The future of catastrophe insurance may be defined less by how much insurers pay than by what they do before, during and immediately after a disaster. Asia Risks Management Services’ Mr Marc Burban explains how the insurers in China are moving from the role of a passive claims’ payer to a proactive partner in prevention and mitigation efforts too.
When the Chinese regulator, the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA) reported that insurers had paid CNY2.89bn ($427m) against nearly 380,000 claims for this season’s floods and typhoons till the middle of July 2026, most of the coverage of claims paid was focused on scale and speed. These figures are indeed impressive.
This development alone, however, cannot be termed as significant. The industry should take cognisance of the way the Chinese insurers are quietly restructuring themselves. Insurers are no longer just financial compensators after disasters; they are becoming an important operational part of the country’s disaster-management system. That shift matters for reinsurers, regulators and capital providers, not just insurers and for the policyholders themselves.
Indemnity to resilience
Speaking with Asia Insurance Review, Asia Risks Management Services Founder and General Manager Marc Burban said, “For decades the insurance model was simple - disaster strikes, customer makes a claim, insurer makes an assessment and the insurer pays the claim.
“This season has shown something different. Insurers warned customers before disaster struck, deployed claims teams alongside rescue services, and made advance payments pending final adjustment, thus putting in place a “Prevention – Rescue – Compensation” chain rather than a linear claims process as above.”
Mr Burban said, “That is a fresh definition of the insurer’s job, not just a faster version of the old one.”
Insurance is becoming part of disaster response
Speaking about how the insurers achieved the transformation, Mr Burban said, “Ping An tracked Typhoon Bavi in real time on its ‘Eagle Eye’ platform, pushing more than 25m weather alerts to the handsets of over 46m customers before landfall, then deployed thousands of loss-adjustment vehicles and drones once the storm hit.
“China Taiping Insurance’s Jiangxi team organised a volunteer crew to harvest a farmer’s rice before it was lost to the marauding flood waters, while its Shenyang branch drove rescue vehicles into flooded districts to reach stranded motorists.”
He said, “Taikang Insurance separately donated CNY10m toward emergency shelter and relief supplies.”
Insurers are now operating alongside, not after, emergency services, and the goal has shifted from compensating losses to minimising overall disruption.
“The most valuable claim may be the one that is never made. Prevention is becoming as important as pricing. Ping An’s warnings reached customers before a single claim was filed. China Taiping’s Shandong team worked with village authorities on drainage before the storm arrived.”
Said Mr Burban: “Every single loss that is avoided benefits everyone - policyholders recover faster, claims costs fall, and the insurer becomes an active manager of outcomes rather than merely a payer of them.”
A new question for reinsurers
Mr Burban said normally the reinsurers seek answers to queries involving exposures, where are the assets, how vulnerable they are, what’s the probable maximum loss and more? All these do remain essential, but an additional new one is gradually becoming important and matters more increasingly - how capable is the insurer operationally when catastrophe strikes?
“Two insurers with identical portfolios may have very different real-time tracking, drone fleets and payment speed. That operational gap increasingly shapes ultimate loss, which means it should guide how reinsurers price the risk ceded to them,” he said.
Service quality a competitive advantage
He said, “The numbers make the point: Ping An’s fastest motor claim settled in three minutes 53 seconds; a China Taiping customer’s water-damage claim was paid in 12 minutes 11 seconds via a mobile app, and a Fujian claim closed just 17 minutes after assessment.
“Customers now judge insurers on speed, accessibility and guidance, not just whether a claim is eventually paid.”
“Technology such as AI, satellite tracking, drones, claims apps, predictive analysis all have become a core underwriting asset, not a back-office tool,” said Mr Burban.
Success creates new responsibilities
These successes, which at the moment may appear isolated and scattered, actually bring in new pressures on the industry players. As emergency assistance and rapid advance payments become normal, they stop being exceptional and start being expected.
Mr Burban said, “Future catastrophes will demand more liquidity, larger response teams and better technology, meaning competitive advantage increasingly depends on execution, not just underwriting skill.”
Protection gap remains
The parametric insurance response under the oversight of Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs shows both the promise and the limits.
A weather-index policy on the department for the Shengzhou plum orchards paid CNY11.7m to 1,680 households automatically, before any adjuster inspected a tree, while other farmers received advance payments within hours of filing their claims.
Mr Burban said, “Yet the national average payout stayed under CNY10,000 per claim, a reminder that closing the protection gap is a bigger task than paying existing claims faster. Rural households, small businesses and farmers remain underinsured; growing the book responsibly will require stronger reinsurance and better catastrophe modelling, not just faster claims.
He said, “This season may be remembered less for the CNY2.89bn paid than for what it revealed: China’s insurers evolving from indemnity providers into resilience partners. For reinsurers, the strategic question is whether future catastrophe underwriting should assess operational capability alongside portfolio quality.
“If operational resilience becomes as important as underwriting discipline, the industry’s most valuable asset will no longer be the balance sheet alone, it will be its ability to keep communities functioning when disaster strikes,” said Mr Burban. A