The UK's largest motor insurance providers have made progress presenting information during the online quote-and-buy process, but significant gaps remain in helping customers understand the financial consequences of the choices they make, according to new research from Defaqto.
The study found the market still struggles to explain the areas with the greatest financial impact on customers, precisely where Consumer Duty places emphasis on informed decision-making. These include the true cost of paying monthly, how auto-renewal is presented, cancellation costs, and the practical impact of policy excesses.
Few buying journeys currently show customers what an excess actually means in practice or explain clearly when it is paid, leaving customers unable to judge at the point of purchase whether they could afford to make a claim. Most journeys also don't show what a customer would get back if they cancelled their policy, meaning people commit to cover without understanding the financial implications of leaving early.
The study flagged duplicate cover as one of the most significant Consumer Duty risks it identified: on add-ons most commonly duplicated elsewhere, including legal expenses, breakdown and personal accident cover, most journeys don't warn customers they may already hold this protection through another policy or product.
That concern isn't hypothetical: the FCA has already intervened directly on a comparable add-on product, suspending GAP insurance sales across the market after finding providers couldn't demonstrate the product offered fair value, precedent that suggests add-ons flagged for weak value or unclear necessity are firmly within the regulator's enforcement scope, not just a theoretical Consumer Duty concern.
Auto-renewal decisions and the added cost of paying monthly before optional extras are added are also rarely presented fairly, meaning customers can end up with cost commitments they never actively chose.
Defaqto assessed the live desktop and mobile quote-and-buy journeys of 25 leading UK motor insurance providers against a proprietary methodology developed with behavioural scientists and UX experts, measuring how effectively each journey helps customers make informed decisions.
The assessment drew on Defaqto's own product database, allowing researchers to compare what a policy actually covers against what is communicated during the buying journey itself, identifying where information is missing, unclear or difficult to understand.
Scores across the 25 journeys ranged from 39.5 to 79.8 out of 100, a spread Sam Leonard-Williams, product director at Defaqto, said shows how much a customer's experience still depends on which provider they happen to choose.
No single provider performed strongly across every part of the journey, but in every area measured, at least one provider was doing it well.
Leonard-Williams said insurers are trying to do several things at once in a quote journey: convert the customer, explain a genuinely complex product, and often introduce add-ons on top, a real balancing act he said he has sympathy for. But he said the research showed the balance is too often tipped toward presenting information rather than helping people understand it, since access and understanding are not the same thing.
He said too many journeys still leave customers to work out for themselves what paying monthly will really cost, what an excess means in practice, or whether auto-renewal is right for them, gaps that are hard to catch through the usual post-purchase feedback since a customer often can't tell whether they bought the right cover until the moment they come to use it, by which point it's too late. He said making information available is no longer enough, and that firms able to show they are genuinely helping customers understand what they're buying have a real opportunity to build trust, reduce compliance risk, and stand out in a market where customers are so often pushed to focus on price alone.
This research lands as the FCA itself moves further toward judging firms on demonstrated customer outcomes rather than prescriptive rules. Insurance Business UK reported that the regulator's 2026 insurance priorities explicitly named improving consumer understanding, claims handling and service quality as an overarching focus, with one market commentator describing the shift as a move away from prescriptive, micro-level rulemaking toward "an outcomes-based regime anchored entirely by the Consumer Duty."
Findings like Defaqto's, which identify specific, checkable gaps in how firms present cost information rather than relying on subjective satisfaction scores, sit squarely within the kind of evidence the FCA has signalled it wants to see firms act on before being forced to intervene.
This research also lands at a point where the cost decisions it's focused on, particularly the true cost of paying monthly, carry more weight than they did a year ago. Defaqto's own Market Pricing data has found motor premiums rising again in 2026 after two consecutive years of falling prices, with premiums up 3.6% since the start of the year following a 2.1% rise in the second quarter alone.
Against that backdrop, unclear presentation of monthly payment costs or cancellation terms carries a bigger financial consequence for customers than it would in a period of falling prices, since the underlying figures being obscured are themselves larger and more volatile than they were during the market's recent soft period.
What distinguishes this study from a general customer-experience survey is its direct line to Consumer Duty's fair value and informed decision-making requirements: excess comprehension, cancellation cost visibility and duplicate add-on warnings are specific, checkable items rather than subjective satisfaction measures, and Defaqto's methodology, built from its own product database, lets it compare what a policy actually covers against what a customer is actually told at the point of sale.
For insurers, the finding that every individual best practice already exists somewhere in the market removes the excuse that better disclosure is technically difficult or commercially unworkable, leaving the gap between best and worst performers looking more like a matter of internal prioritisation than genuine constraint, precisely the kind of gap the FCA's own outcomes-focused supervisory approach is designed to expose.
