Jonathan Newell, co-founder and chief executive at BareRock Limited, talks about his firm’s entry to the Customer Champion of the Year – Insurer award
1. Why did you put yourselves forward for the Customer Champion of the Year – Insurer category?
BareRock was born from customer frustration meeting industry insight. My co-founder John Netting used to be PI customer – a director at a national advice firm who experienced first-hand how traditional policies didn’t reflect firm quality.
I spent 30 years inside the insurance industry watching this disconnect persist. We built BareRock to prove that when you genuinely put customers at the centre you transform insurance from compliance burden to competitive advantage.
Customer Champion felt like the natural category because everything we’ve done, from policy innovations and year-round engagement, has been about making customers feel heard, valued and genuinely supported.
2. What do you think makes your entry stand out and why should you win the award?
We actually listen. When advice firms said insurance felt like a burden rather than support, we redesigned everything around their reality.
We replaced rigid rules with good outcomes, annual renewals with year-round partnership and barriers with trust. Our customers don’t just stick with us – they actively grow their businesses because we’re genuinely helping, not just insuring.
But here’s what matters most – better insurance for advice firms means better financial guidance for ordinary people. When we champion quality advisers, we’re ultimately championing the thousands of families who rely on them for life-changing decisions about their futures.
3. What would winning this award mean to you and your firm?
Validation that customer-centricity isn’t just rhetoric – it’s a viable business model.
We launched in 2024 after four years of development, deliberately choosing a harder path – a direct-to-customer model, transparent fees instead of hidden commissions and trust-based relationships requiring genuine partnership effort.
Winning would prove to the industry that when you truly design from the customer perspective, trust firms’ competence rather than impose oversight and measure success by customer advancement rather than just retention, you create something genuinely valuable. It would vindicate our belief that insurance can be a force for good enabling better outcomes.
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