Insurance

Tigbox

Just renewed my car insurance & it appears that a company called IN UK is buying up companies to make a very large group. so maybe the choice of insurance company will be reduced. Sorry if I am a bit late with this info, I am new.

dunstonh

Something like 90% of all insurers have merged or closed for business. There are hardly any left nowadays. It has been a trend for many decades but has speeded up over the last decade.

InsideInsurance

90% since what date? There certainly has been periods of consolidation with insurers (more so with brokers) but no way near 90% in my opinion. In 2011 there were 1,005 insurers writing business in the UK though obviously not all of those do the mass market personal lines. On top of that you also have all the MGAs which are still getting increasing delegated authorities from their panels and really would be considered insurers from a laymans perspective.

As to IN UK, there is no organisation authorised to do business in the UK with that name and the company called IN UK is actually a very small advertisement firm so I think the OP is getting confused. If they are thinking of UK Insurance, which would be my guess, then they are not buying anything (they are actually up for sale) but RBS owned a number of underwriting entities such as Direct Line, Churchill, Privilege and has over recent years been consolidating them. Now RBS is getting close to the deadline to remove its insurance arm as was required by its rescue package it has decided to consolidate all of these under UK Insurance. It is not a new entity as it was used for a decade or more to do their white label/ affinity business (eg historically Tesco and Peugeot insurance)

dunstonh

90% since what date? There certainly has been periods of consolidation with insurers (more so with brokers) but no way near 90% in my opinion. In 2011 there were 1,005 insurers writing business in the UK though obviously not all of those do the mass market personal lines. On top of that you also have all the MGAs which are still getting increasing delegated authorities from their panels and really would be considered insurers from a laymans perspective.

Cant give specifics as it was a slide at a presentation many years ago. If memory serves me it was the 20th century and the focus was on the consolidation of insurance companies and how this had sped up in recent times with an opinion that within a very short timescale there may be less than 10 mainstream insurers. The focus was on the personal retail sector and not corporate/specialist. There was a particular focus on the number of insurers that closed their doors during the dot.com crash period and how that was a big spike in closures.

That has largely happened to some degree as today you only have Aviva who cover virtually all personal areas. The rest have either pulled out of certain markets, sold their life and pensions book to focus on certain aspects only or sold out fully and closed doors to new business.

The context of the presentation was that how in future that being able to shop around the market or being independent wont mean as much as it once did as there will not be the range to select from and the focus will move more to the quality of distribution, price and ease. One of those predict the future presentations. In this case it was aimed at IFAs with the view that we shouldnt get too hung up on the independent tag because they felt that the way things were going it will mean very little in future. Like most predict the future presentations. Some things turn out right, some will happen but not as quick as they think and others are way off the mark as other events occur to shift things in a different direction.

forgotmyname

Some of the smaller companies were bought and and shut down many moons ago. I used a company for several years
trade something. Although not a trade insurer.

Insurance was done on a monthly basis, They sent out cover notes every month. I thought that would be dearer but they
were half the price of my previous company.

Then a letter arrived, 3 months notice. They had been bought out by a company which were stopping insurance cover.

Obviously they cannot have small companies outpricing them, So buy them up and increase everyones premium.