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Car Insurance Brokers at the Car Insurance UK Supermarket

Using car insurance brokers used to be a popular way to find cheap UK motor insurance. While they maintain some popularity, people are more likely to find them via a price comparison site nowadays where their price has been found to be one of the cheapest generated by the price comparison site's aggregator system.

Very often car insurance brokers are the cheapest insurance providers found in this way. Given that car insurance brokers check numerous quotes from their own panel of insurers to bring you the cheapest, this is not surprising.

In some cases it can be a good idea to go direct to car insurance brokers, without going via a price comparison system. For example, Endsleigh is one of the car insurance brokers that specialises in finding low cost quotes for young drivers. While others, for example, Hastings Direct, can be good value across most car insurance groups.

One problem with car insurance brokers is that there can be a conflict of interest between the size of their commission and the policy that represents the best value to the consumer. The commissions paid by insurance companies to car insurance brokers can vary more than ten-fold. Let us imagine a scenario whereby policy 'A' costs the consumer £420 for which the car insurance broker's commission is £80. An identical policy 'B' costs the consumer £400 for which the broker makes £20. If the broker saves the consumer £20 in this scenario, he loses £60 in commission; so there is a risk that the consumer will not be presented with the genuine best quote.

In fact, as car insurance brokers are obliged to compete alongside numerous competitors in the majority of cases when people compare quotes via an aggregator, as this is the UK's favourite way to buy car insurance, biasing results in their favour is unwise as it is likely to result in no commission at all if they are uncompetitive.

So, while price comparison sites are not perfect, they have forced the insurance industry in general, not just car insurance brokers, to offer more competitive products which undoubtedly benefits the motorist.

In some ways, price comparison sites can be seen as simply meta car insurance brokers. In this context 'meta' refers to the grouping together of numerous unitary services to produce a more powerful, useful and authoritative result. And, as such, these services could suffer from the same built-in conflict of interest as car insurance brokers - that is: commission versus consumer value.

There is actually some evidence that this effect exists for some price comparison services, but nonetheless, because they compare so many quotes, they are still likely to find you the best prices around.

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