Top of the charts again!

Ecclesiastical Insurance has retained its top spot in the Fairer Finance Home Insurance league table for the twelfth time and remains the UK’s most trusted home insurance provider.

The specialist insurer topped the list of 51 insurers including household names such as Nationwide, NFU Mutual, HSBC and John Lewis – retaining Gold Ribbon status for another year.

Fairer Finance, an independent consumer group, surveys around 20,000 UK banking and insurance customers throughout the year, asking them to rate how satisfied they are with their bank or insurance company.

Customers are asked to rate the firms on happiness and trust, Fairer Finance then uses records from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to assess complaints handling and a combination of mystery shopping and policy document reviews to assess transparency.

Ecclesiastical has topped the table for the twelfth time and has seen improvements in its scores, with overall customer experience score increasing by 1.72% to 85.63%, 12% higher than closest rival Nationwide.

The insurer was also rated the most trusted insurer by its customers, achieving a rating of 88.47%, an increase of 3.85% and 17% higher than NFU Mutual which scored 71.11%.

The insurer’s customer happiness score increased by 2.68% to 86.91%, almost 10% (9.96%) higher than the closest rival NFU Mutual.

Mark Hews, Group Chief Executive, said: “I am delighted that Ecclesiastical has again been voted into first place in the Fairer Finance league table for home insurance for a sixth year.

“We are absolutely committed to being the most trusted financial services group in all our markets, so it is wonderful to hear that we have the happiest customers who believe that they can trust us to do the right thing.

“As a charity owned financial services group our purpose is to contribute to the greater good of society, and we will continue to maintain our support for charitable causes while delivering a high quality of service for our customers.”

James Daley, managing director at Fairer Finance, said: “Ecclesiastical continues to set the pace in the home insurance sector - topping our customer experience tables for the 12th consecutive time.

“It’s not only top of our home insurance tables, it also has the highest customer experience score of any company in all 10 banking and insurance sectors that we look at - a considerable achievement. It’s going to be hard to catch them, but we hope other insurers will step up to the challenge.

“While trust in the insurance sector as a whole continues to waiver, Ecclesiastical has shown that it is possible to win customers’ hearts in this market. There’s definitely something that its competitors could learn from its continued success.”