Saga fixes the pet insurance number most insurers leave to drift

From November, a new Saga pet insurance policy will tell a customer, before they pay a single premium, exactly what share of every future vet bill is theirs to carry, for the life of the animal.

A contribution fixed and published on day one is worth more than a headline price that can move later.

The product, developed with Allianz UK, fixes the customer’s own contribution at 10 per cent for life and drops the upper age limit most insurers still apply to older pets. Dental illness and injury cover is included as standard, not sold as an add-on (Insurance Edge).

Saga built the product around its own customer data. Isabella Von Mesterhazy, managing director of Allianz Specialty, called it a bespoke proposition built specifically for Saga’s customers (Coverager), in a market where, Saga says, 46 per cent of its customers already own a pet and more than half of those pets are nine years old or older.

Here is the detail worth sitting with. In most pet policies, the share a customer personally covers can drift upward at every renewal, quietly, with no requirement to flag it. Saga is choosing to publish and fix that number before anyone signs.

My own dog, Tyson, has been insured since he arrived as an eight week old cava-poo, on a policy currently priced at £33.04 a month with 0 per cent APR built into it. Compare that with the 24.9 per cent APR often charged on monthly car insurance instalments, for essentially the same kind of consumer credit, and the lesson is the one Saga’s own underwriters appear to have taken: a number fixed and shown up front costs an insurer nothing it was not already going to pay, and buys a customer’s trust that a floating number never will.

Saga’s launch will not fix how the rest of the pet insurance market handles co-payments. But it removes one excuse. A 10 per cent contribution fixed for life was always a number an insurer could choose to publish. Saga has just shown that choosing to is possible, not just desirable.