Meet the Sherpas: Hannah, the underwriter who switched sides
A confession from an insurance broker. A Sherpa is humble, hard working, and gets you to the top. It's why we're called SherpaTech, and it's how we look after Australia's tech and IT businesses.
Base camp: the bounce-back that started it all
Hannah's career at SherpaTech began with an out of office reply.
For five years she was a cyber underwriter for an insurance company, and plenty of SherpaTech renewals landed on her desk. She became the underwriter Tim, Andy and the team trusted. So when Tim emailed her one day and got an auto reply, he did what any good networker would do. He reached out on LinkedIn to ask where she had landed.
One coffee became a job offer.
"I'd got to know the team really well from the underwriting side," Hannah says. "They knew their stuff and they could explain the risks. That was really refreshing."
She was also ready to see more of the mountain. Underwriting had kept her deep in cyber. With SherpaTech, she works across the full range of cover a technology business needs, from IT liability to cyber, providing cover all the way from the base of the mountain to the summit.
Fluent in underwriter
Ask Hannah what an underwriting background brings to broking and she'll tell you it's a loop.
"To be a great broker, you have to understand underwriting. To be a great underwriter, you have to understand broking. We build trust and help each other."
For our customers, the benefit is twofold.
First, Hannah builds every submission for the reader she used to be. Clear, complete, and free of any hurdles usually encountered by underwriters.
Second, she translates in the other direction. Hannah can take the complexity from an insurer’s side, whether that is risk pricing or fine print clauses, make sense of it, and explain what it means for your tech and IT business. She can take a policy wording apart line by line when it matters. She also knows that most of the time, a client wants a clear answer in plain English, and Hannah is a polyglot. "Brokers go wide. Underwriters go deep. I get to do both."
Insights: Field notes from the renewal desk
A soft market is a chance to look around, not a reason to jump.
More insurers are chasing business, so Hannah's testing the market on plenty of renewals. But she doesn't move clients just because she can. Every change comes after a proper look at the whole picture, and the question is always "what's the best fit for this business?", not "who's cheapest this year?". Sometimes the answer is to stay put, sometimes it is to make a move. The key is that each decision has your best interests in mind.
Your renewal is about you, not the market.
Every renewal starts with what matters most to you. If it's price, Hannah goes after price. If you're happy with last year's premium, she'll look at how to make it work harder: a higher limit, a cover you've been going without, a product that suits how you actually work. And a soft market doesn't mean everyone pays less. Your policy is built around you, not the market average.
Disputes are on the rise.
We are seeing more professional indemnity claims and contract disputes, with a few landing on Hannah’s desk each week. "When you buy insurance, you're buying a commitment. We are seeing those commitments tested, and my job is to make sure yours is honoured." That's why she spends so much time getting your cover right before you ever need it, so if something does go wrong, you land well.
Hannah's summit tip: the golden question
Do your customers have their own cyber insurance?
For tech and IT businesses, a customer's cyber cover is one of the best protections for your own professional indemnity. When something goes wrong in a customer's environment, a claim can still come your way, along with the cost of defending it, whoever was at fault. Their cyber policy can be the first line of response. That’s what makes it the golden question: the answer tells you whether you’re facing an incident on your own or with a first line of defence behind you.
Hannah's advice is to keep track of who has cover. A simple register of which customers hold cover is a great start. A requirement in your contracts is even better.
It's also worth remembering that insurance is just one way to manage risk. Transferring it to an insurer is Hannah's job, but it sits alongside your master services agreement, your company policies and the way you offboard clients. Insurance is there for when things go wrong, and so is the team behind it.
Once you’ve asked the golden question about your customers, turn it around and ask why you hold the insurance you have. "A lot of customers see insurance as a contractual requirement," she says. "I want them to understand what they value and what their key risk is, because we can structure the insurance around that." A combined IT liability and cyber policy suits some businesses. Others need a different setup. As Hannah puts it, "There's no one size fits all."
The trust beyond the contract
For a lot of insurers, claims departments are a separate team from underwriters. This is not Hannah’s experience; she was part of a team that worked in close proximity with each other, during a phase where the market was hardening.
This equipped her with all the right tools to now pick up your first phone call.
When a technology business faces a cyber incident or a professional indemnity notification for the first time, it can feel like uncharted territory, and the pressure is on. They build and run technology for a living, so many never expected it to happen to them. Hannah walks them through it, step by step
"When we come out the other side, they trust us," she says. "Insurance is a piece of paper at the end of the day. It's a contract. The trust is what sits beyond it, and that's what we're building."
Off the mountain
Remember when we called Hannah a polyglot earlier in this piece? That is because Hannah is also fluent in Japanese! She lived in Japan during high school.
Here are some more cool facts about Hannah:
She is currently very busy planning her wedding alongside her fiancé, Taisei, and together they rescue and foster stray cats, taking care of the wider community by supporting desexing programs. This year, she rescued two kittens when they were just three weeks old.
Her interests are not just cats, however! She loves a nature walk (hot tip: Oatley Park), adn has a plan to do a sommelier course next year.
That's the SherpaTech Way
Underwriter, broker, translator, cat rescuer. Whatever the hat, the job is the same: be the person you can trust when it counts. That's Hannah, and that's what it means to be in the SherpaTech team.