Let’s take a look back at the last ten years. Please try and remember that this only takes us back to 2007! We were seeing outbreak of Apple products, changes to our mobile devices that became permanent, wifi has become cheaper and more widely available, and your finances are now something you can control in the palm of your hand. So if you can control it in the palm of your hand, what does the £20+ admin fees to make changes to insurance policies really go on?
By now it is becoming quite difficult to survive in the modern world without having at least enough IT literacy to operate your phone, or your tablet, or your notebook/laptop/ultrabook/PC etc should you choose to purchase them. They aren’t yet wholly essential, but it is extremely inconvenient for you to conduct your daily business without them. You know your device and the internet well enough to be sat reading this now, so I can assume you know how to type and click. Which is all the skills necessary for the person on the other end of the phone at your car insurance vendor to do when they are ‘making changes to your policy’. Naturally things like changing address can also incur further charges such as a higher insurance premium in ‘higher risk areas’. It seems that charges to change your personal details on your insurance plan only seem to have a genuine purpose when it comes to changing the registration of your vehicle, as the DVLA have a charge for this function. Other than that, your money is just further profits to whoever insures you.
So what is a solution to this? More and more sites are now cropping up over the internet that are entirely online based. They do not have somebody change your details for you, and therefore there is no admin fee incurred. So far the impact of these kind of sites is small, but they are a reminder of how things are progressing for us as a society. Our high streets are getting smaller, police stations are closing as ‘people do not tend to walk in to report crime anymore’, and paper statements and bills are now more often than not sent via email instead. We are moving ever closer to full digitisation of our culture, and surely in the long run that will mean that we have more independence and more control over which costs we choose to incur, and which we don’t.
Administration fees as a whole are something I do feel are outdated now. In the days of paper records there will have had to have been somebody who devotes time to change details of a policy. The new details would need writing or typing up, the file would need to be found and the old policy disposed of. Now it’s a matter of copy and paste in most instances and it should be an obligation of companies to provide you a breakdown of what admin is actually involved in your admin fees.
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