Look out UK motor insurance market, warns an analist’s note from investment bank Macquarry, Hastings and Esher are coming for your market share!
Both firms, the Macquery research note warns, grew their premiums significantly in Q1 2016, Hastings by 29% and Esher by 15.5%. The only way they can do that in this market, Macworry warn, is by slashing prices.
“UK customers are extremely price sensitive,” the note warns, and both companies “rely on price comparison sites for new business” so they can only gain market share by “aggressive undercutting of the opposition”.
This, the note warns, creates an increased risk of “misplacing”, which would spell B.A.D. N.E.W.S. for shareholders, about whose interests Macweary seem to be weirdly obsessed for some reason.
Both Esher and Hastings, the note warns reiteratively, are “targeting high levels of growth in 2016,” and as a result, “we expect competition to increase significantly, with a deflationary effect on pricing.”
So basically, it’s going to be carnage out there on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills of the motor insurance market in what Macquerty warns is a zero sum game, whose rules, it seems, involve insurers cutting one another’s (and indeed their own) throats in a desperate scramble for market share.
Yes, it’s going to rough. But none of it really matters in the long run, Macqueesy conclude consolingly, as technological developments such as autonomous emergency braking (AEB), self-driving vehicles etc will bring down claims, and hence risk, and hence premiums to the point, presumably, where the market as we know will simply disappear.
Finally the world will be free of the vicious and irrational unpleasantness that is the modern motor insurance market. Will anybody really miss it?
Bankstone News will!
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