Nearly half of commercial lines brokers claim Consumer Duty support from insurers is at best patchy and at worst non-existent. Only one in twenty commercial lines brokers claim Consumer Duty support from insurers is excellent. These are the headline findings from FWD’s latest research which surveyed 250 UK insurance brokers using its proprietary panel Broking Now!
Provincial brokers (outside of the Top 250 and with 1 to 2 offices) were less well supported than larger firms.
Aviva has been rated top for Consumer Duty implementation support to its commercial lines brokers, with 67% rating them either satisfactory or excellent. Other insurers are rated less highly.
FWD benchmarked and analysed how well brokers were being supported by 11 insurers with whom they had agency and compared levels of support by type of broking firm. Insurers covered by the research include:
- Ageas
- Allianz
- Arch
- Aviva
- AXA
- Covea
- LG
- NIG
- RSA
- Travelers
- Zurich
The research also provides a measure of how well the brokers are preparing for FCA scrutiny from a Consumer Duty perspective and, worryingly only half were conducting any kind of monitoring client feedback. This fell to 37% of smaller brokerage firms indicating that the larger firms had the resources required to be able to put these measures in place; the figure rose to 84% in the Top 50 firms.
In anticipation of FWD’s syndicated Consumer Duty study focusing on SMEs, we asked brokers whether they would provide contact details of their customers to FWD for us to survey them, provided we undertook not to pass them along to any other party. Encouragingly, 7 in 10 said they would support this initiative across all types of broking firms.
FWD’s Research Director Martin Grimwood comments: “This is important since the SME audience is one that insurers have a duty to protect but given the intermediation and reluctance of brokers to provide insurers with client details, receiving good feedback on customer outcomes and vulnerability is often a challenge. FWD’s syndicate of insurers ensures that we can provide feedback on this audience so they can tick the SME box with the regulator. It also enables FWD to provide the broking community with its own duty adherence data, in line with the FCA’s proportionality stipulation in adherence to Consumer Duty”.
