Samantha Marsh, director, product management, UK and Ireland, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Insurance.
Customer complaints about insurance claims are up; the average value of insurance fraud is up; motor and home premiums are up. It is no secret that this is a very tough time for the insurance market. Deeper insight around claims history coming early in 2024 through LexisNexis® Precision Claims could however, change the game for the market, helping insurance providers to speed claims settlements, reduce fraud and price fairly and accurately. This will be the general insurance market’s first claims contributory database to allow a cross view of an individual’s home and motor claims history across the customer journey.
We have discussed before in Claims Magazine how complaints cost money. Yet complaints about motor and buildings insurance in the UK reached their highest level in half a decade. From April – June 2023, according to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), costing the sector over £4.2m in fees alone to the FOS. Car and motorcycle insurance cases represented 36 per cent of all complaints to the Ombudsman in this period, compared with 29% over the same period last year. Buildings insurance complaints meanwhile, represented 40% of all claims. In motor, the largest increase was complaints about delays in claims, with complaints up 90% compared to April- June 2022.
While consumer satisfaction falls, costs are rising. According to Consumer Intelligence, the average quoted price of home insurance rose by 25.7% in the past year – the highest annual increase on record and in June, the ABI’s motor insurance premium tracker showed that the current average motor premium is 21% higher compared to Q2 2022 and is at its highest since the data started to be collected in 2012.
And, as the value of mortgage arrears jumps by a third, insurance providers are all too keenly aware that the cost-of-living crisis may be tempting people down previously untrodden paths. Indeed, the latest fraud statistics from the ABI show that the avera