insurance research report
Insurance Company Due Diligence Checklist
A due diligence checklist for reviewing insurance businesses across authorisation, ownership, underwriting, claims, distribution, capital, data, and operational controls.
Company snapshot
- This checklist is for research preparation, not a legal, actuarial, audit, credit, or investment opinion.
- Use it to create a first-pass diligence memo before commissioning deeper specialist review.
- The most important habit is evidence tagging: mark every statement as verified, source-linked, inferred, or unknown.
Business model and main segments
Insurance due diligence depends on where the company sits in the risk chain: carrier, broker, MGA, reinsurer, coverholder, claims administrator, or technology provider. Each role changes the questions around authorisation, money flow, risk transfer, claims, and data.
Why researchers use this
- To avoid researching every insurance company with the same generic company-profile template.
- To identify gaps that should be escalated to legal, actuarial, compliance, or finance specialists.
- To make source-backed notes easier to compare across multiple companies.
Public signals to check
- Regulatory permissions, restrictions, appointed representatives, licenses, and Lloyds market status.
- Ultimate ownership, filings history, acquisitions, debt, charges, and group-company complexity.
- Underwriting appetite, capacity providers, claims authority, reserving commentary, and reinsurance dependence.
- Complaints, enforcement actions, litigation, service issues, cyber incidents, or operational resilience concerns.
- Public accounts, statutory filings, rating commentary, solvency disclosures, and management changes.
Research checklist
- Create a one-page entity map covering legal entity, brand, parent, regulator, geography, and company type.
- List business lines, distribution channels, capacity providers, claims handling model, and key counterparties.
- Check financial filings, rating commentary, solvency disclosures, acquisition announcements, and regulatory registers.
- Record red flags, unknowns, source links, and questions for management or specialist advisers.
- Compare the company against at least two relevant peers using the same headings.
Public source links
- FCA Financial Services Register
Check UK authorisation, permissions, trading names, appointed representatives, and regulatory status.
- Companies House company search
Check UK company filings, accounts, officers, ownership filings, insolvency events, and registered addresses.
- Lloyd's Market Directory
Check Lloyds brokers, coverholders, managing agents, syndicates, and classes of business.
- SEC EDGAR full-text search
Check US-listed company filings, risk factors, annual reports, quarterly reports, and transaction disclosures.
How to turn this into a company profile
Create a one-page note with four labels beside every material statement: verified source, inferred from source, market commentary, or unknown. That keeps the profile useful without overstating what public information can prove.