Australia’s claims leaders are heading into 2026 with a familiar problem that is getting harder to solve: natural catastrophes are no longer “surge events” that temporarily overwhelm the machine, but a recurring stress test that exposes whether the system’s relationships can actually hold.
That theme will be front and centre at the Claims Leaders Summit in Sydney on May 12 where event partner Ambrose Construct Group is due to give a talk that argues the next catastrophe won’t break claims tech stacks so much as it could break confidence across the value chain.
The numbers underline why the debate is shifting from pure operational surge planning to something broader. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has said extreme weather cost almost $3.5 billion in insured losses from 264,000 claims in 2025, with five events declared significant or catastrophic. That’s a very different planning environment from the one or two events a year mindset many legacy catastrophe models were built around.
Darren Trott (pictured), Ambrose Construct’s executive general manager of business development, says the industry has done plenty of work on the visible mechanics of catastrophe response including surge models, vendor panels, protocols and playbooks. The issue, he argues, is what happens when humans are put under sustained pressure and the implicit rules of the ecosystem start to bend.
“In those stressful leadership times, you’ve got to look at the trust that you build with your supply chain, and that trust is a finite resource,” said Trott. “At what point does that trust break? Behaviour under pressure perhaps matters more than the process itself.”
The ICA breakdown for 2025 illustrates how quickly claim volume can concentrate and collide. Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred was the costliest single event, with 132,000 claims and more than $1.5 billion in insured losses, while two late-year severe storm events together produced about $1.4 billion in losses. For claims operations, this isn’t just about one spike; it’s about spikes that come in clusters, while the labour and repair ecosystem is still recovering from the last one.
Trott’s critique is not that insurers haven’t invested. It’s that the industry keeps discovering a hard ceiling: even with better triage and better tooling, there simply aren’t enough experienced people across insurers, adjusters, builders, restorers, assessors and call centres to deliver the level of service customers expect when whole regions are hit.
That mismatch between customer expectations and real-world capacity helps explain why catastrophe events so often become reputation events. When customers can’t see the constraints in the supply chain, delays look like indifference; when brokers can’t get clear timeframes, delays look like poor governance; and when service providers are asked to stretch beyond contracted commitments, pressure finds its way into the relationship.
The volatility of Australia’s catastrophe experience adds to the challenge. Aon described 2024 as one of the quietest years in recent history, with insured catastrophe losses dropping to around $500 million and noted that in that year there was no declared ICA CAT event. That kind of whiplash makes it harder to maintain “always on” surge capability — and harder to justify the ongoing investment in training, standby networks and overflow capacity when the last year looked benign.
Yet the longer-term trend is unambiguous. The ICA has put the average annual cost of extreme weather in the 2020s at $4.5 billion, roughly triple the 1990s level, as exposure and hazard intensify.
Trott’s argument is that catastrophe protocols often soften precisely when they’re supposed to be most valuable. Under pressure and often for well-intentioned reasons, he says, leaders often relax KPIs, contractual boundaries and normal approval limits to “get things moving.” This can help in the moment, but can also plant the seeds for disputes, perceived unfairness and supplier fatigue later.
His proposed fix is less glamorous than new dashboards, but, he argues, more durable: treat the supply chain as business partners during business-as-usual, not just a panel to be activated during crisis, and invest early in the habits that prevent relationship breakdown when the volume hits.
“I’m of the view that investment in those relationships throughout business-as-usual times ultimately strengthens your catastrophe response,” said Trott.
That approach reframes catastrophe readiness as a year-round leadership discipline: setting clear rules on what can and can’t be expedited, agreeing how exceptions will be handled, and maintaining regular, candid communication even when there isn’t an event forcing everyone onto the same conference call.
Trott also pushes back on the idea that this is an “insurer problem” alone — particularly because, in a catastrophe, every link in the chain ends up making judgement calls about where scarce labour and materials go first.
“This is not just insurers; it’s all of the stakeholders,” he said. “Every one of us is capable of making what I call discretionary effort.”
He said if an insurance firm has 10 clients and they all want to be at the front of the queue, the one that is going to get your best treatment is the one with whom you have the most trusted relationship with.
That’s the uncomfortable reality of catastrophe triage: when capacity is finite, trust functions like a multiplier. And in the coming cycle of floods, fires and storms, Trott’s message to claims leaders is blunt—if your biggest suppliers had a choice tomorrow, would they choose you?
The Summit discussion in Sydney is likely to unpack and examine how far the industry is prepared to take that proposition. In a market where nat cat frequency is no longer surprising, the competitive advantage may increasingly be defined not by who has the most sophisticated surge playbook — but by who can keep trust intact when the queue is unavoidable.
