General insurance is still being treated as an afterthought rather than a core part of financial advice, despite growing focus on customer outcomes and ongoing concerns about underinsurance, according to Mark Chappell (pictured), head of intermediary at Ceta Insurance.
The comments come as brokers face growing pressure to demonstrate the value of advice beyond price, while insurers continue to warn that many UK homes remain underinsured. Chappell believes outdated sales habits, more than technology, are holding brokers back.
Speaking to Insurance Business UK, he said many brokers leave insurance until the final stages of a mortgage sale, often producing quotes before fully establishing a customer's needs.
"Brokers often don't talk about insurance until the very end of the sale,” he said.
As a result, he argued, general insurance is frequently positioned as an add-on rather than a core element of the advice process.
"It's looked at as a bolt-on right at the end rather than being part of the heart of the sale,” he said.
Having moved into insurance four years ago after almost two decades in retail, sales and the mortgage sector, Chappell argued the issue is fundamentally commercial rather than cultural.
Across the advice market, brokers typically earn significantly more from mortgages, protection products and referrals than from home insurance itself. He said that imbalance inevitably shapes where advisers spend their time.
"A life insurance policy is going to pay £2,000 compared to a general insurance policy [that will] pay you £60, £70,” he said.
That commercial gap, he said, is compounded by a second problem: technology has raised expectations about how quickly general insurance should be sorted, even where today's platforms cannot yet deliver on that promise.
"Technology is good, it's brilliant – it's not as good as people believe it to be,” he said.
He said growing expectations of one-click quoting had encouraged some brokers to strip too much out of the fact-find, ultimately reducing the perceived value of advice.
"The quicker the journey can be, often can lead to lower conversion rates,” he said.
He pointed to property-specific details as an example of technology's current limitations, noting that customers often assume insurers already have access to information they simply do not hold.
"The technology isn't there for us to know if the client has built an outbuilding in their garden for example. We simply don't know this, this is where a broker comes into their own,” he said.
That same technology gap, he argued, is built into the market's infrastructure: unlike the mortgage market, where brokers typically use sourcing systems to compare products across a wide range of lenders, general insurance remains much more fragmented because insurers continue to use different underwriting question sets. As a result, most CRM systems still direct brokers to individual insurer portals rather than offering true comparison functionality, which Chappell believes remains one of the biggest barriers to improving uptake.
Chappell believes that advice will become more important, rather than less, as AI makes it increasingly easy for customers to generate their own insurance quotes. He said AI-generated quotes were largely competing with comparison websites rather than advised sales, because the fundamental distinction remains whether someone is helping the customer understand the cover they need.
"That's all well and good, but that person's still not getting advice,” he said. “That isn't taking the sale from the broker, that's taking it from the comparison site."
For brokers, however, the challenge is making that advice commercially worthwhile. Leaving general insurance until the end of the mortgage process can mean missing not only the initial sale, Chappell argued, but the recurring renewal income and longer-term client relationship that come with it.
Technology could help close that gap. Rather than sending advisers through multiple insurer portals, he wants CRM and sourcing platforms to make comparison easier while retaining enough of the fact-find for brokers to give meaningful advice.
"We need to make it as simple as possible – not too simple, so people just click a button and don't do it,” he said. “But we need to remove the barrier of people thinking it's too much work for the small amount they're going to earn in comparison to what they're earning elsewhere."
That leaves brokers with a fairly straightforward commercial question: if home insurance is worth less at the point of sale, should it also be worth less of their attention over the lifetime of the client?
