A conversation with Carol Payne about Aviva's Commercial Combined product

Authored by Aviva

Find out more about our recent Commercial Combined (CCI) developments, how we’re driving good customer outcomes and what we have in store for the next 12 months in this Q&A with our Senior Underwriter, Carol Payne.

How are you responding to broker’s desires to write more CCI business online?

'Over the past year, we’ve continued to expand the capability for our Commercial Combined product in a number of ways. We’ve introduced additional limits for Goods in Transit cover and Legal Expenses, both of which were introduced to make our offering more flexible and in line with the needs of the customer. We’ve also increased the limit of indemnity option for Public and Products Liability for specific trades to £10m.

We’ve expanded our appetite for North American exports by doubling the number of trades and including some higher risk products and have made further improvements to our general trade with the addition of another 17 trades. These changes help our you place more business and more complex risks online.

In the latter part of 2023, following the introduction of our tailored customer documentation, we brought in the capability to write a combination of trades across different business segments. This gives you more flexibility to reflect your customers business activity and make sure you have the right level of cover.

What are you doing to give brokers more confidence to trade larger risks digitally?

Alongside all of the things we’ve done to expand the capability and appetite of our Commercial Combined product, we’ve also invested in a dedicated skill group. This Commercial Combined skill group consists of our most capable and experienced underwriters, who are on hand to help you with the more complex queries, which tend to come up when writing Commercial Combined business. Continually broadening the knowledge of our digital underwriters has also been a key priority, so we hold regular training sessions and increase our underwriters’ licences where possible, enabling them to confidently handle more complex risks.

How are we driving good customer outcomes within our CCI product?

We’re working hard behind the scenes to ensure our product and policy documentation is clear, fair and not misleading. We’ve tailored our customer quote and policy documentation so that it only displays the relevant cover sections and terms for their business based on their trade(s) selection. We’ve also focussed on the consistency of our wordings, so our digitally traded Commercial Combined policy wordings are now closely aligned to the Aviva Mid-Market Commercial Combined policy wording, making it simpler for you to place business with us however you choose to trade. 

To make sure that our product continues to provide Fair Value to customers in line with FCA Consumer Duty, we’ve changed several limits for existing clauses. We’ve also added 10 new cover clauses across Property Damage, Business Interruption and Public & Products Liability sections, offering customers additional cover solutions that meet their evolving needs.

What further developments do you have for the next 12 months? 

We have ambition to expand our proposition even further, first by delivering an optional ‘Business All Risks’ cover section for customers who regularly use items of equipment away from their business premises, providing wider cover than our current limit for business property away from the premises. And we're considering making some of our existing cover sections optional, to help refine our insurance solution to customer needs and help price the risk as competitively as possible. We're also reviewing other areas like our height limit, with a view of enhancing this to 15 metres for specific trades where we anticipate potential exposure for the client.

We’re always looking for ways to make our product more flexible to accommodate more Commercial Combined policies being placed online, which is why your feedback is vital in our development!'