Is a business quietly moving through its renewal season with insurers who can’t actually
see the risk they’re pricing?
According to Aon’s UK insurance market insights, underwriters are now placing far
greater weight on financial resilience, governance quality and ESG disclosures during
primary underwriting, and are pulling back from risks where transparency is weaker.
The soft market is not disappearing overnight, but the terms on which cover is offered
are becoming sharper and more differentiated.
That shift changes what a good renewal conversation looks like.
Why the Renewal Conversation Is Changing
For years, commercial renewals ran on a familiar rhythm: last year’s schedule, a few
updated figures, a rate. ESG and sustainability data sat at the edges, if it appeared at
all.
That’s no longer enough. Underwriters are being asked to justify risk selection with
more than a proposal form, and brokers are the ones expected to bring the evidence
forward. The businesses that can hand over structured, comparable disclosure data at
renewal are starting to look meaningfully different from those that can’t.
The Checklist: What Brokers Should Be Asking For
A practical data handshake at renewal should cover:
- Recent public disclosures, not just last year’s proposal form: annual reports,
sustainability statements, policy documents - Governance evidence: board oversight of climate and resilience risk, not just
headline commitments - Sector-relevant metrics, since materiality differs sharply between a logistics firm
and a professional services practice - Any third-party benchmarking the client already holds, rather than starting from
zero each renewal
The Real Data Gap Insurers Face
The problem underwriters run into isn’t that commercial clients have nothing to say.
Most mid-market businesses do publish something: a sustainability page, a policy
document, a set of figures buried in an annual report. The data exists; it’s fragmented,
inconsistently formatted, and expensive to pull together at underwriting speed.
That’s the gap TDH’s Public Disclosure Analysis is built to close. It structures a
company’s own reported disclosures against a 120-metric, SASB-aligned framework
spanning 11 sectors and 77 industries, weighted for what’s actually material in that
industry. Where a company hasn’t disclosed a given metric directly, nearest-neighbour
and best-fit similarity analysis fills the gap using comparable peers, so brokers aren’t
stuck choosing between “perfect data” and “no data.”
What This Means for Brokers and Underwriters
Renewal season is increasingly a resilience conversation, not just a pricing one. Brokers
who can bring structured disclosure evidence to the table, rather than chasing it after
the underwriter asks, are better placed to negotiate terms and keep capacity engaged
on harder risks.
Talk to Our Team
Curious how Public Disclosure Analysis could sharpen your next renewal cycle? Get in
touch with the TDH team to see the framework applied to a client’s own sector.
