Do you see quotes from every insurer? Who I work with, and why one may be missing

What does the law expect of an “independent” broker?

Under Section 398 of Act LXXXVIII of 2014 on the business of insurance – the Insurance Act (Bit.) – the broker acts on the client's instructions, and the rules on the information a broker must provide require the broker to base its information and advice on an objective analysis of a sufficient number of insurance products available on the market. The benchmark, then, is not “all” but “a sufficient number” and “objective”: enough quotes, of the right kind, to support a well-founded recommendation for your needs. The MNB (Hungary's central bank and financial supervisor) enforces this: in 2023 it fined a broking firm, among other reasons, because it “in several cases was unable to demonstrate that it had fulfilled its obligation to carry out an objective analysis of a sufficient number of insurance products available on the market”. This is where a broker differs from a tied agent: the agent acts for one or a few insurers, whereas the broker must document which insurers were approached and the analysis carried out – I wrote about this in the article on the difference between a broker and an agent.

Why does a broker not have every insurer on its panel?

A broker works with insurers on the basis of a cooperation agreement: it sets out which products the broker may request quotes for and how policies are concluded. Such an agreement does not come about automatically with every insurer, and there are typical reasons for this:

• the insurer does not sell through brokers, only through its own network, through banks or directly online;
• the insurer does not provide quotes in the given product line – for example, not every insurer offers commercial property insurance or group health insurance, so for some types of cover the list is shorter;
• the insurer does not accept a particular risk – an activity, a vehicle type or a property type – so it drops out of the comparison in that case;
• the insurer has contracts not with this broking firm but with other broking firms – the circle of partner insurers differs from broker to broker;
• as a cross-border provider, it is available through Hungarian brokers only to a limited extent, or not at all.

Sometimes the absence is deliberate: if persistently poor experience has built up with an insurer in claims settlement or administration, that insurer is simply left out of the request for quotes – I do not rate insurers by name, and I do not tell you where you “should” take out your policy. The decision is yours; my job is to put comparable quotes and objective arguments in front of you.

What does this look like in my practice?

I currently work with the offerings of 19 insurers (as of 2026), but this translates into a different number for each product line: for compulsory motor third-party liability insurance (MTPL) most of the market is available, and the range is also wide for home insurance and casco, whereas in corporate group health insurance, for example, considerably fewer insurers provide quotes, simply because fewer of them offer it. The comparison table I hand over in every case therefore shows not only the quotes but also which insurers I approached and which did not provide a quote – so you can see how large a slice of the market you are choosing from. As I described in the article on how I work, the competitive quotation starts after the needs assessment, so the circle of insurers approached is tailored to your needs: not every possible insurer, but those that provide quotes for the given risk.

What should you ask, and what can you do if a missing insurer matters to you?

Three questions worth putting to any broker: how many insurers did you approach in this case; which ones did not provide a quote, and why; and is there any insurer that is not available through you at all in this product line. Ask for the answers in writing – the analysis required by law has to be documented anyway. If an insurer that is not available through me matters to you – for example, because your old policy is with it, or because an acquaintance recommended it – I tell you so openly, and there is nothing to stop you requesting its quote directly so that we can include it in the comparison as well. A broker mandate is not exclusive: you may request quotes from elsewhere at any time. The aim is not to have as many logos as possible on a list, but for your decision to be based on a sufficient number of objectively compared quotes – that is what the law expects, and it is what you can expect too.

What to do in practice: when you receive a comparison, check how many insurers were approached and which were left out; ask why they were left out; if a missing insurer matters to you, request a quote from it directly, and let us compare it using the same criteria.