Insurance is often viewed as a ‘heartless’ business – all about making money and not about the customer! Ultimately, all business is surely about making money, but insurance should be a balanced gamble between the client and the underwriter.

On two occasions recently examples have come to light in which insurance businesses have shown that insurance is not all totally heartless!

A small business in Surrey specialises in providing travel insurance for ‘high risk’ individuals suffering from terminal and serious illnesses. Obviously this is business which most underwriters will run away from on the basis that it is simply too high risk. The company I am dealing with underwrites each case individually, with a knowledge of medical conditions, treatments and medical facilities at the destination – they truly assess “fitness to travel” at the point of travel from a medical point of view. Their plan at present is to look for more underwriting capacity in order to spread their underwriting risk so that they can underwrite some higher risks – in order to “truly make a difference to quality of life” in certain cases. Thus they want to insure the “uninsurable” and enable even more people to make those last trips to say goodbye to family and friends, to have that last memorable holiday etc. A heart-warming business in a cut-throat world.

The other example is an insurer which paid property damage claims during the flood – often within hours of the claims being made. In fact our experience indicates that the response to the “flood claims” by most insurers was fantastic. Also, what a good selling-point for insurance – you only need a single disaster to justify years and years of insurance premium payments!

Isn’t it time the insurance industry began a PR campaign promoting their good points?