The FCA’s new general insurance pricing rules certainly threw a spanner in the works for an industry used to a predictable cycle of inflation and deflation.
January witnessed the biggest one-month average premium increase seen in the history of Consumer Intelligence – a whopping 9.1% for motor and 4.9% for home. Since then, the market seems to have levelled out after it’s one-time move to become compliant with the new regulation.
On a market level graph, it looks like a nice, neat step-change. And a graph like this could easily lull you into a false sense of security, potentially making you think that every insurance provider is largely behaving in the same way.
“Having spoken to clients and contacts across the industry in recent weeks, it’s become apparent that some rely too heavily on market metrics in their decision making. It’s the granular view that will help them take confident steps forward in this uncertain market,” comments Consumer Intelligence CEO Ian Hughes.
He continues: “When you look under the surface, there’s a plethora of strategies at play. In January, whilst most of the industry significantly increased new business prices, there were some that went against the grain and lowered their premiums. There will always be outliers to the market average, and these are the ones you need to know about and keep on top of.
“To be successful in today’s volatile and uncertain general insurance market, it is vital you have access to data and insights that provide you with an understanding of how both competitor behaviour and opportunities are shifting from one day to the next.”
Insurance providers are increasingly changing their pricing strategies on a daily, or even hourly basis, meaning that having the ability to be more reactive will be key to your ongoing pricing strategy.
Last month, we released version 2.2 of our Daily Price Benchmarking platform, which can help you understand daily movements and enable you to quickly identify pricing changes you need to make… and much more. In fact, let’s take you through the 7 ways it can help you:
- See which insurers are making pricing changes daily
- Identify untapped customer segments
- Understand which kind of offers and incentives you should consider
- Identify new opportunities to open up new footprint
- Make faster commercial decisions to improve trading performance
- Tweak pricing to be more competitive for segments you want to target
- Have access to a deeper level of segmentation.
Become more agile. Tap into daily insurance price benchmarking data.
Our insurance price benchmarking service will help you understand the daily movements of your competitors and help you to quickly identify pricing changes you need to make.
Source: www.consumerintelligence.com
Darrell
