Over 100 brokers packed HDI Global’s Sydney office, where cyber growth and a soft-but-hard market led the talk
More than 100 brokers filled HDI Global’s Sydney office on Thursday evening for the insurer’s Happy Hours event. This long-running fixture is one way the company is keeping brokers in the room at a time when more of the submission-to-bind process is handled by portals, platforms and AI-assisted tools.
Two short speeches framed the night: Natalie Miladinski, who leads cyber for HDI Global in Australia and across Asia-Pacific, and Stefan Feldmann (pictured), head of HDI Global Asia-Pacific and managing director of HDI Global Australia. Neither set of remarks dwelt on technology. Both dwelt on the people in the room.
Miladinski opened by thanking brokers for a year of support. “Obviously, in this room, you’re extremely important to us and you’ve been supporting us throughout the year, so we really appreciate that,” she said.
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She said cyber had been a standout for the insurer, which launched the line locally in 2024. “We’re having a really good year and we’ve doubled our team. But honestly, it’s a pretty exciting time in cyber,” she said. Miladinski has previously set out how mid-market cyber attacks are playing out in Australia, a segment HDI has targeted with a dedicated incident response offering.
A soft but hard market
Feldmann’s assessment of trading conditions was blunter. “We all know it’s been a tiring year. The market is soft but hard. Hard for you to place business, for us to underwrite business,” he said – a description of softening rates sitting alongside tight risk selection that few in the room would have argued with.
He used the event to mark scale. “We are now a $1.3 billion company. We started from a humble beginning 16 years ago, and here we are. I couldn’t be prouder of the team, what we’ve achieved, where we are now,” he said. The business now writes 14 lines, Feldmann told brokers, with the line managers in attendance – a spread reflected in HDI Global Australia’s first-half 2026 results and Seoul representative office.
A new address and a bigger balcony
Feldmann said the evening could be the second-last Happy Hours at the current premises, with the branch moving across the road next year. He promised brokers “the biggest outside area in the market” at the new office and said he hoped they would be there for it. The move comes two years into Feldmann’s expanded remit across Australia and New Zealand, which brought the commercial and specialty operations under one managing director.
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He closed on the theme Miladinski had opened with. “We do everything in our refreshingly different way: entertaining you, building partnerships, being close to our brokers and clients,” he said.
It is a proposition that is getting harder to differentiate on product or price alone. As quoting, triage and renewal workflows automate, an hour spent in an underwriter’s office – with 14 line managers standing within reach of a broker who has a difficult risk to place – is one of the few parts of the relationship a platform cannot replicate. That is the calculation behind the bar tab.
