Insurance industry has more to do to gain people’s trust, ABI boss tells MPs

The insurance industry has to do more to gain people’s trust, a boss at the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has told MPs.

Hannah Gurga, director general of the ABI, was speaking to the Treasury Committee on financial inclusion.

Asked to reassure the committee that as insights from technology about society move forward, more people will not be excluded from insurance because the risk premium becomes unaffordable, Ms Gurga said: “You’ve touched on a really important issue, but I don’t think it’s just about AI or technology.

“I joined the ABI at the start of 2022, my background is not in the insurance industry.

“And I believe as an industry we have to do more to gain people’s trust.

“And we are making every effort to do that, by providing greater transparency around how premiums are calculated, by working together with our members to ensure that customers enjoy a good claims experience in the event that they do need to make a claim.

“But I think that’s the first and foremost act for the ABI, working with our members, is really to build trust and confidence that the industry is pricing accurately and fairly, that we are committed to serving the communities in which we live and work.

“We want to be representative of those customers, we want to be more diverse as an industry, so that we actually actively represent those consumers.”

She added: “When it comes to the use of new technology and AI, I think we probably have a better job to do in explaining how we’re already using it.

“Telematics will be something you’re already familiar with, the so-called ‘black box’ in motor vehicles, those are not designed to be exclusionary, those are designed to enable insurers to have confidence from the data around how people are driving that they can make the premium more affordable because they’ve got confidence in the risk profile of the driver.”

Representatives of the banking industry gave evidence in an earlier part of the session.

Jasjyot Singh, chief executive, consumer relationships at Lloyds Banking Group, told the hearing: “From my perspective, I think there are two main themes that are the biggest drivers for financial exclusion.

“The first theme is around capability and confidence… and the second big theme I guess is the absence of understanding the interconnected nature of the systems that drive financial exclusion.

“Very often our conversations about financial exclusion are limited to or focused on products, and not the interconnected nature of financial exclusion.”

He said of Lloyds Banking Group: “We feel it’s important that we are quite actively contributing towards increasing financial inclusion in the country. I think any steps that make progress towards that goal should be things that we like.”

He also told the MPs: “We know 10% of our customers have no savings at all, and for those customers, talking to them about savings products is a second step. The first step is how might we help them maximise their income.

“So all our customers can go into the app and they can actually connect or find benefits that they’re missing.”

He said that for customers with minimal savings: “We need to help them build a much more regular savings habit. So one of the things we offer customers is ‘save the change’ which is every time you’re spending round up your savings and put it in a savings account.

“We’ve had about two million customers who’ve used save the change to build a better savings habit.”

Asked about customers who can only be dealt with face-to-face rather than online, Stephen Noakes, director of retail at Nationwide Building Society, said: “Nationwide is a mutual, its shareholders therefore are its customers, so the decision process does look different.”

He added: “In the last 12 months, 56% of our customers used our branches. So… for Nationwide, it’s not a minority offering. Now if you look to the demographic of the average Nationwide customer using a branch, it’s typically older. And we are probably seeing a disproportionate number of those customers that are offline.

“But I think that’s good actually for the development of the banking sector, that you’ve got a large mutual and it’s not just ourselves but other building societies are in the same situation. That we’ll continue to do more ‘channel of choice’, but I think that situation is going to exist beyond 2030 where we’ve currently got our branch commitment to.”

In November 2025, Nationwide made a new pledge to keep each of its 696 Nationwide and Virgin Money branches combined open until at least 2030, extending its existing “branch promise” by at least another two years.