If you run an insurance broking business in Australia, you've likely weighed up the same question more than once: should you take on your own Australian Financial Services Licence, or operate as an Authorised Representative as part of an AR broking network?
It's a decision that shapes almost everything, how much you spend to ensure you run a compliant operation, how you invest in technology, insurance markets available to you, and how much time you actually get to focus on clients.
And while the answer was previously more clear-cut for established brokers (“if you can afford your own licence, get one”), the landscape has shifted significantly, primarily driven by the cost, complexity and responsibility of holding an AFSL.
The AR model has matured into a genuine, and often preferred, alternative for brokerages of all shapes and sizes, from sole operators to national firms placing hundreds of millions in premium.
Community Broker Network (CBN) has fundamentally reshaped the authorised representative landscape in Australia. By investing deeply in people, business infrastructure, market access, governance, and professional support, CBN has changed the narrative around ARs demonstrating that this model produces some of Australia’s most capable, trusted, and successful general insurance advisers.
Here's a plain-English look at what each structure involves, and what to consider when weighing up the right fit for your brokerage.
An AFSL is the licence issued by ASIC that allows a business to provide financial services in Australia. In general insurance, that covers a broad range of activities — from running an insurance company, to operating as a General Insurance Broker, a Life Insurance Broker, a Financial Planner, or an Accountant offering financial product advice.
Holding your own AFSL means you are the licensee. You own the responsibility, and you own the obligations that come with it. In practical terms, that looks like:
It's a serious piece of infrastructure, and for some businesses makes absolute sense. But it's also worth being honest about what it costs — not just in dollars, but in management time, risk, and opportunity cost.
An AFSL holder can authorise an individual or a business to provide financial services under their licence. That individual is deemed an Authorised Representative (AR). When it's a business rather than a person, it's called a Corporate Authorised Representative (CAR).
Under this model, the AFSL holder — in our case, Community Broker Network (CBN) — delegates licensee benefits to the AR. The AR gets to operate as a broker and run their own business, without carrying the overbearing cost and complexity of holding a licence in their own name.
A few things worth being clear on:
In other words, at CBN you keep the parts of the business you want to own and a high degree of autonomy — your clients, your brand, your team — and outsource the parts that eat up time, resources and present an increased risk without adding revenue.
Not all AR Networks are created equal however, with additional administration and transaction fees, so if you intend to become an AR or shift to another network, it is essential to do your research and understand what you’re really getting before committing.
When brokers weigh up the AFSL vs AR question, the conversation often stops at application fees and PI premiums. The real cost sits much deeper than that — and it's growing every year as regulatory scrutiny intensifies.
Holding your own licence means carrying:
And then there's the question that's harder to put a dollar figure on: what happens if you don't know what you don't know? Legislation shifts, ASIC expectations evolve, and a small brokerage running its own licence has to be confident it's keeping up — every day, on every file.
All of this aside there is definitely the time and place for holding your own AFSL. One worth naming: you keep the interest earned on funds held in your trust account. Depending on the size of your book, that can be negligible, or it can be meaningful. It's a real consideration for existing AFSL holders thinking about moving to an AR model, and it should be weighed against everything else on this list.
The strongest argument for the AR model isn't really about cost savings — it's about where you get to spend your time.
A well-resourced AR network like CBN, with a purpose built ecosystem to support quality broking businesses takes on some core aspects of non-revenue-generating work that quietly eats away at a broker’s week and takes away from the core focus – delivering quality client insurance outcomes.
At CBN, that includes:
Beyond operational essentials, the additional services an AR network can provide will vary — and this is where networks genuinely differentiate themselves. CBN support our community of brokers with an unrivalled breadth and depth of services. It’s all about providing the support, technology, connections and scale to grow a better business, deliver better outcomes and build a stronger future
As a member of, CBN ARs have access to:
The effect is practical: the things that previously required a dedicated compliance manager, a tech budget, a legal retainer and a spare afternoon every week start to run in the background. That time comes back to you, enabling you and your team to focus on what you do best, delivering high quality insurance outcomes for clients.
There's a perception that lingers in parts of the industry: that operating as an AR is a stepping stone — fine for brokers starting out, but something you “graduate” from once you can afford your own licence.
Twenty years ago, that framing had some basis, but that's simply not the landscape anymore.
CBN has fundamentally reshaped the authorised representative landscape in Australia, playing a leading role in elevating its credibility from disruptor to a preferred alternative to holding an individual AFSL..
AR networks have grown dramatically in both size and sophistication. They now support brokerages across every part of the industry — from single-operator firms to large national businesses, from generalist SME brokers to highly specialised niche operators in areas like space exploration, aviation, mining, and strata.
The economics have flipped too. For most brokerages, the AR model now delivers benefits of scale that are genuinely hard to replicate independently:
This is the shift CBN has been leading. CBN currently supports more than 350 corporate ARs across Australia and New Zealand, placing over $1 billion in gross written premium through the network.
For experienced brokers and existing AFSL holders in particular, the question has changed. It's no longer “can I afford my own licence?” It's “why would I absorb the growing compliance cost and risk burden of an AFSL when I can leverage the governance, capability, and scale of a mature AR network?”
For some brokerages, running their own licence will still be the right answer. For many, particularly those spending more and more of their time on compliance and infrastructure rather than client solutions, the AR model has quietly become the better one.
If the AR model sounds like the right fit for where your brokerage is heading, it's worth understanding what joining a network like CBN actually looks like in practice — the support you'd have around you, the systems you'd plug into, and the community you'd be joining. Explore what being part of the CBN network looks like for your business.
