With the cost of PI insurance continuing to escalate, Hoyl believes that the market needs a new approach, which provides both the right level of cover and at the same time rewards financial advisers and mortgage brokers for the quality of the business they write with lower premiums. Provided businesses have the right controls in place, many different classes of business can be underwritten.
The main features include a premium dependent on an individual firm's performance, not on industry past performance, continuous policies, and monthly MI reports.
Led by Director Paul Barnes, who has been involved in the Lloyd’s insurance market for over forty years, Hoyl has built a new approach as the evidence showed that current methodology employed by the diminishing number of insurers was leading to a spiral of greater restrictions on cover and where the cost of that cover was threatening to escalate out of control.
He said:
“We have studied the reasons for the seemingly vicious upward spiral in the pricing of the risk and we believe that our new proactive approach to writing PI insurance will help begin to put a brake on the ever growing costs we have seen over the past five years.”
HUM is looking to work closely with potential clients for PI cover and will take an active interest in the activity of clients in the form of a regular monthly report on the scope and scale of their business activities in relation to their advice and the products they recommend.
Paul Barnes added: “Up to now, PI underwriting has been completely retrospective and therefore every time a claim is made, it has tended to relate to a lack of real time information on the nature of the business and the way it is run and managed, which in turn has provoked a Pavlovian response of further restriction and increasing cost. We believe that our approach, because we take a very active interest in the ongoing business activity of clients, will mean that not only will insured parties be more aware of the risks, but also that we will be able to offer significant discounts to insured clients, as we begin to get a real picture of their business over time.”
“We aim to act as a proactive partner to our clientele, rather than a disinterested third party. Not only do we believe that we can deliver a great product with pricing tapered by our experience of the business, but also become a supplementary and valuable source of compliance data, which will have a considerably beneficial effect on future relationships between intermediary firms and their regulatory bodies.”
