You can spend £50,000 on a pair of curtains. Beds can run to tens of thousands of pounds, while high-end pans, knives and plates can add serious value before anyone has even considered the art or jewellery.
According to Ann Owen, managing director of Aviva Private Clients, that is where underinsurance in the high net worth market often hides, not in one dramatic omission, but in the accumulated value of everything inside a home. The challenge is identifying that accumulated value before a claim exposes the gap, particularly when clients themselves may have little idea what their contents are worth.
"Everybody, whether you're wealthy, high net worth or a homeowner with a standard policy, everybody underestimates what they've got, because you buy things over the years and things go up in value," Owen said, describing underinsurance in the high net worth space as "a massive problem."
For the highest-value homes, identifying that gap can require surveyors and appraisers to assess the exposure directly. "It's really clear to our people that the contents sum insured isn't enough, because you only need to take a look at the quality of someone's carpets and curtains," Owen said.
"I think people in the UK generally can be quite modest about what they've got and not think about how much they've spent. But when you actually sit down and work out what is in these houses, it can be huge."
The reasoning behind flagging those gaps early, Owen said, is claims-driven: "We want to be able to go to that customer, pay their claim, and not even be talking about the fact that there isn't enough coverage for them. We want to pay them in full every single time."
Jewellery and fine art add another layer of difficulty because values can move independently of anything the client actually buys. Owen pointed to the death of David Hockney as the kind of event that can shift valuations sharply without a policyholder necessarily considering the insurance implications.
That difficulty compounds at the top of the market, where clients increasingly hold assets across several jurisdictions at once. "Particularly in the ultra-high-net-worth space, people become global citizens," Owen said. "They'll be domiciled in one country for whatever reason is best for them, but they will have exposures in lots of countries, and protecting that wealth makes it complex for us."
Switzerland was one example, with Owen pointing to the canton system and the use of free ports for art storage in Switzerland and Singapore as examples of the complexity involved in protecting assets spread across jurisdictions.
The common thread is that the high net worth label itself tells an insurer relatively little about the risk underneath it.
"Sometimes the industry maybe thinks that a high-net-worth customer is a high-net-worth customer – and they absolutely are not," Owen said, arguing that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. "We cannot take the view that one is the same as the next. They are all different."
At the top end of the market, Owen argued that greater complexity means human judgement remains essential.
"There's something quirky about all of our very large clients, and we love that," she said. "You've got to recognise that to win in this market."
That makes underinsurance more than a question of periodically increasing a contents figure. As assets become more varied and harder to fit into standard assumptions, accurately presenting the client becomes part of protecting them from the gap.
The sums insured may ultimately sit on the policy, but getting them right starts with understanding what is actually behind them.
