Impact of location, job title etc on your car insurance

[Leo]

IMHO insurance underwriting seems to be less of a skill than it used to be and has probably been largely superseded by the ever present phenomenon of the accursed algorithm. This is essentially the "what the computer says" approach that we all seem to be facing in our dealings with financial institutions.

Yeah, in the past you would have had more actuaries crunching the numbers but now they use computer models. A former colleague of mine once worked on these computer systems and they are pretty guarded on the finer points as they each develop their own models and don't want the competition getting their hands on their work. As a result the folks answering the phones won't know all the machinations that go into generating a quote.