Biba 2025: Customer education key to fixing public perception of claims management

Educating customers further on claims processes could improve goodwill towards the industry.

That was according to Andrew Gibbons, managing director at Mason Owen Financial Services, who spoke at the 2025 Biba Conference in a seminar titled Partnering to Deliver Value on Claims, which discussed the importance of claims handling in a sector prone to reputational risk.

Gibbons said that claims management is the “shop window” of insurance and has the potential to “strengthen relationships, enhance reputation and drive long-term client loyalty”.

In turn, he said that educating customers on claims processes could improve goodwill towards the industry, which he feels suffers from bad press despite high payout rates.

“The FCA released a lot of claims data recently and it perhaps gave an unfair picture of what insurers are actually doing in this area,” Gibbons said.

“People forget that insurers pay over 99% of claims, it’s just that 1% that don’t get paid.

“We looked at the reason why those claims weren’t getting paid and tried to use that in an informative way to produce some guides for customers.”

‘Game change’

Bruce Hepburn, chief executive at Mactavish, agreed with Gibbons that customer education could benefit the future of claims management.

He explained: “I think it’s wrong to talk about customers in this industry in the same way you talk about customers in another industry. If you sell a car to somebody, their only part of the bargain is to pay for it.

“Insurance isn’t like that, the customer has a part to play. If you really want to game change this industry, you’re going to need to invest to educate the customer more. They have to understand their own risks, the law requires them to.

“You have to be able to explain your risk to the insurer, you have to comply with the policy conditions.”