Part of the collections and valuables cluster. This article explains the mechanism behind every other guide in it — what actually happens between sending us a description of a risk and receiving terms.
Most insurance in Portugal is bought from a shelf. A rating engine takes a postcode, a floor area, a year of construction and a sum insured, and returns a price in seconds. It works well, it is cheap to run, and for the great majority of homes and cars it is the right answer.
It fails in a specific and predictable way: whenever a feature of the risk has no field on the form. A rubble-stone house with a chestnut roof structure. A collection of paintings, none of which has a catalogue price. A boat kept on a swinging mooring for eight months of the year. A property partly let short-term and partly lived in. The engine has nothing to do with these, so it either declines outright or quotes a policy whose sub-limits make the quote irrelevant.
What replaces the shelf is not a different product. It is a different process.
Who is actually in the chain
Specialist business usually passes through more hands than a retail policy, and it is worth knowing which hand does what, because the names on the documentation are not interchangeable.
| Party | What they do | Who they act for |
|---|---|---|
| You | Describe the risk and supply the evidence | Yourself |
| Intermediary / mediator | Prepares and presents the submission, negotiates terms, handles the claim | You |
| Underwriting agency (MGA) | Assesses and prices the risk, issues the policy, often handles claims | The insurer, under delegated authority |
| Insurer / capacity provider | Carries the risk and ultimately pays the claim | Itself |
The distinction that matters most is the third row against the fourth. An underwriting agency is not the risk carrier. It holds delegated authority — written permission from an insurer to quote, bind and sometimes settle claims within defined limits of value, class and territory. Within those limits it decides; outside them it must refer back. The insurer whose capacity stands behind the policy is named in the documentation, and that is the entity whose balance sheet responds.
Where a specialist agency holds authority on behalf of an insurer, it is often described as a coverholder. In practice, for the classes covered in this cluster, the capacity behind a Portuguese specialist placement comes from a small number of international carriers: Hiscox writes high-value household, art, jewellery and collections directly through its own operations; Liberty Mutual capacity reaches non-standard Portuguese property through a specialist underwriting agency; and some individually underwritten risks with no shelf product at all are placed with Lloyd’s capacity through a specialist underwriting agency, where a syndicate rather than a company carries the risk.
That last route is worth one clarification, because it is widely misdescribed. Lloyd’s is a market, not a company: risks placed there are underwritten by certain underwriters at Lloyd’s — syndicates that accept shares of a risk — and access is through agencies and intermediaries with the relevant authority. No Portuguese mediator represents Lloyd’s, and no intermediary is a Lloyd’s office. What an intermediary can do is present a risk to an agency that holds that capacity.
What individual underwriting means in practice
Stripped of the phrase, it means a person reads the file. That has three consequences.
Unusual features become rateable rather than fatal. A rating engine treats an unrecognised construction type as an exception and stops. An underwriter treats it as a question — how is it built, what condition is it in, what has been done to it — and prices the answer. Most Portuguese risks that are “uninsurable” are simply unratable by an engine.
The wording can move. Sub-limits, the proportional rule, agreed values, territorial scope, security conditions: on an individually underwritten policy these are negotiable at inception in a way retail terms never are. They are also negotiable only at inception, which is the reason to get them right before the policy is bound rather than at the first claim.
The quality of the submission changes the price. This is the part owners find least intuitive. Two identical properties, presented differently, get different terms — not because the underwriter is arbitrary but because uncertainty is priced. Unexplained gaps in a claims history attract a loading; the same history explained, with the remedial work invoiced and photographed, frequently does not.
An underwriter prices what they can see and loads what they cannot. The gaps in a submission cost more than the problems in it.
A risk that has been declined, or quoted with useless sub-limits?
Send us what you have, including any decline letters, and we will tell you whether it can be placed.
What you have to supply
A complete submission for this class of business runs to more than a form. The list below is what an underwriting agency will expect before it will quote seriously.
- The risk described accurately, including the parts that are awkward. An undisclosed feature discovered at claim stage is far more damaging than one declared at inception and rated.
- Values with a basis. Rebuild cost for a building, replacement basis for contents, and valuations an underwriter will accept for scheduled items — each stating the basis on which it was prepared.
- Photographs that inform. Construction, roof structure, security installations, hallmarks and serial numbers, existing damage. Estate-agent photography is of no use here.
- Security as installed. Safe make, model and rating; alarm grade, coverage and whether it is monitored; locking on doors and glazed openings. See the security conditions attached to a policy.
- Occupancy and use. How many months a year the property is occupied, whether it is let, whether anyone is on site. Second homes engage the unoccupancy clause.
- Claims history in full, five years or more, with what was done afterwards.
- Any decline or exclusion letters you have already received. They save time and they are visible to the market anyway.
The survey
Above certain values a survey becomes a condition of quoting. A surveyor visits, records construction, fire protection, security and how valuables are held, and produces a report that drives the conditions attached to the schedule. It is normally at the underwriter’s cost.
Two practical points. Requirements arising from a survey usually carry a completion deadline, and cover may be conditional on meeting it. And requirements are negotiable while they are being drafted, not afterwards — if something is genuinely impractical on a heritage building, that is the moment to say so and propose an alternative.
Realistic timescales
| Stage | Typical time |
|---|---|
| Initial view on whether the risk is placeable | Within 24 hours of a description |
| Assembling a complete submission | 2–10 days, mostly waiting on valuations and documents |
| Terms from the underwriting agency | 3–10 working days from a complete file |
| Survey, where required | 1–3 weeks to schedule and report |
| Referral to the capacity provider, where limits are exceeded | Add 3–10 working days |
| Total, straightforward | 1–2 weeks |
| Total, with survey and referral | 4–8 weeks |
The single largest variable is the completeness of the submission. A file that arrives in pieces is re-read from the beginning each time something is added, and each round of questions costs days. Anyone buying a property with a completion date, or importing a collection with a shipping date, should start the placement several weeks before it is needed rather than in the final week.
What happens at the claim
Where the agency holds claims authority, the claim is notified to and handled by the agency rather than by the capacity provider. That is generally faster, because the people assessing the claim are the people who wrote the risk and know why the terms are what they are.
On this class of business the intermediary’s role at claim stage is substantive rather than administrative: assembling the documentation, dealing with the loss adjuster, arguing the basis of settlement where an agreed value or a restoration cost is disputed, and pressing the timetable. That is worth establishing before placing the cover, because it is the part that differs most between one arrangement and another.
Whether this route is the right one
Not every difficult-looking risk needs it. A retail policy with a corrected rebuild figure, a raised liability limit and properly specified valuables solves a great many problems at a fraction of the cost, and the specialist market is the answer only when the retail one genuinely cannot carry the risk or the terms it offers are illusory. That judgement is the first thing to make, and it should be made before any submission is prepared.
Adler & Rochefort is a commercial brand of Ownizo, Unipessoal Lda., registered with the Portuguese Insurance and Pension Funds Supervisory Authority (ASF) under no. 425591790/3. General information only, not personalised advice; cover, sub-limits and conditions vary by underwriter and by risk.
More on this subject: Setting up a company in Portugal as a foreigner · Liability cover for trustees, foundation boards and family offices in Portugal · Key person insurance when you still own businesses abroad