14 July 2026
Full rewrite to bring page up to date
13 March 2025
First Published
If you are a commercial landlord or business owner reviewing a property quote bearing the NIG name, you need to be aware of a major structural shift in the UK commercial insurance market.
NIG (the National Insurance Guarantee Corporation, formerly a core commercial division of the Direct Line Group) no longer operates as an independent brand. Following a transformational £520 million acquisition by RSA, NIG officially rebranded to Intact Insurance on October 6, 2025.
This transition unites NIG, FarmWeb, and RSA’s commercial operations under a single global banner backed by Intact Financial Corporation - Canada's largest property and casualty insurer. If you hold a legacy NIG policy, your cover remains identical and legally active; however, all new and renewing quotes are now written under the Intact Insurance brand.
You can get independent advice and a personalised quotes comparison of top-tier commercial property policies (including how Intact's legacy NIG products rate against the wider market) from one of our expert advisers below:
Get commercial property insurance quotes and advice today
You can use our expert advisers to compare comprehensive commercial, residential landlord, and mixed portfolio insurance deals across the open market.
They will round up personalised quotes from leading underwriters and independent brokers, ensuring your business assets and buildings are fully protected.
To get started, fill in our quick online form below and one of our expert property insurance advisers will be in touch today
What type of property insurance do they provide?
NIG’s product architecture - now fully absorbed into Intact Insurance - focuses strictly on commercial lines and multi-unit residential property portfolios. They do not write standard, direct-to-consumer domestic home insurance for single-owner occupiers.
Their property owners' solutions are divided into two specialised offerings:
1. Intact (formerly NIG) Property Owners
Designed for standard commercial and residential landlords renting out professional lets, blocks of flats, or retail and office premises. This policy features high built-in limits as standard:
-
Trace and Access: Up to £25,000 to investigate and open up structural cavities following a water, gas, or oil leak.
-
Tenant Malicious Damage & Theft: Automatically covered up to £10,000 per claim.
-
Environmental Clean-Up: Up to £100,000 for statutory decontamination of your land.
-
Loss of Gas, Water & Metered Oil: Covered up to £25,000 following a covered leak.
2. Premier Property Owners (Mid-Market Real Estate)
Specifically engineered for high-value portfolios, large commercial complexes, and mixed residential-commercial real estate blocks. Managed by specialised regional underwriting teams in London and Manchester, this framework offers:
-
Massive Underwriting Capacity: Up to £100 million total sum insured per location.
-
Engineering Breakdown: Automatically built in to cover elevators, central heating systems, air conditioning units, and security alarms.
-
Inflation Buffer: Features a 50% inflation provision on a "Day One Reinstatement" basis.
-
Inadvertent Omission to Insure: Up to £5 million in blanket safety coverage if a property in your expanding portfolio is accidentally left unregistered.
How they calculate premiums
Because Intact (NIG) is an intermediary-only commercial insurer, they do not use the simple postcode-matching price tables common in domestic home insurance. Instead, their pricing engine calculates premium costs through specific commercial variables:
-
Preferred Risk Profiling: They offer significantly discounted premium rates for properties built post-1960 featuring concrete floors. Fully occupied structures with professional working tenants on direct Tenancy Agreements yield the lowest premium rates.
-
RiskAssist Portal Reductions: Brokers can lower your premium by demonstrating compliance with Intact's RiskAssist framework. Implementing recommended security upgrades, electrical testing routines, and water-leak-detection hardware drops your calculated risk score, directly reducing the annual premium.
-
The E-Trading Discount: For smaller portfolios, brokers trade your risk via TheHub or platforms like Acturis. The fully automated algorithm cuts out manual administrative processing costs, allowing the underwriter to pass those savings back to you.
Pros and cons
Here is a look at the pros and cons of protecting your property portfolio via their newly rebranded platform:
Pros:
-
Outstanding Capital Limits: A massive £100m location capacity makes them an absolute powerhouse for large-scale real estate investors.
-
Exceptional Trace & Access: A built-in £25,000 trace and access buffer easily beats standard high-street landlord baselines.
-
Engineering Coverage Included: Having commercial elevators and HVAC boilers automatically insured under standard terms prevents the need for costly secondary policies.
-
Global Financial Backing: Transitioning to Intact Insurance delivers "A-rated" global financial security to protect massive physical claims payouts.
Cons:
-
Zero Direct Access: You cannot get a quote directly online or over the phone; everything must go through an authorised commercial insurance broker.
-
Strict Property Exclusions: They typically reject properties with combustible cladding, buildings converted within the last three years, and unoccupied sites without a referral.
-
Rebrand Policy Number Shifts: Legacy clients transitioning to Intact paper will see changing policy prefix systems, which can cause administrative tracking friction.
Customer service and claims handling
The operational transition from NIG to Intact Insurance has been designed to prevent broker and policyholder disruption:
-
The Prefix Claim Route: To make a claim, you or your broker contact their 24/7 dedicated commercial claims team. For policies that have transitioned to Intact paper, the policy numbers will be prefixed by the letters NG or NM to route your call directly to the correct specialized desk.
-
Localised Claims Experts: Rather than outsourcing claims to global centers, Intact maintains local, regional claims adjusters who physically inspect major structural fire or flood damage to coordinate rapid commercial restoration.
-
Continuous Claims Contacts: All existing telephone numbers, web claim-logging portals, and physical postal addresses originally used under the NIG banner remain fully active and supported under the Intact brand.
Sourcing a quote against the market
To pull a quote from this newly unified platform, you will need to ask an independent commercial insurance broker to run your property details through TheHub (Intact's broker extranet) or standard commercial software houses.
However, because property owner's liability limits, loss of rent indemnity periods (ranging from 12 to 36 months), and commercial excesses vary heavily across the market, you should always run parallel checks. Comparing alternative elite commercial syndicates ensures you capture the most flexible tenant exclusions and the most cost-effective rates for your exact postcode.
At Money Helpdesk, our independent specialists excel at mapping out complex commercial, mixed portfolio, and standard landlord risks. Get in touch today, and we will handle the market search to secure the ideal policy for your business - get started here.
No. NIG officially rebranded to Intact Insurance on October 6, 2025. While the products and underwriting teams remain active, all new documentation and communications carry the Intact Insurance brand.
They are owned by Intact Financial Corporation, a major multinational property and casualty insurance provider headquartered in Canada.
Nothing changes. Your existing cover terms, claims processes, and premium prices remain fully active and unchanged until your next natural renewal date, at which point the policy will transition to Intact Insurance branding.
No. Standard Intact (NIG) Property Owners policies are explicitly not aimed at holiday lets, B&Bs, Airbnb properties, or asylum accommodation. They require standard professional AST agreements directly between the landlord and tenant.