Home insurance comparison web sites
Defaqto the independant financial data collection and research company has completed another report on home insurance. This time Defaqto has looked at comparison web sites, or aggregator sites, to see if and how they benefit consumers.
Defaqto reported on 28 aggregator web sites including Moneysupermarket.com, GoCompare.com, Tescocompare.com, Comparethemarket and Confused.com
The key findings were;
- no aggregator site offers customers ‘whole of market’ coverage, despite what the aggregators imply from their marketing
- few aggregator sites allow customers to clearly compare policies on anything other than price
- aggregators make a number of assumptions about underwriting factors in order to obtain quotations from insurers and intermediaries which could leave customers uninsured if they do not check their quotation very carefully
- some aggregator sites do not provide consumers with the ability to cover all of their insurance needs
Defaqto’s General Insurance Consultant, Mike Powell says: “The home insurance aggregation market is no where near as developed as the car insurance market. For the consumer, it appears that there are a number of sites available, but our research into this market has left us with the opinion that there are only 5 true aggregator sites. The remainder predominately provide quotations from intermediary panels, which could easily be obtained from a local broker”.
“Some of the so called aggregator sites do not allow the consumer to include cover for their possessions outside of the home” adds Powell, “This is a major area that consumers may need cover, and not being provided with the option to include this cover could be seen as an example of poor practice by the FSA”.
Powell continues, “Consumers who choose to use these price comparison sites should be careful to check exactly what they are being covered for and in particular, they should pay close attention to the excess levels”.