Industry guide
How accident management actually works.
Written for the people running these businesses, not for the people making a claim. What the work involves, where the margin is, and why the operational detail decides whether a claim is profitable.
The short version.
When somebody has a non-fault road traffic accident, an accident management company steps in on their behalf: recovering the vehicle, putting them in a replacement, arranging storage and repair or handling the total loss, and then recovering the whole cost from the at-fault driver’s insurer.
The claimant typically pays nothing. The business carries the cost upfront and recovers it afterwards — which is precisely why the operational detail matters so much. Every day a hire vehicle is out, every day a car sits in storage, is money advanced against a recovery that has to be defended later.
The lifecycle
First notification of loss to recovery.
- FNOLCaptured and verified
- OnboardingDocuments signed
- Hire & storageClock running
- EngineeringReport received
- ValuationConfirmed with client
- Disclosed to TPInsurer notified
- Authority & fundsVD in
- Off-hireExposure closed
- Payment packSent to solicitor
- RecoveredMoney in
Where claims go wrong
The four expensive failures.
Almost every disputed claim fails in one of these ways, and all four are operational rather than legal.
Hire that ran longer than it can be defended
Duration is the single most contested figure in credit hire. Insurer-side reviews consistently find that tighter control of the hire period recovers more than arguing about the rate. The gaps — a week waiting for an engineer, a fortnight waiting for a valuation — have to be explained, and explained with dates recorded at the time.
Evidence reconstructed after the argument started
Need, impecuniosity and mitigation are decided on what was recorded when the vehicle went out, not on what can be assembled months later. Contemporaneous records carry weight precisely because they could not have been written to suit the dispute.
Storage nobody was watching
Storage accrues quietly and is rarely the reason anyone opens the file. A vehicle sitting after a total loss decision has been made is cost with no recovery behind it.
Silence mistaken for progress
A third-party insurer that has not replied for three weeks is not a claim progressing quietly. It is exposure growing while nobody is looking at it.
Terminology
The words that matter.
- FNOL — first notification of loss. The moment the claim enters your business, and the point at which most of the information you will later need is easiest to get.
- Credit hire — a replacement vehicle provided on credit to a non-fault driver, with the cost recovered from the at-fault insurer rather than the claimant.
- GTA — the ABI General Terms of Agreement, a voluntary protocol between subscribing insurers and credit hire organisations setting maximum daily rates by vehicle group, with rates reviewed annually.
- Basic hire rate — what a comparable vehicle would have cost on the open market. The benchmark an insurer argues down to when a claimant is not impecunious.
- Impecuniosity — whether the claimant could have afforded to hire a vehicle themselves. Assessed at the point of deployment, and decisive on which rate applies.
- Mitigation — the claimant’s duty to keep the loss down, including returning the hire vehicle promptly once theirs is available.
- Intervention — where the at-fault insurer offers the claimant a vehicle directly, ending or preventing the hire.
- Pre-accident value — what the damaged vehicle was worth immediately before the accident, and the figure a total loss settlement is built on.
The software side of all this.
ClaimCore is built for the businesses doing this work — the claim record, the workstream clocks, the evidence and the money in one system.