UK Commercial Property Insurance 2012

This report highlights the market’s current performance against key indicators, drawing out how they are likely to play out until 2016 and why. Also provided are trends in distribution and SME purchasing behaviour. Together with analysis of market sizing and ratio figures for the top 10 insurers, the report enables effective benchmarking against the rest of the market.

Features and benefits

• Benchmark your performance against the whole market by book growth, profitability and claims experience.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ strategies with comparison of loss, commission and management expense ratios.
• Target your underwriting and find areas for healthy growth within a struggling market.
• Explore the drivers of future growth and actions required to manage emerging and continuing risks.

Highlights

Broken down into sub-segments, market GWP declined in 2011 for both consequential loss and engineering and construction insurance elements, as well as for all other commercial property business. The 2007–11 CAGRs for engineering and construction and consequential loss cover were -5.7% and -2.7%, respectively.

The market expense ratio increased by 2.1 percentage points in 2011 from 45.3% to 47.4%, demonstrating that while pressures of market size and profitability are having a tightening effect on insurers' books, efficiencies in operations are not quite managing to adapt to these conditions.

Only in 2007, when severe summer floods marked a high level of weather claims, did fire account for less than half of all claims costs during 2006–11. This is despite a continuing downward trend in the total number of fires, with figures for commercial non-vehicle primary fires improving year-on-year between 2005 and 2011.

Your key questions answered

• How does my performance in 2011 compare to that of the whole market or the top 10 insurers?
• What are the key risks emerging in the market and how are these being managed?
• When is growth in the market likely to return and to what extent?
• How can the market turn around unsustainable profit margins?