COVER PAGE LAYOUT
- Full-bleed cover, A4 portrait.
- Title (top third, large display weight): "The UK IFA's Guide to Professional Indemnity Insurance"
- Subtitle (immediately below, lighter weight): "DB Transfer Risk, FOS Exposure, and Building a Defensible Cover Position"
- Edition strap (small caps, beneath subtitle): "2026 Edition"
- Attribution line at lower third: "An Apex Insurance Brokers Guide"
- Visual treatment: an abstract geometric motif suggesting shielding or layered protection — overlapping arcs or concentric polygons in two-tone gradient; no stock photography of handshakes, briefcases or skyscrapers.
- Palette: Apex primary (deep navy) for the background field, Apex secondary (warm amber) for the motif highlights, off-white for type.
- Recommended fonts: a humanist sans-serif (e.g. Söhne, Inter, or Calibri fallback) at 48pt for the title; same family at 22pt italic for the subtitle; 10pt small caps for the edition strap.
- Bottom strip: thin amber rule, beneath which sits the regulatory footer in 8pt: "Apex Insurance Brokers Ltd | FCA Firm Reference 724952 | Companies House 07014570 | Bristol".
“A renewal handled on autopilot is the renewal most likely to leave a firm exposed.”
We wrote this guide because the Professional Indemnity (PI) market for UK independent financial advisers (IFAs) and personal investment firms has not been this difficult to navigate in over a decade. The hardening that began after the British Steel Pension Scheme (BSPS) advice cohort came to light has not unwound; the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Consumer Duty is now embedded in supervisory expectations rather than treated as a transition project; the defined benefit (DB) transfer market has shrunk to a fraction of its 2017 size, leaving a long tail of historic advice still working through the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS); and the run-off market — where firms that have ceased or sold need to buy continuing cover — is narrower and more selective than at any point in recent memory.
The guide is aimed at the people who carry the cover-buying decision in personal investment firms: principals, compliance officers, and directors of IFAs, restricted advice firms, wealth managers and discretionary fund managers (DFMs). It assumes you understand your own regulated activities and need a broker’s view of the market that prices them. It is not aimed at consumers.
Inside, we walk through why PI is mandatory, what it actually covers and excludes, how to size limits sensibly, how to read a quote document line by line, what run-off and retroactive cover do, a ninety-day renewal timeline, how to handle a claim when one arrives, what to look for in a broker, and the recurring myths that cause avoidable uninsured exposure. We end with a checklist and the contact details for our team in Bristol.
This guide is a broker’s perspective, not advice — please contact us to discuss your specific circumstances.
The Apex Insurance Brokers team — Bristol, May 2026.
“PI is not a discretionary cost. It is a condition of authorisation.”
For an FCA-authorised personal investment firm, Professional Indemnity Insurance is mandatory. The requirement sits in the Interim Prudential sourcebook for Investment Businesses (IPRU-INV), Chapter 13, supported by the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) implementation that runs through the wider Handbook. Firms with mortgage or general insurance permissions also engage the Mortgages and Home Finance: Conduct of Business Sourcebook (MIPRU) Chapter 3, which carries its own PI minimums for those activities. A firm without conforming cover is not in compliance with its threshold conditions, and in practice not in a position to keep its permissions.
The minimum cover figures are set in euros under the IDD framework and indexed periodically — currently in the region of EUR 1.3 million for any one claim and EUR 1.9 million in the aggregate, equating to approximately GBP 1.1 million per claim and GBP 1.7 million aggregate at recent exchange rates. The exact sterling equivalents move with FX and should be checked against the current text of IPRU-INV 13.1.10R at every renewal.
The Handbook does not require PI because the FCA mistrusts advisers. It requires PI because the regulated activities of a personal investment firm produce long-tail civil liabilities that often crystallise years after the advice was given, by which time the firm may not have the balance sheet to meet the claim itself. PI converts an unpredictable, potentially balance-sheet-destroying liability into a predictable annual cost, and gives consumers a meaningful chance of being made good when something goes wrong.
Two further statutory bodies sit behind the PI policy. The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) hears eligible complaints from consumers, micro-enterprises and small trusts, and can make binding money awards up to a compulsory jurisdiction cap that is indexed each April — sitting in the mid-GBP 400,000s for the 2026/27 financial year for acts or omissions on or after 1 April 2019. A FOS award against an authorised firm is enforceable like a court judgment, and a properly-structured PI policy should respond to it up to the policy limit.
The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is the safety net behind the firm. Where an eligible claim cannot be paid by the firm or by its PI insurer, FSCS pays the claimant up to GBP 85,000 per person per firm for investment and pension claims. FSCS is funded by levies on the surviving firms in each funding class — which is why an IFA market with a large historic DB transfer claims tail produces premium pressure across the whole sector, not just the firms that wrote the advice.
Mandatory cover is only part of the picture. Many of the relationships that make an IFA viable carry their own cover requirements. Networks impose minimum limits and approved-insurer panels on appointed representatives; lenders on equity-release panels require certificates each year; institutional clients and corporate trustees ask for limits well above the IPRU-INV minimum; professional connections often ask for certificates before introducing clients. PI is the price of entry to most of the relationships that produce revenue.
A firm that loses cover — through non-renewal, mid-term cancellation, or a wording change that takes it below the IPRU-INV minimum — is in breach of its threshold conditions and must notify the FCA under Supervision (SUP) 15. Consequences typically include rapid supervisory engagement, a restriction on new business, and where the position is not remediated, cancellation of permissions. Where the firm subsequently fails, complaints land at FSCS and the bill is socialised across the surviving sector. Principals trading without limited-liability protection are exposed personally to any uninsured liability that crystallises.
“The trigger is the assertion of negligence, error or omission — not whether the firm did anything wrong.”
A typical IFA PI policy is a contract of indemnity against the firm’s civil legal liability for damages and claimant’s costs arising out of regulated professional activities, together with the firm’s own defence costs in resisting or settling such a claim. The trigger for cover is the making of a claim — or the notification of circumstances that may give rise to a claim — during the period of insurance. The fact that the policy responds does not depend on the firm having done anything wrong; it depends on a third party alleging the firm has, and asking the firm to pay.
The “professional services” definition in an IFA policy is wide and typically responds to claims arising out of, among other things:
SIDEBAR — "Covered vs not covered"
A two-column boxed callout sitting in the right gutter. Left column heading "Typically covered", with five bullet items. Right column heading "Typically excluded", with five bullet items. Apex secondary colour rule between the columns. 9pt body, 12pt headings.
The exclusions matter as much as the cover. A typical IFA PI policy will not respond to:
A practical wording point that affects how far the limit goes in practice: defence costs may be treated as additional to the limit (“costs in addition”), inside the limit (“costs inclusive”), or in a hybrid arrangement under which costs are inclusive once the limit is reached. On a contested pension transfer case escalated through FOS and into court, defence costs in the six figures are not unusual; a “costs inclusive” wording can therefore consume a large fraction of the limit before any settlement is paid. The wording controls — the quote summary is a marketing document.
“The right limit is the one that comfortably exceeds your worst-case exposure on your largest individual engagement, with headroom for defence costs and aggregation.”
As noted in Chapter 1, the Handbook minimums currently sit at approximately EUR 1.3 million per claim and EUR 1.9 million aggregate, equating broadly to GBP 1.1 million per claim and GBP 1.7 million aggregate at recent exchange rates. The Handbook permits the firm to deduct an excess from those headline numbers, with the excess capped by reference to the firm’s annual income. The euro figures, the sterling equivalents and the excess cap all move; the precise figures in IPRU-INV 13.1.10R should be checked at the time of every renewal.
The minimum is exactly that — a floor. It is the level at which the FCA will treat the firm as compliant with the prudential requirement. It is rarely the level at which a thoughtful principal would conclude the firm is adequately protected.
The two headline limit numbers do different work. The per-claim limit caps the insurer’s payment on any single claim; the aggregate limit caps total insurer payments across the policy year. A policy of GBP 1.7 million per claim with GBP 1.7 million aggregate covers very differently from GBP 1.7 million per claim with GBP 5 million aggregate, which in turn covers differently from GBP 1.7 million per claim with unlimited reinstatement of the aggregate.
A worked example makes the point. A firm that gave twenty-five DB transfer recommendations to members of the same scheme between 2016 and 2018, and finds the FCA’s consumer redress scheme calculation produces an average redress figure of GBP 75,000 to GBP 200,000 per case, faces a potential aggregate redress liability in the range of GBP 1.875 million to GBP 5 million on that book alone — before defence costs. A policy whose aggregate is at the IPRU-INV minimum is exhausted before half the cases are settled. A policy whose aggregate is GBP 5 million may still not be enough once defence costs are added if costs sit inside the limit.
The mirror-image question is whether multiple related complaints aggregate as a single claim against a single per-claim limit, or count as separate claims against separate per-claim limits. The aggregation clause does this work. Common formulations link claims that arise from “a single originating cause”, “a series of related acts or omissions” or “the same or related circumstances”. Aggregation in the insured’s favour means a single excess and the protection of the per-claim limit applied once — but the aggregate is reached sooner. Non-aggregation in the insured’s favour means each claim has its own per-claim limit but the firm pays an excess on each. There is no universally correct answer; the right wording depends on the shape of the firm’s risk.
The third lever is whether defence costs are treated as additional to the limit, inside the limit, or hybrid. We covered the principle in Chapter 2; for sizing purposes, the practical point is that an apparently generous limit can be substantially eroded by defence on a contested matter, and a firm that buys at the IPRU-INV minimum on a costs-inclusive wording may have meaningfully less effective cover than the headline suggests.
The excess — the firm’s own deductible per claim — is the next decision. A higher excess buys a lower premium but exposes the firm’s own balance sheet to more of every claim. A lower excess costs more in premium but means a single complaint settled at modest value does not produce a five- or six-figure cash call. The Handbook caps excesses by reference to relevant income, so very high excesses are not available; within that envelope, the firm chooses based on its cash position and risk appetite. Aggregation rules apply to the excess as well as the limit: where claims aggregate to one for limit purposes, they typically aggregate to one excess as well.
The cases for buying above the IPRU-INV floor are well-established and broadly the following:
TABLE — "Indicative limit ranges by firm archetype"
A four-column table set landscape across the spread, light banding, Apex secondary header row. Columns: Archetype | Typical revenue | Typical limit range (per claim / aggregate) | Common drivers.
Rows:
1) Sole-trader restricted adviser, mass-market, no DB
2) Small IFA, holistic, no DB
3) Mid-sized IFA with DB permissions
4) Larger wealth manager / DFM
Footnote: "Indicative ranges only. Actual limits depend on firm-specific risk and insurer appetite."
A subset of the IFA market buys excess-layer cover above the primary policy. A primary layer of, say, GBP 2 million sits underneath an excess layer of an additional GBP 3 million from a separate insurer, producing a total programme limit of GBP 5 million. Layered structures are routine in the audit and large-solicitor markets and used by IFA networks and larger advisory firms where catastrophic-claim exposure warrants it. The reasoning is partly capacity — primary insurers often will not write large limits in a single tranche — and partly diversification, since a layered programme reduces dependency on any single insurer’s claims approach.
“The wording controls — the quote summary is a marketing document.”
The schedule names the insured. Read this twice. Every trading style the firm uses should appear, including dormant ones; every appointed representative (AR) or introducer appointed representative (IAR) for which the firm is the principal should appear; related entities under common ownership that share resources or clients should appear; the corporate name and any partnership or LLP names should appear in their exact registered form. Omitted entities are not covered. We have seen firms find at notification stage that the AR through which a particular adviser was registered was never added to the schedule.
Look for the description of the professional services covered. It will normally cross-refer to the firm’s regulatory permissions and to a wider description of advisory and intermediary work. Check that any activities the firm has recently added — pension transfer specialist work, equity release, discretionary management, ESG-themed propositions — are within the description. New activities outside the description are not covered, even if the firm has the FCA permission.
The retroactive date determines how far back the policy will pick up claims arising from past advice. For a firm authorised in 2008, the retroactive date should normally be 2008 or earlier — “unlimited prior”. If the schedule shows a later date, the policy excludes claims arising from advice given before that date, and those claims are likely to be exactly the ones the firm gets sued on. Retroactive-date creep at renewal — sometimes inadvertent on insurer change — is a common source of avoidable uninsured exposure.
The per-claim limit and the aggregate limit are usually set out as separate line items. Confirm both. Confirm whether the aggregate is reinstateable and on what terms.
A line item — sometimes only a phrase — will tell you whether defence costs are inside or outside the limit. Confirm and document.
The excess is normally a single figure but can be tiered by class of business — for example, a higher excess on pension transfer claims than on other advice. Some insurers apply a class-of-business loading rather than a separate excess; the effect on a settled claim is similar but the cash-flow profile differs. Read both.
Most IFA policies are written on a UK territory and jurisdiction basis. If the firm has any non-UK clients, advises on non-UK products, or has any non-UK introducer arrangements, check the territory and jurisdiction clauses. A claim brought in a jurisdiction outside the policy’s scope is not covered.
The exclusions section is where the hardening of the IFA PI market becomes visible. Common named-exclusion candidates include DB transfer advice, advice on unregulated collective investment schemes (UCIS), advice on mini-bonds and speculative illiquid securities, and certain SIPP-with-non-mainstream-asset configurations. An insurer may exclude these in full, or may apply a sub-limit, an inner aggregate, an additional excess, or a date-bracketed exclusion (covered after a certain date but not before, or vice versa). Read each exclusion against the firm’s actual book; an exclusion that looks academic may bite hard if the firm gave a single piece of advice in the excluded category in the relevant period.
The notification clause sets out how the firm must notify claims and circumstances, to whom, in what form and within what time. Late notification is a common reason a claim is declined; the firm’s internal process should track the policy’s wording.
Subjectivities are pre-incepting conditions the insurer requires before cover attaches — for example, completion and review of a specific file-review programme, confirmation that no further DB transfer advice will be given, or a director-signed statement on a particular topic. They must be cleared before inception; if they are not, cover may not attach.
The proposal form and any further disclosures are warranted by the firm. The Insurance Act 2015 imposes a duty of fair presentation on commercial insureds, including IFAs; failure to disclose material circumstances can give the insurer remedies up to and including avoidance. The discipline is to over-disclose rather than under-disclose, particularly on claims experience and any known circumstances.
A quote summary is a marketing document — a one-page abstract of what is, in full, a sixty-to-ninety-page wording. Ask for the full wording before binding cover, and read it. The wording controls in a dispute, not the summary.
“Liability for advice already given does not vanish when the firm stops trading.”
PI is written on a claims-made basis. The policy responds to claims notified during the policy period, regardless of when the underlying advice was given, provided the advice falls after the policy’s retroactive date. Two features of that structure matter particularly for personal investment firms because the time gap between advice and complaint is long — often a decade or more, sometimes considerably more.
The retroactive date is the earliest advice date the policy will respond to. For an IFA continuously authorised for, say, twenty years, the retroactive date should ideally be “unlimited prior” or no later than the date of first authorisation. Any forward shift of the retroactive date at renewal narrows the firm’s cover. This can happen inadvertently — a change of insurer, a re-tendered programme, a switch from one wording to another — and may not be flagged unless the broker compares the new schedule line-by-line with the old one. We strongly recommend asking the broker for an explicit confirmation each year that the retroactive date is unchanged.
If the firm ceases trading, retires its principals, sells its goodwill, transfers its client book, or has its FCA permissions cancelled, its liability for advice already given does not vanish. A claims-made policy only responds to claims notified during its currency; once the firm stops paying premiums the last policy is the last policy that will respond — unless run-off is purchased.
The FCA expects firms ceasing personal investment business to maintain appropriate run-off cover for an extended period. In practice the working benchmark is at least six years, matching the ordinary contractual limitation period under English law, and longer where the firm has given pension transfer advice or where there are known long-tail exposures.
TIMELINE DIAGRAM — "The six-year run-off window"
A horizontal axis with year markers 0 to 6+. Year 0 = cessation. Bracket above showing "Mandatory run-off period" spanning years 0-6. Below, smaller brackets showing typical extensions for DB transfer firms (often 8-12 years). Annotations: "Limitation period under Limitation Act 1980", "FCA expectation", "Long-tail pension transfer exposure".
The six-year benchmark is the floor, not the ceiling. The Limitation Act 1980 gives a claimant six years from the date of the cause of action — but in financial advice claims, time can run from the date of knowledge of the loss rather than the date of the advice, and the FOS does not apply the Limitation Act in the same way the courts do. The FOS rules allow complaints up to six years from the event and three years from when the complainant became aware (or should reasonably have become aware) of cause for complaint, subject to the Ombudsman’s discretion. For a firm with historic DB transfer advice, complaints fifteen years after the event are not unusual. Run-off periods of eight, ten or even twelve years are common at exit for firms with material DB transfer history.
Run-off cover is normally priced as a single up-front premium calculated as a multiple of the last working-policy premium — commonly in the range of one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half times the annual premium, spread across the run-off term. Pricing is highly sensitive to the firm’s claims experience, its DB transfer profile, the planned length of the run-off term, and the wider market’s appetite. Firms with notifications open at the point of cessation typically find pricing materially higher and the market materially narrower; some find run-off uncommercial to buy at all.
The implication for principals planning an exit — whether retirement, sale or wind-down — is that the run-off conversation begins at least two renewal cycles before the planned exit date, not at the exit itself. Cleaning up the claims file, settling outstanding circumstances, and presenting the firm with as clean a runway as possible materially affects what the run-off market will quote. A firm that turns up at the exit with three open notifications and a DB transfer book may discover that the run-off premium consumes a meaningful fraction of the goodwill value.
Selling a firm does not automatically extinguish the run-off obligation. Sale documentation has to address the position explicitly — either the acquirer assumes liability for historic advice and provides equivalent cover going forward, or the seller buys run-off as part of the transaction, or some hybrid. Where neither side has addressed the position properly, the FCA position may be that the selling principals remain on the hook, and the practical position may be that no insurer will quote at all. We have seen sale transactions fall over at the eleventh hour for this reason. The lesson is to start the run-off conversation in parallel with the sale negotiation, not after it closes.
“The hour you spend on the proposal form is the highest-leverage hour you spend on PI all year.”
Ninety days out from renewal, the principal and the compliance officer should sit down with the broker for a renewal kick-off. The agenda is short: what has changed in the firm since the last renewal (permissions, headcount, services, client mix, revenue), what is the current claims and circumstances position, what is the broker’s read on market appetite for the firm’s profile, and what is the rough strategy on insurer selection. Refresh the management information that will populate the proposal form — turnover, fee income broken by advice type, file-review outputs, complaints log, training records, Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR) responsibilities mapping.
Two weeks later the firm should have the proposal-form pack assembled. The core items are:
With the pack complete, the broker takes the submission to a selection of insurers with relevant appetite for the firm’s profile. The insurer panel is typically a mix of large composite carriers and specialist IFA underwriters; the broker’s judgement is which combination produces the best blend of terms and capacity for this particular firm in this particular year.
Insurers return indicative or firm terms. The broker compares them on a like-for-like basis, normalising for excess level, defence-costs treatment, sub-limits and exclusions. A side-by-side comparison sheet is the operational deliverable.
The principal and compliance officer review the options with the broker. Common queries at this point: explanations of an exclusion, negotiation on the excess, requests for a higher aggregate, queries on the retroactive date, and any subjectivities that need to be cleared. The broker takes queries back to the insurer side.
Two weeks out, the firm makes the selection. Any subjectivities — typically file-review confirmations, director-signed statements, or evidence of process changes — need to be cleared in this window. The broker draws up the closing documentation.
The new policy incepts. The broker circulates a cover note, the certificate, and the schedule. Certificates are circulated to FCA-gateway-relevant counterparties — networks, platforms, lenders, institutional clients — where they ask for them.
GANTT-STYLE TIMELINE — "90 days to PI renewal"
A horizontal bar chart with seven milestones (Day -90, -75, -60, -45, -30, -14, 0) as vertical markers. Each phase shown as a coloured bar in Apex secondary. Labels above each bar in 9pt body. A summary strap below: "Total elapsed: 90 days. Principal hours: typically 6-12 across the period."
Ninety days allows the firm to brief, gather, market, negotiate, decide and incept without compressing any single phase to the point where mistakes happen. Compressed timelines — start at thirty days, want incepted in ten — typically produce worse outcomes: a narrower insurer panel because some carriers cannot turn around at speed, less negotiation room because the firm has less leverage to walk, and a higher risk of subjectivities not properly cleared. The hour the principal spends on the proposal form at Day -75 is the highest-leverage hour on PI all year.
“Notify early. Notify wide. Say nothing to the complainant without insurer sign-off.”
PI policies require notification of two things — claims and circumstances. A claim is a written demand for compensation or a formal communication asserting a liability. A circumstance is any fact, matter or event which may reasonably be expected to give rise to a claim — including a complaint received, an error identified internally, a FOS contact, an FCA visit raising a concern, or a client expressing dissatisfaction in a way that may foreshadow a complaint.
The discipline is to notify wide rather than narrow. Insurers prefer to be told too much rather than too little; an undisclosed circumstance that crystallises into a claim during a subsequent policy year, when a different insurer is on cover, can create an uninsured gap. Notification is not an admission; it is housekeeping.
The notification clause is treated by the courts as a condition precedent to cover in many policies. Late notification — beyond the period specified in the wording, or beyond the policy period in which the circumstance was known — can give the insurer a defence on cover. We have seen cases where the substantive claim would have been comfortably covered but the notification was three months late and the insurer relied on the wording to decline. Whatever else the firm does on first sight of a possible claim, log it and notify it within the policy timeframe.
Three behaviours predictably damage cover in the first days after a complaint:
The Dispute Resolution: Complaints sourcebook (DISP) sets out the firm’s complaint-handling obligations. In summary, an eligible complaint must be acknowledged promptly, investigated, and a final response sent within eight weeks of receipt; the complainant has six months from the final response to refer the matter to the FOS. Insurer-appointed solicitors typically take over the FOS process once it begins, but the firm must keep the procedural steps under DISP on time. Missed deadlines do not just damage the substantive case; they can themselves become a separate cause of complaint.
FLOWCHART — "Claim trigger flow"
A simple top-to-bottom flow:
1) Trigger event (complaint received / FOS contact / internal error identified / client expression of dissatisfaction)
2) Internal log within 24 hours
3) Notify broker (with copy of complaint and relevant file material)
4) Broker notifies insurer
5) Insurer acknowledges and appoints panel solicitor where appropriate
6) Parallel: firm runs DISP procedural steps to time
7) Substantive response drafted by/with panel solicitor
8) Resolution / FOS referral / settlement / litigation
Use Apex primary for boxes, secondary for arrows.
Some claims and circumstances also trigger notification obligations to the FCA under SUP 15. The trigger is broadly any matter the FCA would reasonably expect notice of, including significant losses, material complaints, and matters affecting the firm’s ability to meet its threshold conditions. This is a separate obligation from the PI notification and is not delegable to the insurer; the firm needs to make the SUP 15 judgement itself, ideally with compliance and PI broker input.
The first forty-eight hours after a complaint set the tone. A firm that handles them with discipline — acknowledge promptly, notify wide, preserve everything, say nothing on substance, follow the panel solicitor’s lead — typically gets a better outcome than one that scrambles, argues or apologises in the wrong direction.
“A broker acts for the firm, not the insurer. The Handbook says so.”
Independent insurance brokers operate under FCA Conduct of Business rules and the Insurance Distribution Directive, both of which require the broker to act fairly, honestly and professionally in the customer’s best interests. In practice, a broker working with an IFA on PI should:
Six questions tend to surface the differences between brokers quickly:
Brokers fall into three categories: independent brokers with open-market access; tied brokers acting for a single insurer or small panel; and network-affiliated arrangements. Each has trade-offs — independent brokerage gives the broadest market access and the cleanest agency position. The IDD requires the broker to disclose the basis on which it operates; the firm’s job is to read the disclosure.
Before binding cover, the broker must give the firm certain information in writing, including: identity and address of the broker; whether the broker advises on the basis of a fair and personal analysis of the market; the nature of remuneration; the identity of the insurer; and the route to complaint. A broker that supplies this unprompted, in clear English, is showing professional discipline.
“The myths are predictable. The losses they produce are not.”
The IPRU-INV minimum is a floor for FCA compliance, not a business cover decision. For a firm with any DB transfer exposure, concentrated investment recommendations or a high-net-worth book, the minimum is unlikely to be adequate. A cheaper premium that buys an inadequate limit is not a saving.
It is not. The FCA expects firms ceasing personal investment business to maintain run-off cover, and selling the firm does not automatically transfer liability for past advice. Where the sale agreement does not address run-off explicitly, the principals typically remain exposed.
Wrong. A claims-made policy responds to claims notified now in respect of advice given historically. A DB transfer exclusion added at current renewal can exclude claims arising from advice given fifteen years ago. The exclusion bites on the historic book whether or not the firm still does the activity.
Not necessarily. Open notifications complicate renewal and may produce premium loading, exclusions or a narrower panel — but a notification presented to the market early, with a clear factual account and a documented file-review response, is materially easier for an underwriter to price than one that surfaces late. Managed early, a notification is manageable.
It depends entirely on the network agreement. Some networks provide PI as a central facility; some require the firm to hold its own; some operate hybrid arrangements. The position on cancellation of membership, retention of run-off, and which firm’s loss record drives pricing all vary. Read the network agreement before relying on what feels like the answer.
The FOS money award limit caps what the Ombudsman can require the firm to pay on a single complaint. It does not cap exposure. The FOS can recommend awards above the limit; multiple related complaints can each attract an award up to the cap; and where the firm is not in business to pay, FSCS picks up the rest.
If your firm’s PI renewal is more than ninety days away, this guide is something to put in the diary for the right week. If it is within ninety days, the practical short list is:
If your firm is approaching cessation, sale, or run-off, start the run-off conversation now and not at exit.
Apex Insurance Brokers Ltd is a UK insurance broker authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We are based in Bristol, with our trading address at QCS, 53 Queen Charlotte Street, Bristol BS1 4HQ, and our registered office at c/o Westcan, 5 Anglo Office Park, Bristol BS15 1NT. Companies House registration number 07014570; FCA Firm Reference 724952.
We act for FCA-authorised personal investment firms on Professional Indemnity Insurance and related covers. We are independent — we are not tied to any one insurer and we do not write our own policies. Our role is to act for the firm under FCA Conduct of Business rules, present the firm’s risk to insurers we judge will price it sensibly, and advocate for the firm through claims and notifications.
We are happy to have a no-obligation conversation about your renewal, your run-off planning, or any specific issue you are working through.
Regulator and statutory resources:
Related Apex articles:
Apex Insurance Brokers Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Firm Reference 724952). Registered in England and Wales, Companies House 07014570. Registered office: c/o Westcan, 5 Anglo Office Park, Bristol BS15 1NT. Trading address: QCS, 53 Queen Charlotte Street, Bristol BS1 4HQ. This guide is general information for UK FCA-authorised personal investment firms and does not constitute personal advice. The regulatory references in this guide were correct at the time of writing (May 2026); IPRU-INV and FOS award limits in particular are reviewed annually and you should verify current figures at the FCA Handbook and FOS website before acting. (c) 2026 Apex Insurance Brokers Ltd.
Apex Insurance Brokers serves UK professional services firms and commercial businesses. Call 0117 325 0027, email hello@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk, or request a quotation.
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