The way your business describes customer and competitor behaviour can be a warning sign about your approach and attitude to pricing.

How often have you heard staff talk about poor risk customers.  This implies it is the customer's fault that they don't produce the profit you expected. The reality is the business, not the customer, sets the price and terms. So it is your responsibility if a segment of the business performs badly. You could argue there is an exception in the case of fraudulent behaviour, but equally, like all businesses, insurers need to make decisions and trade-offs about how they protect themselves from criminals. So, again the onus should be on the business to improve its defences.

Equally, how often have you dismissed competitors, or even the whole market, as behaving irrationally. In my view that is too easy an answer. It avoids the difficult questions of trying to understand why competitors are behaving as they do.  In my experience, every insurer believes it is behaving rationally.  Their approach to pricing reflecting their capabilities; capitalisation, brands, operational practices, and cost structure, and their strategic timescales; how far ahead are they looking in assessing the viability of their business. The challenge for each player is to try to unpick these strands and understand why competitors are behaving as they do. This gives you a chance of deciding how to respond and what they might do in future. Dismissing them as irrational achieves nothing.

So, if your pricing discussions are dominated by poor risk customers and irrational competition then you need to change they way you think about customers and competitors if you are to improve your pricing capabilities.