Car Insurance NCD

mikeisathome

Hi,
  I have used the Car Insurance Comparison Calculator and many times before I have used all other Car Insurance Comparison websites.
For No Claims Discounts (yrs NCD) most default menus offer 0 up to many years ( some 25+ ).

My question is I have had 9 yrs NCD for the past 20 years or so yet they never increase that, so why not or why do the websites offer larger numbers.
If there truly is a scale of discounts why do insurers not increase your NCD yearly and why are we shown unavailable values in detail collection.

DullGreyGuy

mikeisathome said:

Hi,
  I have used the Car Insurance Comparison Calculator and many times before I have used all other Car Insurance Comparison websites.
For No Claims Discounts (yrs NCD) most default menus offer 0 up to many years ( some 25+ ).

My question is I have had 9 yrs NCD for the past 20 years or so yet they never increase that, so why not or why do the websites offer larger numbers.
If there truly is a scale of discounts why do insurers not increase your NCD yearly and why are we shown unavailable values in detail collection.

There is no universal industry standard when it comes to NCD/NCB, there are common practices but many providers have their own quirks or novel ideas as a way to attract customers (hence DL created the Named Driver NCD) or just doing what they thought was reasonable.

Historically you got the maximum no claims discount at 5 years, letters would often say 5 or more years, and that was fine. Then someone else came along and said wouldnt it be great marketing to say we recognise up to 9 years NCD! In reality it was smoke and mirrors as what they actually did was rather than increasing the discount by 5% in year 5 as they had previously they only increased it by 1% and continued like that until 9 years at which point you then got the same discount as you used to get at 5 years but Marketing loved it.

Insurance companies often have archaic systems, a former client once offered a large consultancy a blank cheque to replace all their claims systems and processes within 12 months, the consultancy refused saying the minimum realistic time scale was 6 years and unlikely any change from a nine figure budget. As a consequence insurers have kept core systems and bought new fancy front ends that allow them to do quotes on the web or via aggregators or allow a customer to log in and do a mid term adjustment themselves.

We did look at once changing our system to deal with higher NCDs but NCD was hardcoded as a single digit figure everywhere in our systems and so to change it to a two digit figure was a major project and so the financials didn't stack up. 

Some insurers are newer so aren't hamstrung by old systems, some insures decided from the outset that a 2 digit NCD field might be a good idea, some people love bragging about their 30 year NCD. There's a host of reasons why different insurers take different approaches. 

There is an obvious challenge to those that do want to offer a longer NCD period in that many customers coming to them will only have letters say 5 or more years or 9 or more years etc and so they need to have a process for dealing with the customer claiming 20 years but evidencing 9. 

Most insurers max out at 9 or below, I've never seen an insurer that gives any further discount for having over 9 years but there are people on here who claim they got cheaper prices when saying they had 20 years rather than 9. Its hard to know if this is truly due to the higher NCD count or if they have triggered counter fraud measures which bumped the premium when they reduced the NCD.