Region profile: Insurance in Europe

In this article, we explore public sector insurance tenders in Europe. First, we look at how many tenders are being issued year by year by public sector bodies in Europe and their value. We then deep dive into some of the largest countries and show what the range of values and tender quantities these markets have.

We have data on tenders from around the world going back nine years. This allows us to estimate market sizes and model trends. For the public sector insurance market, we have sufficient data to obtain and use the median tender value (€1,362,500 per annum) for European tenders and multiply this by tenders count per year to create a market size of up to €7.2bn.

Sizing the public sector insurance market

At first glance, the market size for insurance each year has dropped in the two years since 2016. However as of Q2 2019, the market size is over 2/3rds that of 2017. From our data, we know that the number of tenders is two-thirds that of 2017 and the value is approximately half that of 2017. Given what we know of insurance publishing patterns from our data, we expect that the market size for public sector will hit circa €6bn by Q4 2019.

This chart does not tell the full story however and it is necessary to delve deeper into the different countries. For example, France has a high demand for insurance in the public sector. On one hand it has seen the number and value decrease over the past three years. On the other, it has seen an increase in the number of insurance tenders that contain reference of a framework agreement (“accord-cadre”). This could indicate a softening of the market in France as frameworks are notoriously poorly priced.

Key public sector insurance markets

This chart shows the seven key public sector insurance markets: France, UK, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain and Denmark. Most of these countries are higher than the European average. We see that the UK appears smaller. One explanation for this is that, within UK public sector insurance tenders, there are a number of references to framework agreements. Framework agreements are much harder to estimate. 

It is also important to consider the consistency of tender values. Some countries report higher median values because they publish less but at a much higher tender value. The chart below shows the range of tender values for the top countries. We see that France and the UK is more consistent than for other countries such as Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The spread of tender values

Market intelligence is key both to identify the larger tenders in countries where the spread is greater and to build a stable pipeline from countries that publish more tenders with more consistent values. At OpenOpps we can help provide free market intelligence through our tender search page [https://openopps.com/](https://openopps.com/) where you can find opportunities for insurance and other financial services sectors and more. We also provide value added market intelligence, such as bespoke research or access to our API.