How insurance has been affected by the pandemic

So you’ll see now at the moment, there’s a lot of- in the insurance industry, what we call obviously is the rekeying. So we’re rekeying lots of risks, which basically means getting information from insurers that don’t want to offer anymore and then having to go and find other markets for it. So that’s a large issue for more of the larger insurers. And it’s quite common.

Can you sort of put that down to purely the business interruption situation? Or are there other areas where we’re seeing patterns prop up as well?

I think at the moment, it’s more closely down to the business interruption, the idea that they’re gonna have to payout claims in the future, and they’re just basically wanting to- I mean, insurance is by risk. So they want to just reduce their risk. And they say they’re gonna be paying out, and quite simply, they don’t want to take the risk with other possible perils that- happen now and again, storms, floods.

So they’re addressing older flood maps, and they’re really looking to address the flood maps and making sure that the risks that they have are not in areas where they may have to payout in the future. I think it’s purely due to the fact that they will be paying large sums of money in the future. It’s just a reduction exposure of risk.

It could be other factors obviously, that we’re not aware of quite yet because there’s still a lot of uncertainty. And there’s no final clarity in regards to things between third companies and whatnot. So, we’ll just have to wait and see on that one.

Did you notice anything over the last, let’s say, a year, six months to a year, Rob- any different patterns in regular customers coming back to renew? Were they changing any of their own wishes in terms of how they were looking for their policies?

Insurance is largely unscathed. There was a dip in business and no doubt about that, but it was probably around three to four percent, in terms of the number of policies. And what we’ve seen is people are just leaving their property uninsured.