A home insurer makes its money paying claims after disasters strike — Suncorp built a free tool that tries to stop the disaster from costing the customer anything in the first place

the problem

An insurer's revenue model rewards it for pricing and paying claims well, not for reducing how often claims happen — so the company has no natural business reason to spend money helping a customer avoid a loss before it occurs

background

what everyone would do

As a claims-driven business, Suncorp's standard incentive was to keep investing in pricing and paying claims accurately after a loss occurred, since that's literally what generates and protects its revenue, with no natural business reason to spend money helping customers avoid a loss in the first place.

what they saw

Suncorp saw that its own research exposed a real gap, 81% of Australian homeowners had already experienced extreme weather but only 17% had any concrete protection plan, and that the insurer already possessed exactly the property-specific risk information, the kind its own actuaries used, that could close that gap if shared before disaster struck rather than kept internal for pricing after the fact. Rather than continuing to optimize only the claims-payout side of the business, the fix was deliberately flipping the incentive, giving away the prevention tools freely, accepting fewer payable claims as a real cost in exchange for the trust and differentiation that giving away loss-prevention capability could build.

the move

Suncorp and Leo Australia built Haven, a free public platform combining 12 large risk datasets, multiple live APIs and around 10 distinct technologies to let any Australian homeowner enter their address and see a specific, property-level assessment of their extreme-weather vulnerability — flood, fire, storm and other climate risk — paired with a concrete, actionable resilience plan for that property, at no cost and with no purchase required.

why it works

Building Haven as a free, no-purchase-required platform that let any homeowner get a property-specific resilience assessment meant Suncorp was giving away exactly the kind of proprietary-feeling risk data most insurers guard as competitive underwriting advantage, which is precisely what made the gesture credible and differentiating rather than merely another marketing campaign. Because the tool provided genuine, actionable value independent of whether the visitor ever became a Suncorp customer, 79% of users reporting intent to act on their resilience plan, it built real trust that converted into commercial results anyway: people exposed to the campaign were 21% more likely to request a Suncorp insurance quote, roughly double the lift most competitors' campaigns achieved, and the company's NPS for the initiative rose from 5.4 to 10.2. This is why the free tool, ostensibly working against Suncorp's own claims-driven revenue model, contributed to Suncorp rising from the #2 to the #1 home insurer in Australia and an estimated AU$402 million in customer lifetime value, evidence that giving away prevention capability grew the business faster than protecting it as proprietary data would have.

the payoff

Haven drew 323,186 visits, 223% above its target, with users spending nearly three minutes on the platform on average and generating 139 earned media articles. 79% of users said they intended to act on their resilience plan, Suncorp's Net Promoter Score for the initiative rose from 5.4 to 10.2, and people exposed to the campaign were 21% more likely to request a Suncorp insurance quote, roughly double the lift seen by most competitors' campaigns. As part of Suncorp's wider 2019-2025 resilience push, the company rose from the #2 to the #1 home insurer in Australia, lifted marketing ROI by 238%, and the program is credited with contributing AU$402 million in customer lifetime value. Haven won the Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2026, selected from 137 entries as the single most game-changing idea of the year — a category with only 18 shortlisted works and roughly 80 winners awarded across its entire 21-year history.

where it breaks

The mechanism depends on the underlying prevention tool genuinely being valuable and actionable enough that giving it away actually builds trust rather than reading as a hollow marketing gesture, a platform offering vague or generic advice with no real property-specific insight wouldn't generate the same credibility or differentiation Haven achieved by drawing on 12 large risk datasets and genuine actuarial-grade data. It also depends on the company having a large enough existing customer base and market position to convert the resulting trust and awareness into commercial growth, since building and maintaining a platform this sophisticated required real investment that only pays off if the resulting brand differentiation and lead generation scale to justify it. And the tradeoff only makes long-term sense if reduced claims and increased customer retention or acquisition genuinely offset the foregone claims revenue the prevention tool is designed to reduce, a company whose margins depend more heavily on claims volume than on customer lifetime value and market share might not see the same net benefit from giving away the same prevention capability.

what came after

Cannes Lions jury president Chaka Sobhani described Haven as "a business strategy about resilience, as opposed to just recovery, which is a game changer in the insurance business," and the case is now cited in insurance and marketing circles as a model for how giving away loss-prevention capability, rather than guarding it as proprietary underwriting data, can grow market share faster than competing purely on claims service.

references

1. [1]The climate-resilience idea that won Cannes' biggest LionFamous Campaigns, 2026famouscampaigns.com
2. [2]Suncorp's Climate-Proofing Platform for Homes Wins Cannes Lions Titanium Grand PrixAdweek, 2026adweek.com
3. [3]Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix Goes to Leo Australia and Suncorp's 'Haven'LBBOnline, 2026lbbonline.com

keep it

same kind of clever

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