Renewal car insurance declined

Lovstad

Recently I have received an email from Churchill insurance to say they are not renewing my car insurance this year.  I paid £326.00 last year.  Have 11+NCB and have had no accidents or claims at all.  I rang and their explanation was the Under writers have decided to say no and have given and code D0150.  Nothing in the literature regarding this code. 

Anyway decided after lots of stress, not sure why, but you think all sorts, fraud, what have I done wrong etc   

Emailed UK Insurance Ltd etc the under writers awaiting reply.  

Went on Churchill web site and asked to do a new quote with exactly the same details and sure enough I was offered a new quote to be insured at a cost of £1088.00.  3x the cost of last year ?

Very strange indeed.  I understand from previous posts about that I might not be what they want or have different criteria but why still insure me for more money then if the criteria has changed or is it they want new customers to charge more money. 

Thank you 

Robin9

Have you shopped around ?

CliveOfIndia

As above, shop around.  It could be any one of dozens of things.  Maybe they've had a lot of claims from people in your postcode, maybe you've had a birthday and are now in a "higher-risk" category.  Maybe the underwriters have tweaked their criteria.  Could be anything (or more likely a combination of things).  I wouldn't worry about it, shop around and see what other insurers are offering.

Don't forget, insurance in general (as evidenced by numerous posts on here) has risen sharply in the last year or so.  But if Churchill don't want you as a customer, just find someone else.  Customer loyalty counts for nothing these days !

Sea_Shell

Yes, average prices are on the increase, but it does seem very bizarre to go from £320 odd quid (low risk) premium to "no quote".

Their algorithms must be having a brain fart.

Insurers seem to be making some very strange decisions recently....or are blacklisting certain model cars.   I've heard anecdotally (here), that Land/Range Rover are being singled out.   What to you drive?

If they don't want £300 "ordinary" customers, who do they want?

Lovstad

Robin9 said:

Have you shopped around ?

Yes managed to get a one from another insurance company for 438.00 

Lovstad

Sea_Shell said:

Yes, average prices are on the increase, but it does seem very bizarre to go from £320 odd quid (low risk) premium to "no quote".

Their algorithms must be having a brain fart.

Insurers seem to be making some very strange decisions recently....or are blacklisting certain model cars.   I've heard anecdotally (here), that Land/Range Rover are being singled out.   What to you drive?

If they don't want £300 "ordinary" customers, who do they want?

I drive a Hyundai Tuscon 2018 
I will shop about I'm pretty good and won't just accept renewal price.
It was just bizarre not to renew even if they offered a huge increase.

Pat38493

My insurer for my house insurance (via AA) refused to insure me again this year after I made a claim for escape of water.  Seemed a bit surprising as I would have thought they would have wanted to try and get some of their money back off me by trying to put the price up.

I just shopped around and got insurance with a different company.  Had to pay more of course as I had made a claim, but I was seeing quotes around the same price I had paid previous year before I put the claim information in.

DullGreyGuy

Churchill is a trading name of UK Insurance these days (along with Direct Line, Privilege etc) hence you note the copyright logo at the bottom their website is to UK I not Churchill... historically they had 5 or so underwriting entities all sitting under the same parent company but like most multi-brand insurers merged into one legal insurance company. 

It's been a while since doing mass market consumer insurance and since then has been the birth of Machine Learning and AI. In my day we had weekly meetings to change the underwriting/pricing rules and so you could be declined one day and quoted the next if it straddled an underwriting meeting and we'd decided that actually we wanted customers like XYZ or blocking such customers hadn't had the predicted impact. If the scripts have been let let loose in principle these types of decisions/rules changes could happen much more frequently.

Insurers wont share their underwriting rules with you, the response from Churchill/UK I will simply be its a commercial decision.

Pat38493 said:

My insurer for my house insurance (via AA) refused to insure me again this year after I made a claim for escape of water.  Seemed a bit surprising as I would have thought they would have wanted to try and get some of their money back off me by trying to put the price up.

The AA is a broker not an insurer 

Sea_Shell

One of these days their AI 'learning' is going to decide that they don't want ANY customers!!!   

"Pesky humans and their claims....we don't need them!!"

WellKnownSid

DullGreyGuy said:

It's been a while since doing mass market consumer insurance and since then has been the birth of Machine Learning and AI. In my day we had weekly meetings to change the underwriting/pricing rules and so you could be declined one day and quoted the next if it straddled an underwriting meeting and we'd decided that actually we wanted customers like XYZ or blocking such customers hadn't had the predicted impact. If the scripts have been let let loose in principle these types of decisions/rules changes could happen much more frequently.

I suspect the AI also has the benefit of additional inputs / datasets that humans would not have been able to process in any significant volume at that weekly meeting.

My son (18) is currently getting IMHO silly-cheap (£1,500 - £2,000) quotes for insuring quite high performance (group 30-35) cars, including some boy-racer favourites.  His friends at work 20 miles away with the same driving experience are being quoted North of £6,000 for a one litre.

DullGreyGuy

WellKnownSid said:

DullGreyGuy said:

It's been a while since doing mass market consumer insurance and since then has been the birth of Machine Learning and AI. In my day we had weekly meetings to change the underwriting/pricing rules and so you could be declined one day and quoted the next if it straddled an underwriting meeting and we'd decided that actually we wanted customers like XYZ or blocking such customers hadn't had the predicted impact. If the scripts have been let let loose in principle these types of decisions/rules changes could happen much more frequently.

I suspect the AI also has the benefit of additional inputs / datasets that humans would not have been able to process in any significant volume at that weekly meeting.

My son (18) is currently getting IMHO silly-cheap (£1,500 - £2,000) quotes for insuring quite high performance (group 30-35) cars, including some boy-racer favourites.  His friends at work 20 miles away with the same driving experience are being quoted North of £6,000 for a one litre.

It was just being talked about when I moved out but the primary/initial area they wanted to explore was monitoring volumes of quotes being given and the conversion rate. If we start getting flooded with teenagers quoting we may want to push the prices up a bit, if we get them all converting we probably want to move it up a lot as it means we are out of step with our competitors and our book mix doesn't target high risk drivers.  Similarly/oppositely can edge prices down if we aren't seeing many ideal risks or push down more if we are seeing them but not winning the business. 

At the time we just had a very crude tool that'd stop quoting in various scenarios to stop fraud, rate raiding and identify potential mis-pricing.

Performance vehicles are not always expensive to insure, it depends on who the typical owner is. For example it was cheaper to insure a brand new Mercedes SL500 than it was a Mini Cooper S (as a 30 something driver), add a learner driver (also 30 something) and the difference was even more pronounced even though the SL was more powerful, better performance and three times the price.