#1268 2025 · Suncorp Insurance · General insurance
An insurer shares its own pricing risk data so your house tells you what will destroy it
the problem
By 2035 a tenth of Australian homes would be uninsurable; insurers act only after disaster and owners ignore the warnings
background
Australian insurers were stuck in recovery mode: 97% of government and industry funding was spent on paying out after weather events and only 3% on making homes stronger before them. Decades of floods, storms and bushfires had taught the industry to price and settle, not to prevent. Yet the risk information that could make prevention surgical already existed — it was the same property and natural-hazard datasets that insurers used to price each policy and decline each address.
The obvious move was marketing: run a doom-scroll ad telling Australians their homes were at risk from climate change. It would fail for the same reason it always had — 35% of Australians did not believe climate events would affect their own home, and a generic warning confirms nothing a skeptic can act on. A lump of aggregate statistics is not a reason to retrofit this house.
what everyone would do
Every obvious move keeps the information asymmetry that causes the apathy: run a climate-notice ad (a generic abstraction a skeptic can ignore), or tighten underwriting and raise premiums (pricing the risk, the insurer's traditional unit of account) — which penalises the owner without telling them anything they can act on tonight.
what they saw
The dataset that ends the apathy was proprietary: the risk data that priced each policy. Suncorp saw that a report voiced as the home itself converts aggregate hazard into a private fact one owner must act on — the pricing input becomes public service.
the move
Suncorp built a free platform, Haven, where any Australian enters an address and the home itself — voiced in its own character and age — delivers a personalised risk report for storm, flood, bushfire and cyclone, pulling live natural-hazard, weather and property data to tell that specific owner exactly what threatens it and how to harden it. Instead of guarding its proprietary risk data as the tool that prices policies, Suncorp gave it away, even to competitors' customers.
why it works
A generic flood warning is an abstraction that shifts blame to the world; a risk report about THIS address, delivered in that house's voice, is a private fact that this one owner can act on tonight. Because it uses the insurer's own pricing data it is credible where marketing puffery is not, and because acting prevents a claim it shrinks the insurer's real cost base — the old model secretly profited from the event it claimed to cover. The fewer claims, the cheaper the pool, so giving away the data does not give away the business; it strengthens it.
the payoff
The company reports 280k+ users, #2→#1 share, 238% ROI, $402M lifetime value (self-reported); independent outlets confirm only the launch
where it breaks
It only pays off if the customer actually has agency to act: a renter whose landlord controls the dwelling, an owner who cannot afford the retrofit, or an uninsurable home offers nothing to hand back. And it requires the institution to genuinely profit from prevention — a firm whose business is the event itself (repair, recovery, litigation) has no incentive to give the avoidance away.
what came after
The platform outlived the campaign: it scaled from a model house to a street to a platform open to every Australian homeowner including competitors' customers, and took the Cannes Titanium Grand Prix for redefining an insurer's role.
references
- [1]MPA (Mortgage Professional Australia) — Suncorp rolls out home risk assessment toolMortgage Professional Australia (Key Media), 2025mpamag.com
- [2]ADFEST winners showcase — Haven / Suncorp InsuranceADFEST, 2026adfest.com
Widely retold, only partly documented. Filed as hearsay.