I was looking to renew my car insurance this week on a price comparison website and found that the cheapest quote by far was from a company called Nutshell, which I hadn’t heard of before.
In fact, several of the cheaper quotes were from insurers I wasn’t familiar with and I’m not sure about that.
In the end I decided to go with Nutshell as car insurance in general is very expensive now and I was in a hurry to get everything sorted.
But should I be worried about hiring insurers that are not well-known, just to save money?
Insurance Company Inquiries: If you haven’t heard of a car insurance company, does that mean you shouldn’t trust them?
This is Money’s Sam Barker responds: In short, you have nothing to worry about here.
Nutshell is a 100% trustworthy company and is subject to the same consumer protection rules as any other insurance company.
I’ll go into more detail, but I think your question sums up something very interesting about the often confusing nature of buying insurance through price comparison websites.
Nutshell is actually a broker, not an insurer, so its job is to manage your cover with one of the insurers on its panel and help you with any claims. It only launched in December 2022.
Nutshell is a trading name of BISL Limited. You may not have heard of BISL Limited, but you have heard of some of its other trading names: Budget and Bennetts.
BISL Limited, in turn, is owned by a larger broker, BGL Group, which in turn is owned by another larger broker, Markerstudy Insurance Services, the seventh largest broker in the UK. The latter, in turn, is part of a large insurance conglomerate called Markerstudy Group.
Nutshell was the brainchild of BGL and an insurer, Covea Insurance, which was formed after purchasing Provident Insurance, MMA Insurance and Gateway Insurance.
As I say, this is confusing. There are around 200 car insurers in the UK, but the sheer number of trading names and waves of acquisitions mean there are only about 10 parent companies.
This can mean that when using a price comparison website, most of the cheapest quotes could actually be from the same company, just through several different sub-brands.
You could argue that there is a lack of competition problem with the current operation of the UK car insurance market, although the industry would argue that a) it is competitive and b) it often loses money on this type of insurance. But for you as an individual driver, that doesn’t matter in terms of Nutshell’s reliability.
It is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
That means it has to abide by some pretty strict rules about how it operates, and in the unlikely event that it goes bust, your money is protected.
The main thing to watch out for with car insurance is buying something that doesn’t meet your needs, such as not covering something you really need to be covered.
This can easily happen accidentally, due to another recent trend in car insurance: insurers and brokers are reducing the size of policies to make them cheaper and therefore appear higher on price comparison websites, which tend to rank policies by price.
The other thing to be wary of is taking out “car insurance” from a company that is not regulated, perhaps advertising through social media. These companies do exist, and they often take advantage of drivers who are baffled by the high cost of car insurance and are looking for a bargain.
Many drivers end up being tricked into taking out what they think is car insurance, but it’s actually a worthless piece of paper. That means they pay premiums for nothing, have no coverage if they need to file a claim, and could even be prosecuted for driving without insurance without knowing it.
If you ever have doubts about whether to trust an auto insurance company or broker, there is some simple research you can do to put your mind at ease.
Check if the company is registered with the FCA by using the FCA online register. This will tell you if it is a legitimate company or if it is worth avoiding.
But simply put (sorry), you have nothing to worry about when choosing Nutshell for your car insurance.
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