The UK's major supermarkets are building insurance businesses at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Morrisons has become the latest to make its move, launching pet and travel cover in partnership with Hood Group - but it is entering a market where its rivals have been quietly laying foundations for years, or in some cases just months.
Morrisons Pet Insurance, underwritten by Burns & Wilcox Global Solutions Limited on behalf of Accredited Insurance (UK) Limited, offers three tiers of lifetime cover with annual vet fee limits of £2,500, £5,000 or £10,000, including 24/7 access to UK-based vets and nurses via a dedicated Pet Health Assist Line. Morrisons Travel Insurance, underwritten by AXA, offers three corresponding cover tiers with gadget cover included as standard on direct purchases. Both products are available through Morrisons.com and delivered through Hood Group's digital platform.
The More Card loyalty mechanic is central to the proposition. Holders receive 20,000 More Points on taking out a pet insurance policy and a 10% discount on travel cover, with every 5,000 points converting to a Morrisons Fiver redeemable in-store or online - embedding insurance uptake directly into the existing shopping relationship rather than treating it as a standalone financial product.
"With the launch of Morrisons Insurance, we're giving customers access to trusted pet and travel cover while rewarding them through our popular More Card with points and exclusive discounts," said Jamie Winter, director of procurement at Morrisons. "These new services are designed to make life a little easier by offering simple, good-value options in areas that really matter to our customers."
Bruce Reid, commercial director at Hood Group, said the launch demonstrated the firm's ability to deliver integrated solutions for major consumer brands. "By combining our deep underwriting and distribution expertise with best in class digital capability, we have created a proposition that is simple, accessible and genuinely valuable for customers," he said.
Morrisons is the latest but far from the first. The broader pattern of UK supermarket insurance expansion has accelerated sharply in 2025 and 2026, with each major grocer now treating insurance as a core component of its financial services proposition rather than a peripheral add-on.
Tesco and Aviva launched a life insurance partnership in 2025, combining Tesco's retail brand and Clubcard infrastructure with Aviva's underwriting expertise. The partnership expanded in May 2026 with the launch of critical illness cover, available alongside the existing life insurance plan and including children's critical illness cover paying up to £25,000. Tesco already operates established car, home, pet and travel insurance lines, giving it one of the broadest insurance portfolios of any UK retailer.
Asda has been moving with particular speed. In October 2025, Asda Money launched the supermarket's first-ever business insurance service in partnership with Everywhen, extending its financial services offering beyond personal lines into cover for sole traders, start-ups and established SMEs. In March 2026, Asda partnered with Taurus Insurance Services to launch its first mobile and gadget insurance proposition, offering three tiers of cover including accidental damage, theft, loss and mechanical breakdown. Most recently, in May 2026, Asda announced a deepened partnership with Allianz - a relationship spanning more than 15 years - to launch home and motor insurance products from summer 2026, with Asda Rewards members receiving preferential rates and the supermarket leveraging customer data to surface relevant products at the right time.
Sainsbury's has taken a different route - rather than building new products, it moved to a distributed model in 2025, with Allianz taking over the provision of home and motor insurance to existing Sainsbury's Bank customers as the retailer wound down its in-house banking operations.
The pace of activity reflects a structural opportunity that supermarkets are well-placed to exploit. Their loyalty schemes give them direct visibility of customer purchasing behaviour, household composition and lifestyle patterns - precisely the data that insurance underwriters use to price risk. Their digital infrastructure, built around apps and online accounts already used by millions of customers for grocery shopping, provides a distribution channel with negligible marginal cost. And their brand trust, built over decades of weekly shopping relationships, addresses the single biggest barrier to insurance purchase: consumer inertia.
For insurers, the model is equally attractive. Allianz's portfolio of retail partnerships - spanning Asda, Sainsbury's Bank and LV= - gives it access to large, digitally engaged customer bases via multiple high-street brands while allowing each retailer to maintain its own front-end proposition.
Morrisons' move into pet and travel cover is the newest expression of that logic. With £15.28 billion in turnover and a More Card loyalty scheme already embedded in its customers' shopping routines, the grocer brings both the scale and the existing rewards relationship that makes insurance distribution a natural extension of the weekly shop.
