Suncorp gave away its risk data so homes warn their owners

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.

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.

Gave away its proprietary pricing risk data as a free home-voiced report, turning aggregate hazard into a private fact one owner must act on.

A generic warning is an abstraction a skeptic can ignore; a report about THIS address is a private fact.

The home's voice makes the risk feel personal and urgent, not like marketing.

Using its own pricing data makes the report credible, unlike puffery.

Prevention reduces claims, so giving away data strengthens the business.

If you hold data customers can't read, hand it back in their frame to turn apathy into action and prevention into profit.

The company reports 280k+ users, #2→#1 share, 238% ROI, $402M lifetime value (self-reported); independent outlets confirm only the launch 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.