The insurance industry is huge, not just in terms of sales each year. Insurers often hold vast investments in other companies, as we have explained in our home insurance guide. In the UK alone, insurance companies manage investments equivalent to around 25% of the country’s net worth.
This means that they are indirectly financing everything from tar sands to the sales of arms. In this guide, we have tried to find the pet insurance companies with the most ethical approach to investment.
There are two types of insurance company: brokers and underwriters:
Brokers sell policies on behalf of one or more underwriters, and include well known brands such as Co-op, Sainsbury and the AA. Brokers make money by receiving a commission from the underwriter, once a policy is sold.
Underwriters are the companies that take most of the money from an insurance premium, but which also pay out when something goes wrong. They may not be as visible as the broker’s insurance brand. But they wield a significant amount of power in the global economy. We cover underwriters in this guide because these are the companies that hold the assets and which, therefore, create policy on whether to make ethical investment decisions. They can also create policy on whether or not to insure coal plants and other controversial projects.
Just to make things more confusing, some underwriters do sell directly to the public, or belong to the same company group as the broker itself. Others may re-insure a specific risk via a different underwriter (basically insurance for the insurer).
What to look for?
In the UK alone, there are hundreds of brokers – too many to include in our reports, so our ranking tables only include underwriting companies.
Unfortunately, most of us will buy our policy through a broker, so you may have to do some extra digging. You can find the underwriter by looking at the ‘Key Facts’ document that the broker must provide when you are deciding to take out a policy. Comparison sights like Money Supermarket will also either provide these documents or tell you who the underwriter is.
How we rate companies
Several campaign groups have published reports about specific investments held by insurance companies (or the banks by which they are owned). We have marked down the companies named in these, and have included some more detail about the reports throughout the finance guides. Insurance companies appeared in Don’t bank on the Bomb, Unfriend Coal (see our home insurance guide); and Israel Report (see our current accounts guide).
We also looked for investments in specific companies, beginning with some of the largest in the UK and US such as WalMart, General Electric and Coca-Cola. Where the insurance company holds shares in, for example, a company criticised for pollution, it will also receive half a mark in the Pollution and Toxics column on the table. Most companies lost multiple marks in this way.
Where no ethical investment policy or shareholdings could be found for a company, it was assumed to have investments in companies criticised under all Ethical Consumer categories – as, sadly, is the norm in this industry. We also wrote to these companies to check there wasn’t a policy somewhere we hadn’t found.
Tax avoidance
Tax avoidance is known to be pervasive in the financial sector, and the insurance industry appears to be no exception. Almost all those companies that had business abroad also appeared to have lots of high-risk subsidiaries registered in tax havens. Companies that got a worst rating for likely use of tax avoidance strategies lost a whole mark under Anti-Social Finance, and those that got a middle lost half a mark.
Best: NFU Mutual
Worst: Allianz, Aviva, LV=, Petplan, MoreTh>n
