Commercial insurance conversations in Northern Ireland are changing as quickly as the businesses they cover, according to Jackie McGirr, commercial director at AbbeyAutoline, Northern Ireland's largest insurance broker. She said the shift towards electric vehicle (EV) fleets, rising cyber exposure and persistent underinsurance is forcing brokers to move beyond an annual renewal model and into an ongoing advisory relationship with commercial clients.
"The pace of change has been remarkable," McGirr said. "It is fundamentally changing the conversations that we're having with clients."
Businesses are adopting technologies such as telematics and artificial intelligence, adapting to new regulation and expanding into new markets while managing rising costs. "We would deem ourselves to be a true partner," she said. "That means that it's not just a case of quoting a business at renewal. We need to help them make informed decisions as the year progresses."
McGirr identified three recurring coverage gaps among commercial clients - each one a conversation brokers need to be initiating rather than waiting for clients to raise.
Sums insured on premises are frequently inadequate, she said, because "construction and replacement costs have painfully went up very, very rapidly." Underinsurance at the property level remains one of the most consistent and avoidable problems in the commercial lines market.
Business interruption is the second. "It's not just about the loss of profits. It's about getting back to that pre-loss trading level," McGirr said, noting that businesses often underestimate how long recovery will actually take. That gap in understanding is precisely where broker guidance has most to offer - not at the point of claim, but well before it.
Cyber risk is the third, and in some ways the most urgent. "Some of the smaller businesses don't think they're going to be targeted, but actually that's precisely why they're a target, because their defences might be slightly less than a larger organisation that has different infrastructure in place," McGirr said. That misconception remains widespread among smaller commercial clients despite rising attack volumes, and it represents an open door for brokers willing to have the conversation proactively.
For businesses switching commercial fleets to EVs, McGirr said the operational and environmental benefits are often obvious, but the insurance implications are not always fully understood. Battery replacement costs, specialist repair networks, EV-trained technicians and charging infrastructure can all influence both risk and insurance costs.
Pricing is becoming more complex too. EVs remain more expensive to buy and replace than diesel equivalents, which underwriters must weigh alongside charging infrastructure, downtime and the usual fleet-rating factors. Increasingly connected fleets using telematics and driver assistance systems add a further layer, introducing new software and cyber security considerations.
Those pressures are already emerging across the market, with UK businesses potentially facing more than £461 million a year in EV write-off costs as limited repair capacity and rising commercial fleet collisions drive up claims - a figure that will shape how underwriters approach fleet cover and, in turn, what brokers need to explain to clients about why EV premiums behave differently.
McGirr said Northern Ireland shares many of the same commercial insurance challenges as the rest of the UK, but its economy and cross-border trading relationships create distinct advisory conversations. Agriculture, transport, logistics, manufacturing and construction remain key sectors, while many businesses operate across Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain simultaneously.
That cross-border dimension matters for how coverage is structured. A business trading across three separate regulatory and legal environments - Northern Ireland under UK law, the Republic under Irish and EU frameworks, and Great Britain - faces a level of jurisdictional complexity that a standard UK commercial policy may not automatically address. McGirr said AbbeyAutoline's experience of supporting businesses across those three markets gives the broker first-hand insight into those challenges, and it is exactly the kind of ongoing complexity that cannot be resolved once at renewal and then left alone.
"There's certainly many challenges that are facing Northern Ireland businesses that are the same as across the rest of the UK, but there are unique factors that shape the conversations we have with clients here," she said.
McGirr expects technology, cyber threats, climate events and economic uncertainty to continue reshaping commercial insurance over the next five years - and recent events have already demonstrated what that pressure looks like in practice.
Windstorm Éowyn struck Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland in January 2025, producing the Republic of Ireland market's largest windstorm-related payout in more than four decades, according to catastrophe data provider PERILS. For brokers, events of that scale are a reminder that climate risk is not a future consideration - it is a present one, and clients who haven't reviewed their cover in the past year may be carrying exposures they don't know about.
McGirr was candid about the wider technology shift. "I'm definitely no expert on AI, but I'm certainly trying to embrace it, and I think everybody should be doing that also to make sure that they can benefit from those advances," she said.
The changing risk landscape - from EV fleets to cyber exposure to climate volatility - reinforces the same point throughout: brokers who limit their engagement to the renewal cycle will find themselves behind the curve. The advisory relationship McGirr describes isn't a premium service; it's becoming the baseline.
