Insurance claims are pivotal experiences in the relationship between the insurer and the policyholder. For the policyholder, they’re often a complex mix of money, emotion and uncertainty. For the insurer, they’re often the first real interaction with the person who bought their product. Questions have often been raised about the fairness of the claims interaction – only last month, the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), announced it was to be undertaking a thematic review into personal lines claims, with a particular focus on the ethical cultures existing within claims departments.
What’s important in reviews like that about to be conducted by the FCA is to get underneath the topicality of current headlines and look at how well claims departments are adhering to the key ethical issues associated with the handling of insurance claims. In a series of blogs I’ll be posting over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at five of the key ethical issues associated with insurance claims, beginning this week with information asymmetry.
As how claims are settled is influenced by how the policy was underwritten, I’ll then be following up this series of ‘ethics and insurance claims’ posts with another series, this time looking at the key ethical issues associated with how insurance policies are underwritten.
