Insurance industry viewpoint

2020 is going to bring some interesting challenges including:

How will the FCA try to deal with dual pricing?

How will government and the insurance industry work together to ensure that consumers and businesses are protected from increased flood risks?

As a country, how will we ensure that all blocks of flats clad in combustible material are remediated or the risks suitably mitigated?

Will we see a properly hard market with insurers pulling out of lines of business left, right and centre?

As the good ship ‘UK General Insurance’ dips slowly below the horizon of 2019 into what promises to be an exciting and challenging year ahead, I thought I would take just a few moments of your time to thank each and every visitor (that’s you if you are reading this) to the youTalk-insurance website during 2019.

Serious enquiries only - no time wasters...

With capacity expected to constrict even further next year, more and more brokers will likely be hoping that delegated authority (DA) arrangements will help them to grow their business in a very challenging marketplace. They will want to partner with solid insurers on these schemes and of course provide excellent products and services to their all-important customers.

In this blog Adrian Saunders, Commercial Director for Ecclesiastical Insurance, talks about the special relationship that Ecclesiastical fosters with brokers.

Relationships are built on trust and that’s as true in the broker market as it is anywhere else. Trusted partner might be an over-used phrase but for me it articulates perfectly the role of the insurer in supporting brokers. It means going beyond a transactional relationship and understanding what keeps brokers, and their clients, awake at night.

In an exclusive blog for youTalk-insurance, Alan O'Loughlin, Director of Analytics and Statistical Modelling, International at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, talks about the missed opportunities for insurers as the new ‘data currency’ gathers pace

So, you are collecting data on your insurance customers and prospects? Brilliant. But what are you doing with it? Is it just sitting there untouched, costing you money to gather and store, without earning its keep by giving back to your business?

Back in the 1980’s I started working in this glorious world of insurance. I still love it! So much has changed and the vast majority of it for the better. I certainly don’t use as much carbon paper as I did back then and I haven’t seen a microfiche for a good few years. The talent joining our industry is awesome. But one thing that always strikes me as not having progressed as much are the presentations brokers make on behalf of clients.

The term ‘Big Data’ has been thrown about for a while, but what does it mean and how does it impact commercial insurance?

“Big Data”, in a nutshell, is the collection of structured and unstructured data and it’s implied that people using it can analyse statistics and derive facts that help make better decisions.

What does this mean for brokers and insurers? 

Brexit chaos – motorways at a standstill - Labour splits – Tories split too, for good measure – urgent climate change issues – EU in financial crisis – productivity down, crime up – storms increase in intensity – terrorism – major flooding events – giant radioactive lizards roaming the home counties...

Disasters (especially fictional ones) come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have something in common: none were anticipated by the people most affected and it almost always comes as an unpleasant surprise.

In a guest blog for youTalk-insurance Simon McGinn, General Manager, Commercial and Personal at Allianz UK shares his thoughts about 2018 and takes a look at what’s in store for the year ahead

During 2018 we saw another busy period of legislative, political and socio-economic change.  As an industry we needed to respond to major developments which impacted the insurance sector, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) and the progress of the Civil Liability Bill through Parliament, to name a few.

Let me start by saying I’m embarrassed to be writing this blog in the year 2018.

I was moved to hit the keyboard and write this blog having just read the CII’s report on the UK Insurance Gender Pay Gap that was published last week “UK Insurance Gender Pay Gap 24% - CII calls for action”