The Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation, Canada's P&C guarantee fund, has published the fourth edition of its Global Failed Insurer Catalogue, recording 1,273 insurer failures worldwide across 98 countries since 2000.
The United Kingdom recorded 20 of those failures, placing it 11th globally and among the higher-frequency jurisdictions in Western Europe, behind only Spain (25) among major EU-adjacent markets.
Alister Campbell, PACICC's CEO, said the findings show "compelling evidence regarding the continuing risk of insurer failure, in both developing as well as developed economies."
The report highlights a detail with particular relevance to the UK market: Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory that for years served as a base for insurers passporting into the UK under EU single market rules, recorded 12 insurer failures since 2000, tying it with China and Romania for the joint-12th highest country total worldwide.
That figure is notable given Gibraltar's small size and its historically close regulatory and commercial relationship with the UK insurance market, and reflects a broader European cluster of failures the report documents among firms that used passporting arrangements to sell cross-border coverage before regulatory and market conditions shifted post-Brexit.
Europe as a whole recorded 282 failures, 22.2% of the global total, second only to North America's 612. Within that European total, the report finds failures occur in clusters just as they do elsewhere: the UK itself saw five failures cluster between 2021 and 2024, while the wider pattern across the continent shows an identical dynamic to what Grant Kelly, the report's lead author, describes globally.
"Our research identifies clusters of insurer failures that occurred 118 times across 59 jurisdictions since 2000, often after sustained periods of relative calm. This should serve as a sobering reminder to all financial services sector stakeholders of the risks of complacency," Kelly said.
The UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme, established in 1989, is one of the longer-standing policyholder protection schemes catalogued in the report, and its existence places the UK among a global minority: just 34.0% of European insurer failures since 2000 occurred where an active protection scheme was in place, compared with 86.6% in North America.
Campbell said that gap should prompt the International Association of Insurance Supervisors to act.
"While the International Association of Insurance Supervisors continues to set standards for best practice in supervisory regimes, it has yet to embed an expectation regarding the existence of policyholder protection mechanisms within its core standards," Campbell said, adding that guarantee mechanisms "should be championed more vigorously" globally.
For UK insurers and brokers with cross-border relationships into Gibraltar, the Channel Islands or wider EU markets, the report's data is a useful reminder that jurisdictions long used as low-friction bases for passporting business carry their own documented failure history, worth factoring into due diligence on any carrier relationship built around such structures.
For UK regulators and market participants more broadly, the report's finding that only a third of European failures occurred where a protection scheme existed underscores that the FSCS's coverage, while well established domestically, sits well ahead of the norm across much of the rest of the continent, a gap that matters directly for UK-based multinational insurers and brokers placing business with counterparties in less protected European markets.
