Articles
Insurer’s relevance reset
What the latest technology developments mean for unlocking deeper prevention-based customer relationships
Most insurance models are still built around infrequent, high-severity events. That made sense when data was scarce and intervention wasn’t possible. Today, it leaves us with a product that feels distant from daily life, something you buy but hope you’ll never use.
Relevance isn’t earned through rare moments of crisis. It’s built through small, timely interventions that prevent or reduce everyday loss. Most of what ‘goes wrong’ in people’s lives isn’t catastrophic, it’s the daily disruptions we’ve never thought to insure against.
Becoming more relevant doesn’t mean forcing constant engagement. Few customers want to hear from their insurer every week. It means using natural, frequent touchpoints to add genuine value through timely, helpful services. We’ve talked about this shift for years, but now, technology finally makes it both practical and profitable. Consequently, customers increasingly want it. A 2025 survey found 70% want proactive services, not just post-loss cover.
What is missing?
The tools to move from reactive coverage to proactive engagement already exist, IoT sensors, wearable health tech, behavioural analytics, embedded insurance platforms. The capability is there to make prevention and protection the core of the product given the extent of hyper-personalisation that LLMs are enabling.
Currently, insurers often turn up too late. However, prevention isn’t a wellness tagline, it’s how insurance becomes relevant in the daily lives of customers and businesses alike. Whether you’re an individual or a company, the real value isn’t in being compensated after loss, it’s in avoiding loss and disruption altogether.
This matters across both personal and commercial lines.
- For individuals: stopping a leak before it ruins your home, getting a nudge before your driving causes an accident, catching a health issue early.
- For businesses: preventing the disruptions that quietly drain time, revenue and trust, from cyber threats to delayed shipments or staff downtime.
Insurers must stop waiting to be useful, and start embedding value into the everyday.
The basics have already been in place for years…
- Motor: Root Insurance uses real-time driving data to set personalised premiums and send feedback to drivers, reducing risky behaviours before they result in claims.
- Cyber: Coalition’s Active Cyber Insurance proactively alerts SMEs to threats before breaches occur, transforming the insurer into a true security partner.
- Parametric: AXA Climate’s products now use automated weather-based triggers with immediate digital support, helping policyholders mitigate knock-on impacts like business interruption or crop damage.
- Health: YuLife turns life insurance into a daily engagement platform, rewarding walking, meditation and sleep with tangible perks. Vitality reports that members who increase activity to five days a week can add up to five years to life expectancy, proving that daily nudges drive meaningful outcomes.
These aren’t perks. They’re engagement models, ones that show up often, not just when things go wrong. Now, LLMs and agentic models let us move beyond rules-based triggers to deliver truly personalised prevention suggestions that improve with every interaction, enabling us to shift the model.
How prevention shifts the model
- Underwriting becomes continuous, adjusting based on behaviour, not fixed annually.
- Pricing becomes personalised, informed by live risk signals rather than historical averages.
- Engagement becomes habitual, with users checking in more often, not just at renewal.
- Trust is earned through advising customers, not just insuring them, through visible, proactive support.
What insurers need to do
- Design with frequency in mind. Advances in LLMs make personalised prevention possible, so relevance becomes the metric for success.
- Embed in ecosystems. Partner with OEMs, health apps, workplace platforms, SME software and IoT providers.
- Turn triggers into touchpoints. Use alerts like water leak detection or poor sleep as opportunities to educate, guide and reward.
- Build prevention as a business and engagement model, not just a cost reduction tactic.
- Rethink the annual model. Explore usage-based, outcome-based or tiered service pricing to align incentives with prevention advice that continuously learns and improves.
How prevention benefits insurers
Focusing on prevention isn’t just good for customers, it strengthens the business model too. By reducing claim frequency, it lowers loss ratios and brings greater stability to underwriting results. It also enables more proactive risk management, helping to smooth capital exposure and reduce volatility from unexpected events.
On the growth side, prevention-led products open new markets, attract underinsured segments and help insurers differentiate beyond price. When customers feel supported in avoiding losses, they’re more likely to renew, improving retention and lifetime value.
In short: prevention doesn’t just reduce cost; it creates resilience for both customers and insurers. It drives long-term profitability as well as relevance.
Conclusion
If insurance were re-invented today, would we design a product that activates only when something breaks, charging an annual premium for a service most people never use? Or would we build something that adapts in real time, warning us, guiding us, rewarding us?
Insurance wouldn’t be a financial product. It would be a resilience service, subscription-based, data-powered and woven into daily life. A living product, not a dormant one.
That vision stands in stark contrast to the legacy model built on rarity: the big, infrequent, actuarial event. However, customers live in a world of constant disruption. They want less friction, fewer surprises and more peace of mind.
That won’t come from faster claims. It will come from never having to claim at all. The future of insurance isn’t only protection when disaster strikes, but presence before things go wrong. Insurers that lead on prevention won’t just lower costs, they’ll increase relevance.
