INSURANCE INSIGHTS

Year to date picture Aggregator (price comparison website) new-business quote volumes are down compared to last year. Several factors are driving the change: Fewer people are shopping around or switching, following the FCA’s pricing reforms that mean renewal premiums must be no higher than the equivalent new business price. This has reduced the need for some customers to seek a better deal elsewhere. 2024 set a high bar. Last year saw exceptionally high switching levels along

I’ve been re-reading a cracking book lately. It’s called “Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?” by Ben Hunt-Davis, a rower who helped the British men’s eight go from no-hope finalists to Olympic gold in Sydney 2000.  The big idea? Every decision the team made, every session, every tactic, every meal, every chat… was filtered through one brutally simple lens:  “Will it make the boat go faster?”  If the answer was no, they didn’t do it. No excuses. No committee waffle. Just clarity

Sales gets the credit. Leaderboards. Bonuses. Targets. Celebrations when things go right. Claims? Claims often gets the complaints, the costs, and the pressure when things go wrong. But if you’re a broker running a decent-sized personal lines book, claims is half your customer experience. It’s where reputational damage happens or where loyalty gets earned. So why don’t we measure claims like we measure sales? Imagine if we tracked: How quickly FNOL is handled (not just by the

Let’s be honest, being a personal lines broker in the UK right now isn’t easy. It’s noisy, it’s regulated to the hilt, margins are tight, and customer expectations are rising faster than most systems can keep up. So what actually matters right now? What should brokers really be focusing on if they want to stay competitive, relevant, and commercially sustainable over the next few years? First up - regulation. You can’t talk about broking in 2025 without talking about Consumer

Let’s be clear insurance is a business, and like any business, it has to make money. But if the only thing we’re using to measure success is loss ratio, we’re not just missing the bigger picture, we’re often making it worse. Loss ratio has become a kind of religion in some underwriting circles. It’s neat, it’s quantifiable, and it gives you something to aim at. But it also hides a multitude of sins. You can hit your loss ratio targets and still be haemorrhaging value somewher

Everyone’s talking about AI and fair enough, it’s changing the way we work. But in insurance, the gap between what’s promised and what’s actually used is still pretty wide. You’ve got some firms doing clever things: predictive claims triage, intelligent underwriting assistants, fraud flagging at quote. And then others who’ve just bought a chatbot and called it transformation. The truth is, AI will transform insurance but only if it’s deployed with a clear purpose. Too many pr

We all love a bit of fraud tech, don’t we? AI-driven quote manipulation alerts. SIRA referrals. Smart pricing engines that tweak based on IP address and keystroke behaviour. But here’s the truth: none of it works without proper governance. You can throw as much machine learning at the problem as you want if the humans behind it aren’t joined up, you’ll just end up shifting fraud from one department to another. Most policy fraud isn’t clever. It’s persistent. And it’s usually

Embedded insurance has been the buzzword of the last few years and to be fair, the theory makes total sense. Meet the customer where they already are. Make it frictionless. Bundle cover into something they’re already buying. And yes, it can work. But for every slick embedded travel policy or bike insurance offered at checkout, there’s a dozen half-baked ideas where the customer doesn’t understand what they’ve bought, doesn’t value it, and doesn’t claim when they need to. The