Keeping pets covered: why access to care is now a product question

Ask anyone who works in pet or equine insurance why they do it, and the answer usually lands close to home: so that people who love their animals can afford the care those animals need. Cover is access-to-care infrastructure. When it works, a frightening diagnosis is a medical conversation, not a financial one.
That mission has just moved to the centre of public life. The Competition and Markets Authority has concluded what its inquiry chair calls “the most extensive review of veterinary services in a generation”, and its reforms start coming into force later this year. The review found owners too often “left in the dark about who owns their practice, treatment options and prices – even when facing bills running into thousands of pounds”. The cost of care is about to become more visible, more comparable and more discussed than ever. For insurers, that is not a threat; it is an invitation to lead.

What the numbers say

Demand for what this industry does has never been stronger. ABI members paid out a record £1.23 billion in pet claims in 2024, up 4% on 2023 and more than double the total of a decade ago. Owners brought 1.8 million claims, an all-time high, and a record 4.6 million of them now hold cover, a third more than before the pandemic. Underneath it all, the ONS reported a 9.1% inflation rate for vets and other pet services in 2024.
The same success is straining affordability. PDSA’s latest PAW Report research found more than half of owners (51%) worried about the cost of vet care, and PDSA describes families weighing “heating, eating and whether to take their sick or injured pet to the vet”. Industry reports suggest just 25% of dogs and 12.1% of cats were insured in 2023. Read together, those numbers carry an uncomfortable conclusion: the animals most exposed to rising care costs are the ones the market has not yet found a way to cover.

Pricing alone will not close the gap

The instinctive response to claims inflation is pricing discipline, and the pricing lead’s objection deserves a straight answer: with vet costs inflating by 9.1% in a single year, no product structure outruns the loss trend, and rate has to hold the line. Both things are true. But a price cannot reach an owner for whom the product itself is the wrong shape. Product design can: cover tiers that flex to a budget, excess options that trade premium against contribution, preventative add-ons, multi-pet structures, and distribution through the channels owners already trust, from veterinary groups to retail partners. A product that can flex keeps a household insured; a product that cannot, lapses, and a pet loses its safety net. Growth will belong to the insurers who can offer more shapes of cover, to more owners, through more channels.

The real constraint is speed of change

If product shape is the affordability lever, the binding constraint is how quickly an insurer can pull it. Most policy administration estates were built for annual renewal cycles and occasional change. Product logic sits deep inside them, so every new tier, excess option or partner scheme queues behind a core release calendar. That is a market condition, not a criticism of any team: those systems were right for the era that built them. But it leaves the distance between a product idea and a product in market measured in quarters or years, while affordability pressures move in months.
The encouraging part is that closing that gap no longer means the project our industry learned to dread, the multi-year core replacement programme. The pattern that works is progressive: orchestrate pricing, underwriting and policy binding as one flow, in a layer above the systems you already run, and modernize policy administration step by step with the core you have.
In practice, progressive means product logic (rating factors, cover tiers, excess structures, documents) lives in that orchestration layer rather than deep in the core, so a new preventative add-on or a partner scheme becomes a configuration exercise instead of a core change request. The core keeps doing what it does well. The product surface above it moves at the pace the market sets.

Where this points

For pet and equine insurers alike, the welfare mission and the commercial one now point in the same direction. Owners need cover that fits their budgets. The market needs products that reach the uninsured majority. Both need product change measured in weeks, not release cycles. That is why we built the FintechOS Pet Insurance Accelerator, a pre-configured starting point for quote-and-bind, tiered cover and vet and partner integrations. The question worth taking back to your own product meeting is a simple one: when the next affordability pressure arrives, will your answer ship that quarter, or wait behind a core release calendar?