Biba 2026: Allianz seeking pricing transformation to support brokers in ‘challenging’ personal lines market

Allianz’s personal lines broker business is looking to invest in a “pricing transformation” to help its partners navigate the “challenging market”.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times during the Biba conference in Manchester (13-14 May 2026), Glyn Hughes, managing director at Allianz Personal Broker, shared this vision as he looked to hit the ground running just fourth month into the new role he started in February 2026.

Having spent over 20 years working in the personal lines market – most recently as director of personal lines underwriting and pricing at Ageas – Hughes acknowledged that the broker side of the market is “challenging”, which has made “collaborative relationships” and providing access to price and underwriters paramount.

With the insurer’s direct business recently launching Willis Tower Watson’s Radar Live package, a pricing and rating software platform, Hughes is eyeing how they can deploy it “into the broker business”.

It is his “ambition”, he says, to see those “pricing advancements” delivered in 2027.

He explained: “It helps us in a number of ways as you can really stretch the granularity of your modelling and deliver far more accurate prices.

“It also improves your risk selection and that’s clearly going to be one of the key levers to our success. But, on top of that, the way you can change prices, the agility that it brings can really allow us to make braver, underwriting decisions.

”There’s also the way you move from one model to the next, you can blend that across, so you’re not suddenly jumping from one to the next.

“To support that we are also looking at some of our training mentality around we can protect brokers’ books at renewal, so that they’re not just jumping from one technical rate to another so we can manage that flow. We know brokers need a long relationship with their customers and if we are delivering significant price drops, then that’s not going to be helpful to them.”

And Hughes stressed that there should be a level of caution with price selection when it comes to “navigating the inflationary risk” in the motor market which has been exacerbated by the Middle East conflict.

“It is, at times, going to hurt our volume, but we need to make sure we’re making the sensible decisions for all sides,” he continued.

“That market context will always be there, but where you can really make a difference as an insurer, when trying to support the brokers, is trying to get down to that granularity. It’s even more important that we get down to that level of granularity, utilising brokers’ data, to make sure that we can help support volume where we can while profitability is under challenge.”

Meeting broker needs

Joining Hughes at the conference, Insurance Times also sat down with Allianz distribution director, Vicky Yuill, who echoed similar priorities for ensuring the “longevity of the customer” and that the insurer can “smooth” the pricing process.

Also just starting her tenure at Allianz, having officially joined the team in December 2025, Yuill is already spotting opportunities in distribution to advance “the artificial intelligence (AI) capability on data sharing”.

She explained: “We spend a lot of time sharing data with our partners so that the brokers can demonstrate fair value and good customer outcomes and a lot of that work for the distribution teams is currently quite manual.

“The utilisation of AI is something that we’re investing in to try and make the distribution teams’ jobs easier, but also to give quicker access to brokers so that, when they need data, if they need support on fair value or customer outcomes, then it’s much easier to access for them.”

Through investment in technology and interaction with Allianz’s broker and distribution teams, Yuill added that the closer the insurer can get to “working as one business with the broker, the more success” will be had all around.

Understanding different broker requirements will be key to this philosophy, Hughes said.

“If you’re a high-volume personal lines broker, there’s a certain thing you want from us,” he added.

“In non-standard, again, it’s a different solution we need to be looking at, as it is for regional advisory groups. We’re starting to segment those down and make sure what we’re offering as our proposition is suitable for each of those market segments.”

‘End game’

Despite still settling into his position, Hughes has an ambition that, he mused, “outstrips the plan that we currently have”.

Hughes said he believes that the personal broker proposition is an underdog in Allianz UK’s success story and he wants to be a “much bigger part of the personal lines broker market” overall.

“That’s the end game, there’s work to do and that’s about those investments in technology, making sure we get even closer to brokers and we have that ease of doing business with,” he says.

“We want to be the first insurer that brokers call when they’ve got an opportunity they want to discuss. When we get to that point, then the growth starts to really accelerate as well.”