Commercial lines insurance pricing – what's moving the dial?

Head on championing the importance of the 'brilliant basics'

Commercial lines insurance pricing – what's moving the dial?

Insurance News

By Mia Wallace

In the 20 years since she joined Allianz as part of its graduate scheme, Claire Buck (pictured), now head of commercial lines pricing at Allianz UK, has seen that the ingredients required to navigate evolving market conditions are unchanged whichever part of the insurance ecosystem you serve.

Having worked in a variety of roles with the insurance giant – from portfolio management, to pricing, to SME, to schemes – she welcomed the opportunity to support its commercial lines pricing transformation, particularly given the changing market conditions at the time. Five years ago, the market’s appetite for investing in commercial lines pricing started to undergo a shift, she said, which Allianz recognised as the green light to make heavy investments to support the ambitions of its commercial lines business.

Key trends shaping commercial lines insurance pricing today

Five years on, Buck noted that the market now widely appreciates the need to invest in analytics. “We’ve gone from an environment where we had the ‘art of underwriting’ in assessing risks – and… we do take incredible pride in that being an underwriting-led organisation – to one that looks to complement that by using data-driven insights and analytics as decision-making support for underwriters.

“The trend now is that we’re looking to do all that better and faster, but we’re also adding in new technology components. It’s no longer satisfactory to go away and analyse data and then slowly feed those insights back into the business. You need technology that’s able to deploy, respond and report back very quickly. You need to make sure you’re operating a strong feedback loop back in the business.”

That’s where Allianz stands today, she said, and that’s being reflected in other businesses, both within and outside the insurance ecosystem. With Allianz Holdings’ CEO Colm Holmes confirming that the company spent £200 million on change in 2024 and will devote the same resources again in 2025, it’s not an area of focus that looks set to be redirected elsewhere anytime soon.

Why companies mustn’t neglect the ‘brilliant basics’

With all the right parts in place on the ‘chessboard’, the focus for Buck and her team is on the  right layering of new technology and processes because you can’t underestimate the importance of the ‘brilliant basics’.

“There are instances where companies can rush ahead in order to get at what’s ‘new’ and ‘creative’,” she said. “But actually, when something in the market changes, unless you’ve got good processes and you’re able to spot things early and respond quickly, it doesn’t matter that you’ve been doing something ‘whizzy’. Because you won’t have the right underpinning foundations.

“I think everyone’s got to be looking at strengthening that foundation but doing so in a more industrialised way so you can take those brilliant basics and really embed them in the business. That’s how you can empower people to start focusing on being more creative and seeking out those new factors that are going to make a difference to your pricing, to spot the things that haven’t been spotted before – and to do so before the rest of the market.”

Success in 2025 looks like smart execution, she said, it means going out to the market to deliver great results and seeing what it’s building with partners and clients.

“Sometimes the gestation period of investing in your data and your models can be quite long,” she said. “But I think we’re now at the point where everything’s up and running, we just need to look at faster ways of getting the cycle to work, to getting the insights flowing into the business, and in getting our teams really connected to that workflow because they’re seeing the results and they’re satisfied that we’re making a big difference.”

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