The IFoA’s ongoing series of Inclusive insurance bulletins explores how the insurance industry can remove barriers to coverage.
Insurance offers protection to consumers, businesses and society, playing an important role in economic development and supporting wider societal needs. Demographic change, technological and medical advances, and increasingly prevalent extreme weather events are just some of the factors insurers are grappling with, and the COVID-19 pandemic is an extreme example of rapid change in the environment within which insurance operates. These changes were explored in Drivers of change, the first bulletin in our ‘Inclusive insurance’ series, published in June 2020.
The insurance sector’s response to these changing dynamics will provide challenges and opportunities. Governments, regulators, consumer groups and the insurance industry are already considering and responding to the evolving environment. Consistent themes are ‘fairness’ and ‘exclusion’, and whether sufficient protections are in place to ensure insurance remains fit for purpose and does not penalise or exclude people – particularly those most in need of protection. Recently there has been much regulatory focus on the impact of financial services on vulnerable consumers, particularly concerning pricing practices in motor and home insurance.
The second bulletin, Responding to change, explores this in more detail. It includes articles from Which?, the Access to Insurance Initiative, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and will be published in March; keep an eye on the IFoA website for more information.
The third bulletin in the series, Tackling exclusion, will be published later this year and will explore insurance’s broader societal impacts.
If you want to contribute your own perspective to the Inclusive insurance bulletins, contact [email protected]
