Introducing Sampo’s business areas: Private UK

Sampo reports its financial performance under four segments based on its operational business areas. In this blog series, we will introduce all our segments. Next up is Private UK.

Formed by the acquisition of Hastings in 2020, Private UK has been the Group’s strongest growth area, having more than doubled UK top‑line and added in excess of one million customer policies as part of the Sampo Group. In 2025, Private UK reported GWP (including brokerage) of EUR 2.9 billion, representing 27 per cent of the Group’s total GWP and making it the second-largest segment after Private Nordic.

Strong positioning in a digitally advanced UK market

In the UK, the Group serves around 4.5 million customers through Hastings. The business is built on a digital operating model, with sales primarily conducted through price comparison websites (PCWs), which are now the dominant sales channel for both motor and home insurance in the UK. Rather than relying on an insurance broker to intermediate between a customer and an insurer, a significant majority of UK customers will compare policies and purchase insurance through PCWs. In practice, PCWs effectively function as broker-like intermediaries, with insurers paying a commission for each policy sold via the platform.

In this respect, the market differs significantly from the Nordics, where insurance is primarily sold directly, and both brokers and PCWs play a limited role in private lines. In the UK, by contrast, distribution is largely driven by PCWs, emphasising the importance of pricing: even small price changes on PCWs can have a significant impact on new business volumes in the short term. As a result, the UK market has historically been more cyclical than in the Nordics.

The UK P&C insurance market is also markedly less concentrated than in the Nordics, where a fairly small number of major insurers have a large share of the market. However, the UK has seen some consolidation during the recent years as well. The UK market characteristics favour players that have specialised in digital distribution through PCWs, such as Hastings. These players have gradually gained market share from traditional and broker-driven insurers that have been slower to adapt their business models to new digital distribution channels.

Recent market developments have highlighted these structural characteristics. Significant price increases implemented in late 2023 and early 2024, driven by quickly elevated claims inflation, increased activity on PCWs and created more new business opportunities as customers shopped around for alternative cover. By contrast, the market environment changed in 2025. The moderation of claims inflation and a more benign claims environment led to declining market prices, particularly in the first half of the year, which was reflected as lower consumer switching rates on PCWs. Despite this, the overall size of the PCW market continued to grow, supporting Hastings given its digitally focused business model and strong position in the private motor and home insurance markets.

Increasingly diversified growth beyond core motor portfolio

As one of the leading digital motor insurers in the UK, with a market share of around 10 per cent, motor insurance is the largest business line within the Group’s Private UK segment. In 2025, it accounted for around 80 per cent of the segment’s live customer policies, with the majority derived from traditional car insurance. However, growth in Private UK has increasingly diversified beyond core motor portfolio, particularly into home insurance and in motor insurance to telematics products. At the end of 2025, the Group had around 4.5 million live customer policies (LCP) of which the faster-growing portfolio (van, bike, home, telematics) represented around 1.9 million policies.

Telematics insurance enables continuous risk assessment and active driver engagement, improving risk selection for the insurer while directly rewarding policyholders for safe and responsible driving, as renewal pricing is based on individual driving behaviour. Policy holders’ driving is monitored through a small wireless device attached to the vehicle and linked to user’s mobile app. Safe and responsible driving is rewarded with lower premiums, while identified high-risk behaviours, such as sudden braking, speeding or mobile phone use while driving, may lead to higher pricing at renewal or even the termination of the policy.

Our competitiveness in the UK P&C market is underpinned by advanced capabilities in pricing, data analytics and fraud detection. These capabilities also support our leading position in telematics offering, which in turn deepens our understanding of customers’ driving behaviour and further strengthens the Group’s ability to assess and price risk.

Our ambitious growth plans will be delivered through digital leadership, embracing new technology, and investing in our colleagues, customers, company and community. We have a simple and straightforward approach; to provide our UK car, van, bike and home insurance customers with great service and straightforward products at competitive prices, however they choose to interact with us.

Managing growth and profitability across market cycles

Sampo always operates with a long-term mindset, with disciplined underwriting in its DNA. Growth is never pursued for its own sake. Across the Group, underwriting quality takes clear precedence over short-term volume expansion. This discipline is particularly essential in the UK's price-driven and cyclical market where short-term pricing volatility can lead to value-destructive growth if it is not supported by fair pricing, sound risk selection and at attractive margins.

In the UK, our ambition is to deliver a combined ratio of 88–90 per cent consistently across market cycles. In softer phases of the pricing cycle, this typically results in operating towards the upper end of the range. As in the Nordics, we have a strong track record of delivering solid underwriting profitablity through market cycles in the UK. Ability to deliver high and stable margins in all market conditions is the result of disciplined underwriting, active growth management and a clear focus on long-term value creation over short-term.

Disciplined underwriting supporting long-term growth

Given the segment’s scale within the Group, Private UK contributes meaningfully to both top-line and underwriting result growth. At the 2024 Capital Markets Day, we set an operational ambition for Private UK to deliver average underwriting result growth of 10–15 per cent over 2024–2026, which was subsequently increased to 20–25 per cent in November 2025 following strong performance achieved to date. During 2024–2025, underwriting profit grew by an average of 31 per cent per year. In 2025, underwriting result growth slowed to 13 per cent from 49 per cent in 2024, reflecting slower growth throughout the year in a softer pricing environment.

As highlighted, the UK market experienced a declining pricing environment in 2025 that led to associated reduction in customer switching volumes on PCWs, limiting new business opportunities while supporting customer retention. As a result, we responded to the softening pricing environment by shifting our growth towards higher-premium segments, driven by its telematics offering, while maintaining a focus on prudent underwriting. Despite the softer market environment, the combined ratio for the period increased only slightly from 88.5 per cent in 2024 to 89.2 per cent in 2025, demonstrating our commitment to underwriting discipline and a highly selective growth appetite over short-term expansion. 

Over the long-term we continue to see attractive organic growth opportunities in the UK personal lines market. Maintaining underwriting discipline and a high-quality portfolio will ensure that we are well positioned to capture attractive growth opportunities once the market turns.

Antti JärvenpääI
R Specialist, Sampo plc