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It was great to see the House of Commons Terrace Pavillion packed out as we launched our new 2026 BIBA member Manifesto: ‘Economic Resilience’ this week.
We were joined on stage by the Minister for the Digital Economy - the ‘Cyber Minister’ and the FCA, all pledging to work together with us during 2026.
What a fantastic way to start the year!
With every BIBA Manifesto comes a sense of renewed optimism, of hope, of new ways to help our customers.
And I am full of hope, because we experienced a great year in 2025 with over 20 Manifesto wins, more success than we have ever had before.
This year I had five key announcements.
First, that BIBA was delighted to be introducing a new joint commitment with the ABI on ‘total retail signposting’ to help more people find the insurance they need. We have worked closely with the ABI on access to insurance ever since our first signposting agreement on age and insurance in 2012.
Since then, we have launched signposting agreements on:
Combined, these initiatives have helped over 1.7 million customers with particularly challenging risks to access the vital insurance they need more easily, and our Find Insurance Service helped an incredible 430,000 people last year alone.
TOTAL retail signposting is a massive step that will support all types of personal lines customers.
Secondly, I announced more investment in our Find Insurance Service where we are now piloting a new ‘Live Chat’ facility (staffed by humans), so supporting consumers even more.
Turning to regulation, readers might recall me often highlighting page 36 of our 2025 Manifesto containing BIBA’s regulation wish list.
I am pleased to report that the FCA worked in close collaboration with us during last year so that we saw: faster authorisations; more streamlined reporting requirements; a change in the scope of the Consumer Duty, and introduction of a more efficient Fair Value Assessment process – all points raised by BIBA members as we gathered views for the previous Manifesto.
Now BIBA is committed to bringing forward a cross-industry new ‘Fair Value Assessment template’ that insurers and brokers alike can benefit from and which will help to reduce the frictional cost of regulation. And I am pleased that HM Treasury is working with us on other relevant issues through their cross-cutting paper on growth in financial services, including an improved senior managers regime and welcome reform of the Financial Ombudsman Service.
Moving on to 2026, we desperately need a new Financial Services Bill which could be the legislative vehicle to carry some of these regulatory changes forward and is the number one key ask in our Manifesto this year. The Manifesto is themed ‘Economic Resilience’ which is what our clients need, what our economy needs, and what BIBA brokers offer.
My third announcement is that we will work with our partner Markel to establish what we are calling our AI Academy, to help members better understand the opportunities presented by AI and how to manage the associated risks.
We also want to build strength and depth in the insurance broker market. With mergers and acquisitions outrunning start-ups, we are committing to creating a guide to help prospective new insurance brokers get started.
A concerning fact arose in our research for the 2026 Manifesto, when our associate member, Broker Insights told us that their number crunching of 7 billion lines of data revealed the startlingly low take up of stand-alone cyber-insurance at 2.8%.
That is why my fourth announcement is that we are working with DSIT (the Department for Science Innovation and Technology) to identify and include expert cyber insurance brokers in a new accredited, cyber insurance broker directory.
This will help businesses to more easily access this important cover
And last, but not least, my fifth and final announcement is also about cyber insurance.
Recent events have shown that there is acute vulnerability in the supply chain for SMEs because of dependence on one major large customer - perhaps a car manufacturer whose business has suffered a cyberattack causing it to shut down. Those small firms themselves will not have suffered a physical loss, but the financial loss they could face because their affected customer stops buying places immense pressure on cash flow that can be terminal.
To fill this protection gap, we are pleased to announce that we have partnered with CFC who have developed a new extension aimed at SMEs which responds to these customer business interruption events. A clear demonstration of how our industry can innovate and respond rapidly to evolving risks, building economic resilience and protecting livelihoods.
I said at the start of this column I feel full of hope for the future, and our future is the young people staring out in our sector which is why it’s gratifying that our work with schools and our BIBA Conference Young Broker Day is now bearing fruit. We have been told that some of the young students that joined our initiative have now started work at insurance firms.
The BIBA Conference 2026 is themed ‘TIME:TO’. So I finish by saying to everyone we work with it is Time:To work more closely together than ever before to keep this great momentum going and deliver economic resilience for our customers, for our sector and for the United Kingdom.
