Background to Private Motor Insurance (Insurers, Brokers and Price Comparison Websites)
PRIVATE MOTOR INSURANCE MARKET INVESTIGATION Background to private motor insurance (insurers, brokers and price comparison websites) Introduction 1. This working paper is in four parts: (a) The first part provides background information on the legal and regulatory framework underpinning the private motor insurance (PMI) industry. (b) The second part provides background information on the provision of insurance policies, including types of PMI and claims costs, information on each of the ten largest PMI insurers, costs of selling PMI and claims experience by channel, common measures of industry profitability, a high-level analysis of profitability, and a description of the bilateral agreements between PMI providers. The ten largest PMI insurers are: Admiral Group plc (Admiral), Ageas NV/SA (Ageas), Aviva plc (Aviva), AXA Insurance UK plc (AXA), CIS General Insurance Limited (CISGIL), Direct Line Insurance Group plc (DLG), esure Insurance Limited (esure), Liverpool Victoria Insurance Company Limited (LV), Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance plc (RSA) and Zurich Insurance plc (Zurich). We estimate that the top ten PMI insurers made up 64 per cent of the total UK PMI market in 2012. The information we set out on these insurers includes the type of each company, its distribution channels and brands used to sell PMI, its gross written premiums (GWP) and the number of policies sold in a year (as rough measures of size), and whether the insurer owns PMI-related companies such as brokers or a price comparison website (PCW). This information was gathered directly from insurers and is more up to date than the data on types of PMI and claims costs which we 1 extracted from a 2012 Datamonitor report.
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