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The UK insurance industry is to lose one of its best-known brands after the Canadian owner of RSA, formerly known as Royal & Sun Alliance, decided to rename the business.
Intact Financial Corporation, Canada’s largest property and casualty insurer, said RSA would become Intact Insurance before the end of the year. NIG and Farmweb — brokered insurance operations Intact acquired in 2023 from Direct Line Group — will also fall under the new brand.
Commercial insurer RSA, which offers products ranging from cyber and property insurance to business interruption policies, has roots stretching back more than 300 years to the Sun Fire Office founded in London in 1710. The rebrand comes four years after IFC paid £3bn to take over RSA’s operations in the UK and Canada.
RSA, whose larger clients include G4S and Network Rail, also provides commercial insurance to 7 per cent of the UK’s small and medium-sized insurance customers.
Pre-tax operating profit within IFC’s UK & Ireland business was C$301mn (£172mn) in 2024, nearly double the previous year’s C$151mn.
RSA chief executive Ken Norgrove said that because commercial insurance was sold through brokers rather than the price comparison websites that dominate the personal insurance market, “being a household name is not critical for us”.
He added that brokers who sold RSA’s products in the UK had pushed for the brand change because of IFC’s positive reputation.
Charles Brindamour, IFC chief executive, noted that while UK commercial insurers suffered “brand damage” from fights over policy wordings during the Covid-19 pandemic, North American peers fared better in terms of reputational hits because their policies more clearly excluded pandemic-related claims.
“The clarity of the language and the product is an issue, especially on this side of the pond,” he said. “North America fared much better.”
One looming threat to the industry’s reputation is cyber coverage. Industry leaders have long argued that businesses are not sufficiently protected under existing insurance policies from risks such as hacking or botched IT upgrades.
Norgrove said the cyber products currently offered by RSA were tailored to larger clients based on their specific risk management practices, and that the business would like to develop offerings for small businesses that are less bespoke.
“We do provide an element of cyber coverage but in our opinion it’s not broad enough, strong enough, or taken up enough by SMEs,” he said.
Brindamour said climate risk had become a competitive advantage for Intact because the company was early to invest in modelling the threat, helping it address the so-called protection gap between weather-related losses and insurance coverage.
By contrast, he said, society’s exposure to cyber threats was much larger than cyber insurance coverage — and the risk may be harder for private insurers to hold. Unlike natural disasters, which are “geographic in nature”, he said, a single “systemic” cyber attack could affect the majority of businesses worldwide.
“It’s hard to diversify . . . tail risk management is a big issue,” he said of cyber threats. “There are models. But the problem is that: they’re models.”
In the UK, he said, Intact had “baked in” an operating assumption that the cost of natural disasters — stemming mostly from flooding — would increase by 50 per cent over the next 15 years.
