An established client's claims record may offer little guidance when it introduces a new technology or moves into a different activity. Claire Davey (pictured), chief of staff and strategic delivery – underwriting at Relm Insurance, sees a similar underwriting challenge in those accounts to the startups she works with: understanding an exposure before there is a reliable loss history to draw on.
For businesses in areas such as Web3, AI, biotech and fintech, that means examining how a product works, how it is used and what customers have been promised. The broker's ability to explain those details helps an underwriter assess what could go wrong.
"The broker's role is to know that client's operating model or technology inside out so that they can advocate on behalf of them to insurers," Davey said.
Technical plans and a clear account of who a technology is being sold to, including the claims made about its capabilities, help underwriters assess the exposure. Sales representations can reveal potential liabilities that a description of the technology alone would miss.
"Sometimes the devil is in that detail," she said.
Governance and legal structures also help explain how a company manages its exposure, alongside the measures it has taken to prevent an incident and recover from one. Underwriters use that information to work through potential loss scenarios and estimate how frequently a serious loss might occur.
Clients with limited experience of insurance may struggle to convey those details in a formal submission. Davey favours bringing engineers or senior leaders into a direct conversation, giving the underwriter access to "the people who know the answers" and allowing technical questions to be resolved more quickly.
Where an exposure is genuinely new, comparisons with better-understood risks can also help. Davey cited the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a reference point when considering AI regulatory liability, using an existing framework to inform her thinking about an emerging one, a comparison also reflected in the EU's AI Act penalty structure, which regulators built on the same tiered approach.
"I think brokers can do more to help translate it to underwriters in order to help them overcome that uncertainty," she said.
Building that understanding takes time, sometimes before there is a clear prospect of placing cover. The economics of working with an early-stage business can make brokers cautious about committing that effort.
"Brokers are not necessarily the first to the party on this, and often it's because they want to see evidence of a longer-term financial pathway for themselves," she said.
That hesitation can leave a young business without help explaining its exposure to insurers. But the need for a fresh assessment also arises within established accounts, where a new activity may sit outside the operations that dominate the main insurance programme.
A manufacturer might embed new technology in its products, while a pharmaceutical company might begin clinical trials involving alternative therapeutics. The client remains familiar, but the activity introduces a different set of underwriting questions, exactly the kind of specialism UK insurers are urging brokers to build over generalist cover.
"Brokers are often thinking about the biggest portion of their risk, which is their everyday," Davey said, "but often claims arise from the areas of the business which are marginal, which maybe don't have the same governance and controls, which are pushing at the boundaries of operational capabilities."
The concern is that those smaller activities may receive less attention despite operating beyond the controls developed for the core business. Their share of revenue or operations does not necessarily indicate the scale of the liability they could create.
AI brings that issue into existing insurance programmes, and insurers are increasingly rewriting policy wording to close that ambiguity rather than leave it silent. Davey said telling a client an AI exposure is probably not excluded doesn't give it sufficient clarity about how the policy would actually respond.
The discussion needs to examine the exposure itself and whether the existing cover addresses it adequately. An absence of express exclusion may leave questions about how the activity fits within the policy's terms.
"I think we need to see more proactivity from brokers around discussing these difficult conversations," she said. A 2025 report by the London & International Insurance Brokers' Association (LIIBA) tied that same lack of proactivity in emerging risk to a widening global protection gap.
Established clients can introduce activities their existing programme was never designed to address. A familiar account can therefore require the same fresh underwriting assessment as a new venture, even after years of otherwise predictable renewals.
