AI, rising costs and a transparency reset: pet insurance pricing is entering a new era

The UK’s veterinary reforms have arrived with a reassuring promise: more transparency, clearer pricing, and a fairer deal for pet owners.

That matters. Anyone who has stood at a vet’s reception desk, weighing up treatment options while trying to make sense of the cost, knows how opaque things can feel. The Competition and Markets Authority is trying to fix that, with requirements around price lists, ownership disclosure and better comparison tools.

It should make the market easier to navigate. It may even rebuild some trust. But it doesn’t change the underlying reality. Veterinary care is becoming more advanced, more specialised, and more expensive. That trend has been building for years, and it is unlikely to reverse just because prices are easier to see.

Which makes the timing of these reforms interesting. They land just as AI has become the dominant thread running through insurance conversations. Depending on who you ask, it is either the answer to rising costs or another source of risk entirely. The industry is still working out where it actually sits between those extremes.

Insurance pricing clarity

Pet insurance is a good place to look for clarity, because the pressures are very real. Costs are rising. Customer expectations are shifting. And now, with greater transparency, the differences in how those costs are structured will be much harder to ignore.

More visibility sounds like simplicity. In practice, it often does the opposite. As pricing becomes easier to compare, variations between practices, regions and treatments start to stand out. That doesn’t just influence how pet owners behave. It feeds back into how insurers think about risk, pricing and product design. What was once averaged out begins to fragment.

That’s where the strain on traditional pricing models starts to show. Most insurers are still working with approaches built for a slower-moving world, where data came in batches and pricing changed in cycles. That made sense when costs were more stable and less visible. It makes less sense now.

Some insurers have already moved on from that way of working. ManyPets is one example. Instead of treating pricing as something that gets reviewed periodically, it is handled as an ongoing process. With platforms like Earnix, teams can test scenarios, adjust assumptions and implement changes far more quickly than was previously possible.

The devil in the detail

The speed helps, but what really shifts is the level of detail. Pricing needs to reflect what is actually happening on the ground, rather than what happened last year. That brings its own questions.

The more precisely you price risk, the more exposed those decisions become. In a market where customers can see and compare more than ever, it is not just about getting the number right. It is about being able to stand behind it. Explain it. Defend it.

That is where the conversation around AI becomes more grounded in execution rather than the art of the possible. It is less about bold claims and more about capability. Can you process the volume of data now available? Can you respond fast enough to keep up with change? Can you do that without losing sight of fairness or trust?

Justin Clarke, Chief Underwriting Officer at ManyPets, has talked about how InsurTech has pushed the market forward through speed and adaptability.

“Before, we used to have an old system where it would take a very long time in order to implement systems and changes and solutions. Earnix has come along, and sped everything up massively. We’ve got a brand new analytics engine as well – it’s a fantastic solution for us as a team… and one that is really going to help us improve our performance… I think it’s a fascinating market in the in insurtech world – it’s driving an awful lot of innovation at the moment in the industry.”

That feels particularly relevant now. The gap is no longer just about innovation for its own sake, but about whether pricing approaches are fit for the environment they operate in.

The CMA reforms are part of that environment, but they are not the whole story. They make the market more visible. They do not make it less complex. For insurers, that complexity is only going to increase. AI will not change the cost of veterinary care, and it will not remove difficult trade-offs.

What’s changing here is not just regulation, or technology, but the pace at which pricing needs to respond to reality. In a more transparent, more data-rich market, pricing can’t lag behind the world it is trying to reflect. It has to move with it.

For those still relying on static models and slow cycles, that gap is only going to widen. That requires a different way of working. Continuous pricing. Integrated data. The ability to test, adjust and implement without delay.

In a market defined by transparency and rising costs, can pricing still afford to stand still?

By: Andy How, Insurance Director