UK Insurance Underwriting Is Under Strain: What’s Broken, What’s Changing, and How to Fix It 

The Reality Check (2024–2025) 

Insurers in the UK and Ireland have faced a sharp rise in weather-related property losses since late-2023, driven by successive named storms and saturated catchments. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) reported record weather-related home payouts in 2024, and Q1 2025 set a new quarterly record for weather damage to homes and possessions, alongside elevated total property claims.  

This pressure aligns with the Environment Agency’s national risk update showing ~6.3 million properties in England at flood risk from one or more sources today, with risk rising under climate change.  

Climate context matters: the Met Office confirms summer 2025 as the warmest on record for the UK, consistent with projections for warmer, wetter winters that amplify flood losses. 

How the Market Became Vulnerable 

A confluence of trends has put incredible strain on insurers across the U.K., and the data is showing those pressures are only going to increase. 

• Successive storm seasons increased claims volatility. Storms Babet, Ciarán and Debi (Oct–Nov 2023) materially lifted UK/European insured losses, with PERILS placing Ciarán at ~€2.07bn across affected countries. 
• Household weather claims hit multi-year highs in 2023–2025. ABI data shows 2024 records and fresh quarterly highs in early 2025. 
• Post-pandemic mortality patterns were atypical. ONS reports substantial excess deaths in 2020–2022, complicating life and protection assumptions. 
• Model uncertainty persists. Lloyd’s guidance and thematic materials highlight variance across catastrophe models and the need to reflect changing hazard and exposure. 
• Motor risk/pricing is in flux. Evidence shows telematics can improve risk differentiation and, relative to non-telematics, often lowers costs for comparable young drivers when executed well. 

Against this backdrop is increased regulatory scrutiny, doubling the pressure points for insurers and their data estates. 

• PRA SS2/21 (Outsourcing & Third-Party Risk) sets expectations on due diligence, contracts, resilience and exit plans for material services (including cloud). 
• SM&CR has applied to insurers since 2018 and is now under active 2025 reform consultation by FCA/HMT/PRA. 
• Automated Vehicles Act 2024: a new framework (authorisation, liability, data access) will reshape motor insurance data and claims handling as systems deploy over the coming years. 

What “Good” Looks Like for Insurer Data Strategies: Avoid Rip-and-Replace, Instead Augment for Data Fabrics 

A governed data fabric overlays existing systems to unify metadata, lineage, quality controls, and access – leveraging what you already run rather than swapping cores. This approach improves existing investments for current challenges while also critically avoiding disruption. This approach also aligns with analyst/industry wisdom that emphasizes metadata-driven automation, cross-domain integration and no rip-and-replace. 

When augmenting with newer technologies, there are a number of capabilities insurers should target. 

1. Unified Metadata Harvesting across mainframe, cloud, and SaaS, with profiling for data quality. 
2. End-to-End Lineage so underwriters and validators can trace inputs (e.g., flood layers, telematics attributes) to pricing decisions. 
3. Embedded Governance & Auditability to satisfy PRA/FCA evidence requests efficiently. 
4. Low/No-Code Connectivity & Orchestration to bring in external feeds (e.g., weather, IoT, third-party data) without bespoke builds. 
5. Model-Data Readiness – trusted, repeatable feature pipelines to curb drift and speed recalibration aftershocks.  
6. Architected to Augment – Pentaho platform 

If you need a concrete product to implement these patterns, Pentaho has capabilities to match. 

• Pentaho Data Catalog seamlessly overlays with existing insurance tech stacks (Guidewire, Duck Creek, Sapiens, Quantera, etc.). The catalog enables the harvesting of tables, schemas, glossaries, and business glossaries from mainframe, cloud, and SaaS data sources. 

• Pentaho Data Catalog’s “Galaxy View” enables visual lineage/relationships to help trace mortality inputs, climate layers, or GDPR attributes all the way through to underwriting decisions. 

• With Pentaho, you can apply machine-learning-driven checks and audit logs to comply with FCA/PRA standards, generated in minutes. Feed claims, weather and fraud data into your AI/ML pricing models, so accuracy is maintained and ‘model drift’ is prevented. 

• And Pentaho Data Integration provides broad source connectivity; drag-and-drop transformation/orchestration and operational lineage for data integration jobs that bring every telematics stream, weather API or third-party feed into a governed model, no custom coding required. 

Click here to learn more about how Pentaho can help insurers tackle their data management issues.