Suncorp flips incentive with free disaster prevention tool

Suncorp, one of Australia's largest home insurers, faced a structural mismatch: its own research found that while 81% of Australian homeowners had already experienced extreme weather, only 17% had any concrete plan to protect their property against it. As a claims-driven insurer, Suncorp's standard business incentive ran in the opposite direction of prevention — it profited from correctly pricing and paying out claims after a loss, not from a customer's home never needing a claim at all.

Working with agency Leo Australia, Suncorp set out to flip that incentive deliberately: build a tool that gave homeowners the same kind of property-specific risk information an insurer's own actuaries use, before disaster struck, rather than only after.

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.

Gave away its proprietary risk data as a free public tool, turning a cost into trust that converted more customers than the lost claims cost.

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

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 pl

Any company whose revenue depends on a customer's failure or loss — an insurer paid on claims, a lender paid on defaults' collateral, a warranty provider paid on repairs — should ask whether giving aw

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. 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.