Independent claims benchmarking & advice
The promise is not made at the sale. It is kept, or broken, at the claim.
Insurance sells a promise. The claim is the only moment the customer finds out whether it was true. We help insurers win that moment, and prove what it is worth.
- Independent
- Evidence-led
- Benchmarked across the market
- The claimant’s voice
The idea
The claim is not a cost to be contained. It is the front line of trust.
Every insurer says it is good at claims. The customer has learned to discount all of it, because it is the company praising itself. What cannot be discounted is how a claim actually felt, and what the customer did next.
For years the industry has managed claims as a back-office function, measured in cost, cycle time and leakage, while the brand was built somewhere else entirely. Yet the claim is the single moment when everything the marketing ever promised is tested, in full, by a customer who is frightened, out of their depth, and paying very close attention.
Handle that moment well and loyalty, growth and reputation follow. Handle it badly, or merely adequately, and the customer quietly leaves. The evidence for this now exists, at market scale. claims.company was founded to put it to work.
The blind spot
The cost of a claim sits in one place. The value is scattered everywhere else.
Which is why the cost is managed and the value is missed.
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Where the cost sits
One line on one report.
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Where the value goes
Scattered across next year’s numbers.
The evidence
What a good claim is worth, counted at a scale no single insurer could reach.
Our thinking is built on one of the largest bodies of claimant experience ever gathered in the UK: more than six years of independent tracking, hearing from ordinary customers about real claims, then following each of them to renewal to see what they actually did. No single insurer can see the whole market. We can.
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150,000+
UK motor and home customers heard from, over 30,000 of them describing a claim they had just lived through.
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~2×
A poor claim roughly doubles switching at renewal, in motor and home alike.
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29pp
The gap in two-year switching between a good claim and a poor one in motor, around 26 points in home. It survives holding price constant.
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“Fine”
Customers whose claim was merely fine leave at nearly the rate of those whose claim was poor. Adequate is not a safe place to stand.
Figures from six years of independent UK motor and home claimant tracking, and analysis prepared for the forthcoming book The Claim Is the Promise. Draft figures, subject to final verification before publication.
The framework
Four questions, all answered in one moment.
Borrowed from The Trusted Advisor and pressed into the service of claims: trust is credibility, reliability and intimacy, divided by self-orientation. A claim is simply the moment those four terms are tested together, whether the customer meant to ask or not.
Trust = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy Self‑orientation
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Credibility
“Do you know what you are doing?”
A customer can forgive a great deal, but they can tell within minutes whether they are in capable hands.
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Reliability
“Will you do what you said?”
A claim is a sequence of small promises. The customer is counting, even when they do not realise they are counting.
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Intimacy
“Am I safe with you?”
The term the industry measures least, and the one customers describe most vividly, long after the money is paid.
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Self-orientation
“Are you on my side, or your own?”
The denominator. It does not subtract from trust. It divides it. This is where claims are truly lost.
What we do
We sell two things: the market view, and what to do about yours.
We do not sell data. The independent dataset is the asset that makes both products possible. What you buy is the comparison, and the interpretation.
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01 · The anchor
Benchmarking
Your claims experience, set against the independent market view. Not your own survey marking your own homework, but how your claims actually felt, stage by stage, benchmarked against the whole market and tied forward to whether customers stayed. Sold as a recurring engagement, so you see movement, not a snapshot.
Claims outcomes benchmark 4 of 5 · motor · 2026Illustrative. Positions shown do not represent any firm.
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02 · Built on top
Advice
The why behind your numbers. Where your claims win or lose trust, which moments are costing you customers, and what to change first. Then the case in the language boards act on: a satisfaction score that predicts retention after price has been held still is not soft. It is money that has not arrived yet.
Kept informedWhere trust is won
Handled with sympathyWhere it is lost
The silences in betweenWhere we look first
Why the comparison holds. An insurer can survey its own claimants. It cannot see the whole market, and it cannot go back in time. Our view is independent of every firm we measure, and it stretches back years, with each claimant followed forward to what they did next. That is the moat, and it is why the benchmark means something.
The limits
What we are not.
Three things we will not sell you. Each one is a constraint we accept, because the alternative would make the comparison worth less.
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Not a consultancy.
We do not run transformation programmes, we do not embed teams and we do not own delivery. If the answer turns out to be a change to how your claims run, someone else will make it. We would rather not be the firm selling you both the diagnosis and the cure.
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We do not sell the data.
You cannot buy the dataset, and neither can anyone else. The people who described their claims were never ours to trade, and that is why they keep answering honestly. Selling the raw material would quietly destroy the thing that makes it worth having.
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We do not run your surveys.
We are not a replacement for your voice-of-customer programme and we are not bidding against whoever runs it. The difference is who commissioned the question: yours is asked by you, ours is asked by nobody with a stake in the answer.
None of this is modesty. It is what independence costs.
Who we are
claims.company is run by Ian Hughes.
Ian founded claims.company to give the UK insurance market an independent view of how a claim actually feels to the person making it, and of what that experience is worth long after the money is paid.
He has spent more than twenty years in financial services data and intelligence, founding and building a UK insurance pricing and behavioural intelligence business before this one. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Claim Is the Promise.
claims.company is a division of Asterisk Investments, the holding company Ian founded to build ventures in insurance and financial services. Corporate and legal details are published there.
Founded and run by Ian Hughes. Reach him directly at hello@claims.company.
Forthcoming
The Claim Is the Promise
How great claims build trust, loyalty and long-term growth
The book
The Claim Is the Promise
How great claims build trust, loyalty and long-term growth.
A book about trust, told through the one moment where trust is truly won or lost. Written by a marketer who spent a career on the promise and became fascinated by the place the promise gets tested.
Drawing on the experience of more than 30,000 real claimants, it makes the evidence-led case that the claim is the single greatest opportunity an insurer has to build the trust that keeps customers and drives growth.
Contact
The test that counts is waiting. Let us help you win it.
If you lead an insurance business, a claims function or a brand, and you suspect your claims are worth more than your dashboards say, we should talk.