Laura Sweetman and Danielle Medhurst: PremFina’s ‘blueprint for success’ to fill personal lines gap

When finance firm Close Brothers announced in July 2025 that its premium finance arm will exit the personal lines market over the next year, rival premium finance provider PremFina immediately identified this as an attractive opportunity to scoop up more customers and support the business to reach its target compound annual growth rate of 85% between 2024 and 2027.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, PremFina’s chief product and revenue officer Laura Sweetman – who previously worked at Close Brothers for 10 years in its personal lines function – explains that acquiring Close Brothers’ former personal lines premium finance customers has been a “priority” over the last few weeks.

She says: “We are going to benefit from the news of Close Brothers pulling out of the personal lines market [and] that’s something that we’re actively working on.

“Historically, those were the relationships that I held personally at Close Brothers, so we’d already laid a lot of the pipework.”

Sweetman first joined PremFina in 2022 as chief operating officer, before taking on her current, newly created role in May this year.

She continues: “From a broker perspective, personal lines is high volume, so they want [service] to be as seamless as possible for their customers. They don’t want to take any additional operational burden from the premium finance side.

“For us, it’s about how we apply our technology to help enable those goals that a broker has.”

Building for ‘2.0’

PremFina has set its sights on transforming its model and operations, with it investing in people and technology as the firm aims to boost premium finance volumes to £1.9 bn.

Chief strategy officer Danielle Medhurst tells Insurance Times that, with fiercer competition in the financial and insurance sectors, “it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the pace of change without additional operational costs because the technology [used] was more legacy”.

While companies have been left in a position where they can only tinker with the front-end, Medhurst notes that the investment was about building “a scalable business model and at the heart of that is having the right technology and building from the inside out”.

She says: “For us, it was [about] balancing the two things between the expertise, the service and the relationships that you build with brokers, but [also] having the technology to be able to provide that to all brokers, regardless of their size. That has been the blueprint for success.

“Now we’re coming to the back end of that heavy technology investment, building the right team, building the right fundamental business and then being able to accelerate and build for 2.0.”

The operations team currently uses Aileen, which is a customisable, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform. It acts as an embedded part of the business to improve responsiveness, identify trends, vulnerabilities and complaints.

Using this tool, Medhurst says her firm “plans to have a relatively small headcount for the size of the business” and streamline the processes that can be automated.

She also explains that insurance and financial services have “lagged behind” in terms of investing into digital customer service and insurance.

“We spent the last few years investing in that technology [and] that means we can respond to change, we can scale [and] we can react in the right way,” she continues.

Responding to regulatory changes

Meanwhile, Medhurst also stresses that PremFina prioritises using the right technology to enable service to keep pace with consumer demand and regulatory changes.

One of the main regulatory changes affecting the premium finance sector in 2025 followed the Supreme Court case on motor finance mis-selling.

Heard in April 2025, the ruling enforced changes to commission transparency and premium finance charges.

Close Brothers withdrew from personal lines in the run up to the UK Supreme Court Ruling, which impacted around 10% of the provider’s broker relationships.

Medhurst says that changes to PremFina’s premium finance regime were made with broker impact in mind to ensure it did not affect their operations.

And she concludes that while the Close Brothers retreat has “accelerated” PremFina’s position in personal lines, the focus now is on “doing the right thing” and creating a scalable business model that “can add value to brokers”.