Customers are getting more and more on the ball regarding their insurance policies

Insurance covers almost everything these days and the web has helped fashion a highly transparent and competitive market place for insurance providers. Some insurance is required by law such as car insurance or medical insurance in many countries. Other insurance although optional in law is viewed by most customers as a ‘must have’ such as travel insurance or insurance for a person’s business interests or property belonging to their business. Then there is a third class of insurance focused mainly on the consumer market which is more specialised such as pet insurance, wedding insurance or insurance for extreme sports such as skiing. On the high street or online, companies set their policy prices and excesses at varying rates dependant on many different things. There is also a secondary market where insurance brokers sell their services who trawl the market for products at the request of their corporate or consumer clients. Another agency service in the insurance industry is underwriting.

This is where the risks of any given insurance venture are calculated and the underwriter decides what the insurer should charge for their services or whether to insure at all. To take the example of car insurance, the underwriter would take a detailed look at a drivers accident record. In medical insurance, another example might be where the patients medical records are examined. The mass take-up of the internet definitely helps the insurance sector maintain its competitiveness and transparency but many customers are even now finding themselves uninsured when they most need it. Extreme winter sports insurance demonstrates this well. It is reported that over half of travelers to ski resorts are uninsured and although the other half do, less than a quarter of them are in fact insured for skiing and snowboarding which are classed by most insurers as ‘extreme sports’ and excluded from their plans. In the main, European travellers also think that their E111 is adequate to get them treatment but this is not true at most resorts. Another interesting example of The way the insurance market is adapting is the furious competition on price between opposing auto insurance companies that has been mainly facilitated by the mass uptake and use of price comparison sites. We have to buy car insurance as a matter of law so everyone must purchase it. This causes pricing to be the chief competitive factor.

A recent example of a failure in the insurance market was when payment protection insurance policies (PPI’s) were discovered by the FSA to be negligent drafted or having been missold to many customers. This has generated a storm of legal claims against insurers or certain banks and firms actually being set up for the single purpose of acting as legal assistants so that customers can claim back any PPI that is covered by the FSA’s investigations. Compare travel insurance on the web for the best bargain. Another questionable product is internet security insurance that promises to refund the subject for any loss as a result of cyber fraud or identity theft. However most customers do not realise that the bank is in almost all instances liable for such acts.