The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be collecting fair value data from pure protection insurance providers, Health & Protection can reveal.
The regulator said it was planning to collect the data as part of its market study into the distribution of pure protection products to retail customers.
Health & Protection also understands that the inquiry will be conducted by the regulator’s competition team.
Last month Health & Protection revealed that the FCA is planning to launch its study in the first quarter of 2025.
As part of its provisional terms of reference published in August, the FCA confirmed its study would focus on commission, fair value and the shrinking insurer market.
Value measures data
At present the FCA publishes a range of value measures for several protection and health products including mortgage payment protection and cash plans as part of the general insurance (GI) market.
However, this does not include private medical insurance (PMI) or typical pure protection products such as life insurance, critical illness and income protection.
Using this data the regulator has highlighted concerns with several products and markets, but it has also shown that health cash plans are among those providing the highest value to consumers.
Responding to questions from Health & Protection, the FCA said: “We will be looking at fair value as part of the pure protection market study to be launched in 2024/25.
“We intend to collect and assess similar data of this kind as part of the market study.”
It added: “The only place where we currently explicitly collect value measures data via a regulatory return in the insurance sector is GI value measures data.
“This does have a limited degree of overlap into what we might call pure protection, for example personal accident, but does not cover the broader pure protection landscape.
“We do collect and publish some product sales data on pure protection – but this is looking at business volumes rather than value.”
