The Insurance Wallet: Why Every Financial Product Has One Except Insurance

You can see all your bank accounts in one app. Your investment portfolio updates in real time. Your pension pots are consolidating under the government's dashboard initiative. Insurance is the last holdout. Here's why that's changing now, not ten years from now, and what it will look like when it does.

How Banking Got Its Wallet

Open Banking launched in the UK in January 2018, mandated by the Competition and Markets Authority following a review that found the retail banking market was not working well for personal customers and small businesses. The technical mechanism — the Open Banking API standard — required the nine largest UK banks to share customer account data with authorised third parties upon customer consent. What followed was a wave of aggregation apps: Yolt, Moneyhub, Emma, Money Dashboard, and eventually the banking apps themselves adding multi-institution views.

The key enabler was the API standard. Each bank's account data, despite being stored in different formats on different core banking systems, was presented to third parties through a common interface. The aggregation layer didn't need to know how NatWest's internal database worked; it needed to know how NatWest's API worked, and the API was standardised.

Insurance doesn't have that. The UK insurance market has no equivalent of the Open Banking API standard. Each insurer stores policy data in proprietary formats. There is no FCA mandate for insurers to share policy data with third parties via a standardised API. There is no AISP equivalent for insurance (the banking sector's "Account Information Service Provider" licence category).

Why Insurance Didn't Follow the Same Path

The CMA review that triggered Open Banking focused on the current account market — a market where competition was demonstrably suppressed by switching friction and information asymmetry. The insurance market was not included because it was seen as having functioning competition through price comparison sites.

That diagnosis was arguably correct for price comparison at point of purchase. GoCompare and Compare the Market created genuine price competition in motor and home insurance, reducing average premiums through comparison friction. But price comparison didn't solve the post-purchase problem: once you've bought the policy, you still can't aggregate it alongside your other policies, you can't query it, and you can't use your data from one insurer as a portability asset when switching.

The government's insurance aggregation initiative has been discussed at FCA level since at least 2021, when the FCA published its general insurance pricing practices review. The review led to the ban on dual pricing (charging loyal renewing customers more than new customers), but did not extend to a data portability mandate. That is the policy gap Rehuman is building into, not around.

The Technical Workaround: What Rehuman Does Without an API

Without a standard API, the only way to aggregate insurance policies is to read the documents themselves — the PDFs, certificates, and schedules that insurers provide. This is a harder technical problem than banking aggregation, but it's solvable. OCR converts the document to text. NLP extracts the structured fields. A normalisation layer maps insurer-specific terminology to a standard schema. The result is a structured policy record that can be stored, queried, and compared — the same end state as an API would produce, via a different route.

The limitation of the document parsing approach is that it's backwards-looking: you have to upload documents that exist. It doesn't get real-time policy updates — if your insurer amends your policy mid-term, you need to upload the updated schedule. Banking aggregation via Open Banking, by contrast, reflects the account state in near-real time. An insurance wallet built on document parsing is closer to a statement viewer than a live account dashboard.

The second path — email monitoring with user consent — is closer to real-time for renewals and mid-term adjustments. When an insurer sends an updated schedule to your email, Rehuman can detect and parse it automatically. This is how approximately 60% of our users' policy updates are currently processed. The other 40% is manual upload.

What an Open Insurance API Would Enable

If the FCA mandated a UK Open Insurance standard equivalent to Open Banking, several things become possible that aren't currently. First: real-time policy status. An insurer's API would surface whether your policy is current, lapses, cancelled, or amended, without waiting for a renewal email. Second: portability at renewal. Your claims history, held by one insurer in a structured format, could be shared with a new insurer via an API call rather than requiring the No Claims Discount Letter process that currently takes 7–14 days.

Third: comparison on coverage, not just price. A policy data API would allow comparison services to surface not just the cheapest motor insurance, but the motor insurance with the best combination of coverage breadth, excess level, and inclusion of specific add-ons, all at a quoted premium. Price comparison would become coverage comparison. The market implications of that shift are significant — insurers that compete on price by narrowing coverage would face pressure they don't currently experience.

That last point is why insurer lobbying on an Open Insurance mandate has not been constructive. The incumbents that benefit most from the current opacity are not aligned with the consumer outcome that a data portability standard would produce. Open Banking happened because the CMA compelled it; Open Insurance will require the same mechanism.

Where the Momentum Is Building

The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) published its Open Insurance consultation paper in 2021 and has been developing a framework since. Several EU member states are ahead of the UK on insurance data portability frameworks. Post-Brexit, the FCA is not obligated to follow EIOPA direction, but the commercial pressure of operating in a market where EU insurers must comply with a data portability standard will be a factor.

The FCA's Consumer Duty, as mentioned elsewhere, is pushing insurers toward better customer outcomes. The logical extension of that pressure is that customers should be able to access their own policy data in a usable form. The step from "good consumer outcomes" to "consumers can take their data elsewhere" is shorter than it appears from the current position.

The government's Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 included a "smarter regulatory framework" provision that gives the FCA broader powers to designate data portability obligations. The Act doesn't require Open Insurance, but it provides the legal basis for the FCA to mandate it without primary legislation if it chooses to. That's a change from the prior position.

Why Now Rather Than In Ten Years

Three conditions that weren't simultaneously true five years ago are now all true: the technical capability to parse insurance documents at scale exists and is proven; the regulatory pressure through Consumer Duty creates institutional incentive for insurers to support comprehension tools; and the consumer expectation for aggregated financial data — set by Open Banking and investment platform aggregation — has created a legibility gap in insurance that is increasingly visible to consumers.

When customers can open Monzo and see all their bank accounts, then open a separate app and see their investments, and then have no equivalent tool for their insurance policies, the contrast is noticeable. It wasn't noticeable in 2015 because financial aggregation wasn't common. It is noticeable in 2025 because it's the exception in an otherwise aggregated financial landscape.

That's the specific moment we're building into at Rehuman. Not waiting for the API mandate — building the document-parsing infrastructure that fills the gap now, and that becomes more valuable when the API eventually arrives.