mean-
Does that limit the acquisition opportunities?
Well, you've got to bring back the system of when you buy something and what you tell that something to do and what control you have over that something. Then, when you acquire a whole lot of stuff that gives you, say, market control, okay, and you can tell everything in that, in what you own, to do exactly what I say, to move exactly what I want to do, to move that to that, that's a problem. When you run a network like we do, with nearly 80 businesses who all make their own decision about where they place their premiums, which insurer they work with, who they employ, then you don't have market control. Those 80 businesses in our organization compete against one another.
Every now and then, I get a phone call from somebody saying, "so and so is taking some business off us." And I go, "That's the market, baby. Just get used to it. That's the way it is. It's either our guys taking it off you or somebody else taking it off you, because guess what? Your client's not happy with you." While that exists, and while that's the way we operate our business, then there's no creep issue because they're independent people. We may own them, but we do not control them. And that system is the thing we adopted from the beginning. Steven, wasn't it?
We said, "Okay, if..." I mean, I had to, I had to tell people like you, okay, that it was a good idea to back us, that those people, by not putting chains over them, letting them have their own way and giving them support, they'd be a lot better for you. That'd be a lot better way to work. And it's worked for 11 years now so far.
Any further questions?
Rob, Jason here. How you going?
You've had too many, Jason. I mean, seriously-
[crosstalk]
Go back to Adelaide and stop in the morning. Sweet. Okay, go on.
Just in terms of the PSF fees, we've heard about the Steadfast juggernaut today and all the stuff you're doing for carriers and the brokers and the networks. At what point is there an opportunity to increase the PSF fees?
It's really difficult if you want. If you follow our model, because our model is not predicated on saying, "Hey, we do a lot more business with you. Pay us a little bit more." And if you look at some of the PSF fees we get, they're peanuts compared to what we give to the insurers. I think we're looking for margin creep on that, but just margin creep on it. We're not looking for the fact, "Hey, we gave you an extra AUD 2 million last year, so we want an extra AUD 11.50," or something like that. I think that if you look at the PSF at around AUD 70 million dollars, and you look at through the underwriting agencies and through the network, we put out AUD 14 billion, okay?
It's pretty small nuts, small potatoes. And if somebody else could turn around and say, "You should put pressure on them," what the pressure we want to put on them is for service, the pricing and claims payment, and to work with us on product design.
Thank you. Good afternoon, it's Andreas Stadnik from Morgan Stanley here. Just one question. So on one of the slides earlier, you mentioned you're seeking to innovate via mutuals and underwriting agency solutions. Can you elaborate on that a bit?
Okay. What's happened as the market moved to turn away from underwriting capability in certain sections and/or put huge prices into that, then when you started to dissect the loss ratios in those sections, you saw it, in some cases, they were a dead sitter to control some of their own capital, and most of them were rich enough to do that. So you build a mutual for them, you put your own... their own capital into that mutual. They work off their own capital, and then you transfer the risk to a reinsurer. So that with the market hardening the way it was, opportunities came for us to build some mutuals, okay?
We built mutuals in hospitality, we built mutuals in two other areas as well. We built a mutual on something that people didn't think was insurable, and when you did an analysis of what the loss ratio was, it was very insurable, and when you went to the principal and said, "Would you put some capital into that?" They said, "We've got plenty of capital." So that's some rationale for doing it, and doing a mutual, where there's commonality, where there's too, it's too expensive sometimes to transfer the risk to an insurer and where you've got capital which is similar to a captive.
A captive is the same situation, the position we were in two years ago, I said to our D&O insurers, "If you put the price up anymore, I'm gonna take the whole first layer out, and I'm gonna put it into our captive, and I'm gonna run that, run that first AUD 20 million ourselves." Okay? So when you get to a situation where the price is too expensive for what you think the risk is, and you've got capital to put into a protected cell, then that's when a captive comes into play. And what's happened with captives over the years is once upon a time, they were difficult to run, they were hard to run, they were complicated to run. It hasn't got easier, the systems have got better, and you can put them in.
Okay, I think that's everything.
Lunch.
That concludes our session.
Thanks.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks for putting up with us, and thanks for giving us the time this morning. We very, very much appreciate it. Okay, thanks a lot.
We're serving our lunch, buffet lunch outside, if you'd like to stay.