Existing insurance Co. can see my confused.com quotes?

Ant555

Can Insurance Co. gain access to quotes I have had from other companies on comparison sites?

After some conversation about my renewal quote being too high, the agent accessed the (slight) differences between my existing policy with them and the quote I had on confused.com
 - slightly different job title,  No. of adults in the house, market value etc etc

Is that something new?  I guess I agreed although what he asked relating to permission for this did sound a bit vague.

DullGreyGuy

From what you are saying they are looking at the existing policy and the quote you had from them via the aggregator? 

In which case absolutely nothing new... aggregators work by sending the information you input to the different providers who then return a quote which the aggregator shows to you. Any insurer with a quarter decent IT system should be able to link an incoming request for a quote with both previous requests and existing/former customers.

Ant555

Ah yes, they weren't specifically looking at the quote from the other company, they were looking at the quote that they provided somewhere in the results.

That makes sense - just didn't picture it that way round.

Thanks

DullGreyGuy

Ant555 said:

Ah yes, they weren't specifically looking at the quote from the other company, they were looking at the quote that they provided somewhere in the results.

That makes sense - just didn't picture it that way round.

I'm just going by what you are saying in that they are comparing the answers to the questions which certainly would be from what discussed above.

What they may also have is a view as to how their price compared to others. It's been a long time since I had dealings with a company like Confused.com so my memory is fuzzy. I am 100% sure that as an insurance provider you could pay to be told what rank you were in the returned quotes. You may have been able to get the price of what the cheapest quoted but less sure on that. What you definitely couldn't buy was the name of the provider, the product in question and their price... all data on others pricing was on an anonymised basis. 

What providers do with this data and if they expose it to call centre agents is another question. We at the time certainly wouldnt have noted on the system that we were the cheapest quote received to call the customers bluff when they said they've gotten cheaper quotes elsewhere. Instead we combined it with other competitor pricing analysis we paid for and fed into the analysis for pricing changes and estimating the likely impact if, for example, we bump up premiums for the under 21s by 3% or cut the premiums for owners of VW cars by 1%