50,000 need to find new insurer

Corvo wrote: »

Aye, huge profits. That's why they keep going bang. Dope.

The Irish companies/branches like PMPA, Quinn et al went bang "dope" :rolleyes: because of mismanagement. Aviva made nearly 100 million euro profit last year. Their profits have been on the up since 2015 and they're not alone in this. Axa the same. And claims have fallen in the same period. Yet our premiums have been steadily going up? Hmmmm...

Del2005 wrote: »

And not a single other insurance company has entered the Irish market when we have massive premiums. So if companies are making profits in our insurance market then there's something else wrong that's causing the high premiums and no new competitors.

There's no "if" about profits. Aviva and Axa have seen their profits going up since 2014/15. And yet at the same time their premiums go up. These are facts, facts that a Dail investigation backs up.

Spook_ie wrote:

Quinn were undercutting everybody to try to win market share, you could walk into your own broker and say Quinn have quoted me X amount and your company would more than likely have matched it. Don't know if PMPA were doing the same but you drop the price to crush someone you'd better have deeper pockets

Indeed Spook and perfect examples of how utterly amateur hour the Irish insurance industry can be. Quinn being effectively unregulated in their horse trading and the rest slitting their own throats to all the way to financial ruin in an effort to keep up. PMPA was another example of woeful mismanagement and that was back in the 1980's.

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

And that for some reason they all manage to offer cover for older cars, reasonable prices, didn't mind that I was insured in Ireland for 20+ years, cover for cars over 2 liter (Lord Bless us and Save Us!), no problem with insurance for private use of vans, the "they're all ripping us off Joe" argument falls apart pretty quick then.
And I don't hear of a big insurer going bust.
The next argument "How Dare They Make A Profit!", well they make profit on the continent too. They gots to make money, doncherknow.
So what is the difference?
Whiplash.

Yep DR F, there is a claims culture here and no mistake and there has been one for decades. So why if it was and remains such an issue for the insurance industry here to the point where companies have gone bust on the back of it that they've done so little about it, beyond complaining about it and pointing at this as the big problem here? I mean they've had long enough to try.

Oh and claims have gone down over the last five years, yet premiums have gone up and not just in motor insurance. Yet they still lay the blame there? Never mind that 70% of claims are settled outside the courts so the Irish consumer has zero idea of what they're actually paying out. The companies point to court cases where the figures are public. Clearly it's far cheaper to settle outside of court, or they wouldn't do it. Then again going on the record of scary levels of inefficiency and mismanagement that's not necessarily a sure thing either.

The salient part for me in the article linked by mgbgt1978 is this:

Insurers shrug and blame the claims culture, generous court awards, ambulance-chasing lawyers, uninsured drivers, shortcomings in regulation and more besides.

They are right in some of what they say but they rarely, if ever, take any blame for the massive losses that they have collectively racked up in recent years from badly running their own businesses.

We see that here from people working in the industry. The finger almost always points outward and almost never at their own industry.

Why don't more competitors enter the market? I'd say it's simply down to Ireland being a small market and a holy mess of a market to get involved in, with a mostly hands off government, a legal system and claims culture set up to milk them, an existing low level cartel among existing insurance companies, many of which have been woefully managed in the past, exposure to having to take up the slack of other companies in trouble and no real change or willingness to change that's evident over decades.