By Christian Amir Wayne
Recently, the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council told a room of nearly 400 police officers that “road safety in Saint Lucia isn’t mainly a policing problem. It’s a productivity problem”.
NCPC Director Lisa Florent-Montoute laid out the numbers. Saint Lucia now has more than 95 000 registered vehicles sharing roads built for a population of about 180 000. In 2023, the island recorded close to 3 000 accidents, more than 350 of which were major collisions.
Every one of those pulls someone away from work, adds medical bills, damages property, and in the worst cases costs a life.
Two conversations, one problem
It’s a fair diagnosis. But there’s a piece of this that keeps getting talked about separately: insurance. NCPC is asking how to make the roads safer. The government’s own insurance dialogue this year is asking why coverage keeps getting more expensive and harder to hold onto, but nobody has said the obvious thing yet: you can’t really fix one without the other.
Shopping around for insurance is too difficult
Try shopping around for car insurance in Saint Lucia, and you’ll see why. You call one company for a quote and wait. You call the next and wait again. Some never call back. Most people give up after two or three tries and renew with whoever they already had, whether or not it was the better deal. And don’t even mention all the paperwork it takes just to get a single quotation.
More than the cheapest quote
Price is only part of the problem. Simply chasing the cheapest quote in the market can lead people astray, since two policies at very different prices can both be right, depending on the deductible, what’s excluded, and how long that insurance company actually takes to pay out a claim.
Real access to insurance means being able to see those differences clearly enough to choose what’s right for you, not just finding the cheapest policy. Without the right information readily accessible, our drivers end up underinsured for the risks we face on our daily commutes.
When premiums price people out
Where this leads has already shown up. In 2024, Guyana & Trinidad Mutual suspended issuing new motor policies due to rising claims costs, and other insurers raised their premiums. By way of example, motorcycle third-party insurance went from $800 to $1 200, a 50 per cent increase, in just two years.
Kingson Jean, vice president of the National Association of Driving Schools, said at the time that the effect wouldn’t be fewer cars on the road; it would be more uninsured ones. This is where we are now as a country. When a family is forced to “choose between buying food or paying rent”, then insurance is going to lose every time.
Mr Jean wasn’t asking insurers to charge less, either; he said plainly that insurers need to be financially sound to keep providing the coverage the law requires. But the reality is that every uninsured or underinsured driver is a cost that someone else, or the state, will eventually absorb.
A reform with a gap in it
There’s a second gap, and it sits inside NCPC’s own reform. NCPC wants drivers involved in minor collisions to be able to exchange information and file reports digitally, clearing the road rather than blocking traffic for hours. Good idea.
But most insurers in Saint Lucia still won’t process a claim without a police report, even for a small fender bender, and there’s a real reason for that: a police report is one of the few checks against inflated or fraudulent claims.
The NCPC should aim to tie these two rules together. Without it, a driver can do everything the new law asks: exchange insurance details, clear the road, file the claim digitally, but still end up at the police station days later because that’s what their insurer’s claims department requires.
What regulators could actually require
NCPC’s proposed Road Safety and Traffic Management Collaborative could close this gap if it reaches far enough. Barbados did this successfully a few years ago, where now, only major traffic collisions require police intervention.
The Government of Saint Lucia and the FSRA, the country’s insurance regulator, have the authority to drive meaningful change. A concrete place to start: require insurers to publish their rates and coverage terms, deductibles, exclusions, claims handling history, in a place where a driver can actually see them side by side.
Regulators around the world are encouraging innovation in their insurance markets. For example, last year in Nigeria, the local regulator passed a law that requires insurers to settle claims within 60 days or incur penalties. Rules like these encourage insurers to find efficiencies in the claims settlement process, which ultimately helps alleviate the very problems the NCPC is tackling.
That said, Saint Lucia’s insurers are managing real cost pressure of their own that deserves attention, but what’s being asked here is simpler: visibility, so that whatever price the market settles on, people can see it clearly enough to make an informed decision about their coverage options.
Room for new builders
None of this has to wait for one company. Saint Lucia has a small but real community of entrepreneurs and technologists who are already changing how people bank, shop and move money. Insurance has mostly sat that digital shift out. There’s room, and a real need, for local technology entrepreneurs to help close that gap too, not just the handful of companies that have run this market the same way for decades.
Florent-Montoute closed by saying every minute saved on the road, every accident prevented, every life protected adds up to a stronger, more productive Saint Lucia. That’s a fair standard. But that standard should encourage great transparency so our drivers can actually find, understand and afford the coverage they need before anything goes wrong.
Christian Amir Wayne is the founder of Breadfruit Technologies Inc., a digital motor insurance brokerage with plans to launch in Saint Lucia.
