A staggering 93% of UK properties are insured for the wrong amount, signalling a major flaw in how insurers assess and price risk, according to new research from Intelligent AI.
The finding underscores a growing “Risk Intelligence Gap” across the market, where incomplete and inconsistent data is distorting underwriting decisions and increasing exposure to avoidable losses.
The data comes from the company’s latest whitepaper, The Risk Intelligence Gap, which analysed more than 30 insurer annual reports and included interviews with senior executives across carriers, brokers and advisory firms such as Zurich, Generali, AXA, WTW, Hiscox and Tokio Marine Kiln.
The research highlights an industry struggling with limited visibility at the point of decision, where critical risk data is often missing or unreliable.
A key contributor to this gap is the quality of submissions entering the underwriting process. Between 40% and 50% of submissions arrive incomplete, forcing underwriters to spend significant time chasing missing information instead of evaluating risk. This inefficiency slows decision-making and weakens pricing accuracy.
The consequences are already visible in financial performance. UK property claims reached £5.7bn in 2024 and climbed to £6.1bn in 2025, reflecting increasing pressure on insurers’ portfolios. At the same time, business interruption cover is frequently underpriced, in some cases by a factor of three to five, due to poor visibility into supply chain dependencies.
The report also highlights a structural imbalance in underwriting, where selecting the wrong risk has a far greater financial impact than marginal pricing errors. This dynamic is driving adverse selection, leaving insurers with weaker data more exposed to poorly understood and higher-risk policies.
However, the research points to clear benefits for those addressing the issue. Insurers using advanced analytics have achieved 3–5 point improvements in loss ratios and 10–15% growth in new business, while some have reduced loss frequency by up to 60% through better-quality risk data.
Despite significant investment in AI and automation, data remains fragmented across brokers, third-party providers and internal systems. As a result, information rarely reaches underwriters in a consistent, decision-ready format, creating bottlenecks and limiting the effectiveness of digital transformation efforts.
In response, Intelligent AI has introduced Risk_API, designed to embed verified property intelligence directly into underwriting workflows. The company sees this as a foundational step towards more advanced, AI-driven underwriting models.
Intelligent AI founder and CEO Anthony Peake said, “Those insurers that address the data problem will be far better positioned to select risk, compete for higher-quality business and accelerate agentic AI underwriting, while those that don’t will face increasing exposure to volatility and adverse selection.
“The good news is that the data already exists, however, it isn’t reaching decision-makers in a structured, trusted form. Closing that gap is critical to unlocking the full value of AI and ensuring underwriting decisions are grounded in reality, not assumption.”
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