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Aipedia: Insurance brokers
Prefilled answers save clients time, but a wrong prefilled fact can become a misrepresentation that reduces or defeats a claim. Brokers who prefill need to make clear that the client must check, and need to be able to prove they did.
Part of: AI in insurance brokers
In short
Brokers and platforms increasingly prefill proposal questions using third-party data and AI: property age and construction, vehicle specification, company turnover and trade. Prefill is often accurate, but when it is wrong the client may not notice, and the insurer may later treat the wrong answer as a misrepresentation or unfair presentation. Consumers have a duty to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation, and commercial clients must make a fair presentation. If the broker's journey made checking difficult, the client may blame the broker, and broker E&O cover would usually be the policy that responds, subject to its terms.
Prefill takes a small amount of information, such as a postcode, a registration number or a company number, and fills in the rest of the proposal from external data sources. AI models may estimate rebuild values, property construction, flood exposure or likely business activity from that data. For retail home and motor, prefill is now common in online journeys. For commercial risks, brokers use enrichment to populate turnover, employee numbers, trade descriptions and claims history from public filings and data providers.
The aim is to reduce effort and drop-out. The side effect is that the client may be answering questions it never actually read, by accepting a page of answers the system has already chosen.
The CII's Digital Ethics Companion specifically advises testing data suppliers' compliance claims, which applies directly to enrichment data.
Illustrative: a homeowner buys a policy through an online broker journey. The postcode lookup prefills the property as standard brick construction with a tiled roof. In fact it has a partly thatched roof. The answer appears on a summary page with a "confirm all details" button, and the customer clicks through. After a fire, the insurer says the property was misdescribed. The customer says she was never asked about the roof and assumed the broker had checked.
For commercial clients, a typical problem is a trade description inferred from a company's registered activity code that no longer matches what the business actually does.
Brokers often address prefill in their terms of business by stating that clients must check all information, including any provided or prefilled by the broker, and tell the broker of errors. Clear wording helps, but it is unlikely to protect a broker whose journey made checking unrealistic, for example by hiding prefilled answers behind a single confirmation. The strongest position combines clear terms with a journey that shows each material prefilled answer and asks the client to confirm it.
If an insurer reduces or refuses a claim because of a wrong prefilled answer, the client may argue the broker's process caused the error. Broker E&O cover meeting MIPRU 3.2.4R would commonly respond to that kind of allegation, subject to the wording. Where the error came from a data supplier's mistake affecting many clients, the aggregation clause may matter, and the broker may look to recover from the supplier under its contract.
See also AI fact-finds and demands and needs, AI-built submissions and fair presentation, the 2012 Act and the insurance broking AI hub.
Apex arranges PI for insurance brokers. We can check how your E&O policy responds where a third-party data error passes through your quote journey to many clients.
Generally clients have a duty to take reasonable care (consumers) or to make a fair presentation (commercial clients). But whether a client acted reasonably can depend on how clearly the broker asked them to check, so the broker's journey design matters.
Clear terms help by explaining the client's duty to check information. They are less likely to help if the journey made checking unrealistic, so terms should be combined with a journey that shows each material answer and asks for confirmation.
The client's claim will usually be against the broker. The broker may then seek recovery from the supplier under its contract, depending on the terms. Under SYSC 8.1.6R the broker remains responsible to the regulator for the outsourced service.
No. The duty under the Insurance Act 2015 remains with the insured, however the information was gathered. A broker that prefills commercial data should make sure the client reviews and confirms it before the presentation goes to market.
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Start a PI quote Request a callbackApex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered in England and Wales, company number 07014570. This page is general information about how AI is used in the profession and how insurance may respond. It is not legal, regulatory or insurance advice on your circumstances, and it does not guarantee that cover will be available or on what terms.
