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Materiality

QBE regularly undertakes a sustainability materiality assessment to understand the sustainability topics that are most material to our business and to inform our sustainability approach, Focus Areas and reporting. In 2025, as part of our most recent materiality assessment, we updated our material sustainability topics to make them more relevant to our business and industry.

Aligned to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, our sustainability materiality assessment considers our economic, environmental and social impacts across the value chain on stakeholders, society and on our business. By understanding the impacts we have through our business activities, we can identify the key material topics to QBE.

2025 Impact Materiality Assessment

In 2025, we refreshed our material sustainability topics and reduced them to seven topics where we can have an impact. The refreshed list of topics is listed here and are largely aligned to the nine topics from the previous assessment undertaken in 2023. The reduction in number is due to:

  • Two Focus Area 2 topics from 2023, Thriving workforce and Organisational culture and inclusion being merged into the new topic of Resilient workforce, and
  • One topic, Accountable and transparent business, being removed from our material topics as accountability and transparency is embedded into all aspects of our business and is not considered a standalone topic.

Note that a separate climate-related financial materiality assessment was undertaken in preparation for the Australian mandatory climate-related financial disclosures, which forms part of our 2025 Annual Report.

The following provides an overview of the steps that were undertaken in the 2025 materiality assessment.

materiality infographic

 

We began our sustainability materiality assessment by identifying relevant business activities that may have a positive or negative external economic, environmental and social impact, and the relevant stakeholders to assist in identifying and assessing QBE’s impact areas. The associated impact areas were then determined taking into consideration the regions in which we operate and the economic, environmental and social challenges associated with those regions.

Using a range of sustainability standards and frameworks (such as the GRI Standards, the UN Principles for Sustainable Insurance and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment), we conducted a desktop assessment of the insurance sector landscape and our peers. In addition, we reviewed internal documents to map impact areas from the first step to specific material topics. Material topics identified by 14 of our industry peers were also considered as part of the analysis. From the desktop analysis, we identified a long list of 23 material topics.

Using the long list, we held a workshop with cross-functional stakeholders and SMEs to assess the significance of the impacts of the identified topics and developed a shorter list of ten topics. This shorter list then formed the basis of an employee survey designed to seek further input and help rank our topics based on where QBE has, or could have, the most impact on the economy, environment or society, to assist in the next step, prioritisation.

We conducted interviews with executives and two Group Board members to complement the survey results and help prioritise the topics where we have or could have the most impact through our business activities. This included further exploring what we could do to reduce negative impacts and increase the positive impact. The interviews also explored the commentary outlining the reasoning for the respondents' ranking choices, opportunities and risks for these areas. The discussion included amendments to existing topics and definitions to better reflect the current landscape. The interviews informed a final priority short list of seven most material sustainability topics, outlined below. 

On completion of the process, the list of material topics and definitions was validated with the cross-functional stakeholders and SMEs involved in our initial assessment and refined to clearly articulate the sustainability topics as they relate to our business and industry. The final list was taken through our sustainability governance committees and approved by the Group Board.

 

A full list of our material topics and their definitions can be found here.