Nic Brown (pictured), divisional director – broker at Markel UK, has long been a passionate advocate of the need for a sustainable professional indemnity insurance marketplace. In a recent interview with IBTV, Brown explored some of the key challenges facing insurance brokers in the ongoing hard market, examining the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis and offering tips to brokers looking to thrive.
“The biggest challenge for brokers is managing the loss of capacity and the pricing increases that we’ve seen as a result of the softening of the market,” he said. “Which is ultimately, almost the commoditisation of many of the insurance lines in the UK.”
How brokers can continue to find value for their clients in the PII market is “all about what we do next”, he said. Brokers have spent the last two years working incredibly hard to manage clients and manage the price increases. But now is the time to focus on keeping that at a sustainable level and, to do so, brokers need to do two things.
Firstly, is to have a long memory in terms of the insurers and the capacity that wasn’t there for them in the past two years and put them through “ridiculous price increases” due to issues with their own sustainability. The other thing, he said, is to recognise that if the only thing a broker has to talk about is price, “then we’re all doing something wrong.”
“My big call out to brokers to help navigate the market at the moment is please go to insurers that have got a long-term sustainable commitment to the market or sector that they’re in,” he said. “[That’s those who] have steadied the ship in the last few years and been there to support customers, either from a claims perspective or by continuing to provide capacity and commit to the markets that they’re in. That has to be rewarded because that’s really good behaviour. And together, if we work on that basis, we’ll be able to get a lot more plain sailing for years to come.”
