InsuranceMarket.ae's Chief Engagement Officer: UAE Motor's 60-70% Loss Ratios Would Be a Dream in London

A UAE motor book running at a 60-70% loss ratio sounds, to most people inside the market, like a portfolio under real pressure. Rachel Al Mughairi, Chief Engagement Officer at InsuranceMarket.ae, offered a useful corrective drawn from 13 years working the London market, including a stint at Zurich handling global corporate accounts for FTSE, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones-listed companies with turnover above $500 million. "We would have loved them," she said of a 60-70% loss ratio. "The loss ratio in the London market for motor was in the 90s... the motor book was running at 97%. Imagine -- we only had three points before to cover all our operating expenses and our profit margin."

That comparison reframes the conversation regional brokers and insurers routinely have about "unsustainable" motor pricing. It isn't that the UAE book is uniquely troubled; it's that motor, almost everywhere in the world, is a structurally thin line of business, and the region's numbers are, by that standard, comparatively healthy.

Why composite insurers can live with a permanently thin motor book

The mechanism that makes this workable, Al Mughairi explained, is portfolio underwriting: insurers operating here are composites writing multiple lines, and they deliberately let profitable lines subsidize motor rather than expecting every line to stand on its own. "They contribute profits from this area and profits from that area to offset the losses or the less than desirable margins being achieved in another line," she said. "Motor has always kind of been that line of business that needs propping up or sustaining."

The reason motor specifically ends up in that position is structural, not accidental: it's mandatory almost everywhere in the world, which makes it a compliance purchase rather than a considered one, which in turn makes buyers maximally price-sensitive. "Because it's mandatory, they become more price sensitive," she said. Many buyers respond by minimizing spend -- taking third-party-only cover to satisfy the legal requirement -- without registering what that actually excludes until they need it. "They saved really hard for three years to buy this car, and I've just written it off... all my insurance did was pay somebody else for the damage I did to them."

The COVID paradox: parked cars, angry renewal calls

A specific and pointed example of how disconnected customer perception can be from actual risk exposure came from the pandemic. With cars sitting unused in garages for months, customers who had dutifully kept their mandatory cover running felt they'd effectively paid for nothing and wanted a rebate when renewal came around. What that framing misses, Al Mughairi pointed out, is what the insurer was actually on the hook for the whole time: "For one big accident on Sheikh Zayed Road involving a couple of vehicles, insurers have probably had to pay out millions of dirhams... I've just paid 1,500 dirham for my car insurance, but actually what I'm covered for is infinite."

The premium a customer pays bears very little visible relationship to the actual liability an insurer is carrying against them for the policy period -- a gap in understanding that shows up repeatedly in how customers evaluate whether they're "getting their money's worth," independent of whether they ever file a claim.

A content strategy built entirely in-house, and a website that won't sell you anything

On the marketing side, Al Mughairi described a deliberately unusual operating model for a brand of InsuranceMarket.ae's scale: no external agency at all. A small internal team -- covering creative, digital, copy, and technical accuracy -- runs a daily WhatsApp check-in on "what's hot and what's not," and can take an idea from that morning conversation to a published post by early afternoon. "If we were to use an outside agency for that, there'd be a lot of breakdown of links in that food chain," she said. "It wouldn't happen so dynamically... so organically... so cost effectively."

The more counterintuitive strategic choice sits on the transactional side of the website. Despite investing heavily in content -- a "Know Your Insurance" hub of articles, blogs, and short explainer videos -- InsuranceMarket.ae has deliberately not built full click-to-buy functionality for its products. That's a considered decision, not a technology gap: "There is a very large community of people here that like to go online to educate and inform themselves and get that awareness. But actually when it comes to taking the step to clicking a buy button, they don't want to do that. They want to speak to somebody." For a considered, elective purchase like whole-of-life insurance in particular, she argued, a customer needs a human to walk them through affordability and framing -- what looks like an intimidating million-dirham sum insured can look completely different once broken down into a realistic monthly premium for a healthy 32-year-old. Online is where InsuranceMarket.ae wants to win the education battle; the human advisor is where it wants to close.

Moving customers from price to value, deliberately

On competing with the wave of aggregators (Bima, Hala, and others) that have entered the UAE market, Al Mughairi's stated philosophy was pointedly indifferent to matching them feature-for-feature: "Don't consider the competitors, focus on yourself... the minute you allow your strategy to be set by what's hot and what's not... you've kind of lost your focus." She points to longevity as evidence the strategy works -- InsuranceMarket.ae's parent, AFIA Insurance Brokerage Services, was founded 26 years ago, meaning the brand predates most of the digital entrants currently competing for the same customers by a wide margin.

The practical tool for shifting customers away from pure price comparison is a loyalty and concierge layer built on top of the core insurance product: a "My Rewards" programme with partners like Bloomingdale's, Noon, and Aster Clinic, and an "IM Priority" concierge tier for VIP customers that handles restaurant reservations, medical appointments, and hotel bookings -- benefits with no direct connection to the insurance product itself, designed purely to make renewing feel like it comes with more than a repeated bill.

Renewal is a KPI, not a hope

On measurement, Al Mughairi was specific about which metrics actually govern day-to-day management, not just which ones get reported. Retention sits above 90% company-wide, but the number that carries consequences is individual: renewal advisors are required to hit at least 80% on their book, and falling short triggers a formal performance review, not just a coaching conversation. The justification is the standard acquisition-cost math -- "it costs on average seven times more to get a piece of new business than it does to make a renewal happen" -- treated here as an operational rule enforced through KPIs rather than a slide in a strategy deck.

On NPS specifically, she flagged a methodological point worth borrowing: timing and frequency of measurement matter more than the metric itself. A single post-sale NPS score is biased toward customers who arrived already warmed up (a referral, an existing relationship), and tells you little about the harder-won conversions. Measuring at multiple touchpoints -- post-sale, post-claim, post-settlement -- turns NPS from a one-dimensional vanity number into something closer to a genuine leading indicator of business health.

A role built to cut across an industry that runs in silos

Al Mughairi's title itself -- Chief Engagement Officer -- is still rare in insurance, though common enough elsewhere that she expects it to formalise across the industry over time. Her own definition of the mandate is broader than internal HR: engagement of employees, yes, but also of stakeholders, strategic partners, customers, and the market itself. The distinguishing feature, in her account, is that it deliberately cuts across the siloed structure insurance is typically organised around. "Any organization isn't going to progress if it doesn't start looking at itself and how it works," she said -- treating engagement not as a soft, secondary function but as the connective layer that determines whether every other function (underwriting, claims, marketing) actually performs.

An unfilled product gap: insuring against rain

Asked what greater cross-industry collaboration could produce, Al Mughairi offered a concrete, slightly unexpected example rather than a platitude: rain cover for events. It's a well-established product in parts of Europe, protecting event organisers against a washed-out outdoor event, and she flagged it as exactly the kind of niche, climate-linked product the UAE market hasn't built or marketed yet -- despite the fact that, as she put it, "when it rains here, it really rains." Her broader point wasn't about rain insurance specifically; it was that products like it tend to get built when companies compare notes across the industry rather than only inside their own walls, and that the region's networking culture currently leans toward senior executives trading achievements over drinks rather than jointly identifying gaps like this one.

What this means for the region

Al Mughairi's closing point was less about her own company and more a critique of how the industry engages with itself: networking here, in her experience, tends to mean senior people at a Lloyd's drinks event trading achievements rather than solving shared problems. Her own monthly "think tank" -- informal calls with counterparts at other companies to swap what's working and what isn't -- is offered as a low-cost alternative that most firms could replicate without waiting for a formal industry body to organise it.

The broader signal for GCC insurers and brokers is that the region's motor economics, while genuinely thin, aren't the crisis they're sometimes framed as relative to global peers -- and that the more durable competitive lever against price-led aggregators isn't matching them on discount, but building loyalty infrastructure (concierge services, partner rewards, disciplined renewal management) that changes what a policyholder is actually comparing when they decide whether to switch.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode 09: Customer experience + Insurance aggregator = Disruption.