From coverage to prevention: the next frontier in insurance

Premiums keep rising. The protection gap is widening. Natural disasters are hitting record highs. Chronic diseases are pushing health systems to the limit. Customers feel the squeeze. Policymakers question affordability. Regulators increase pressure on long-term sustainability. Investors wonder how a model that profits when things go wrong can remain viable.  

It’s time for a new equation, one in which insurers don’t just pay for losses but play an active role in preventing them. 

The economics of insurance are shifting as claims grow faster than premiums and underlying risks become less predictable. In every major line of business, a similar trend is evident: prevention reduces volatility, lowers loss costs, and enhances long-term value creation. 

• Property and Casualty Insurance: Insured losses have exceeded $100 billion annually since 2020. Prevention measures such as early-warning systems, resilient construction and improved community preparedness can reduce the frequency and severity of losses by up to 40%.
• Health Insurance: Around 70% of healthcare spending comes from largely preventable chronic diseases. Digital prevention programmes, targeted behavioural nudges, and early screening can save billions while improving quality of life.
• Cyber Insurance: Continuous monitoring identifies vulnerabilities and stops incidents before they occur. This approach is consistently more effective than raising policy limits or tightening exclusions. 

Taken together, these shifts show that prevention aligns societal value with business value. It lowers losses, strengthens customer retention, and builds long-term trust. The next competitive advantage in insurance will not come from pricing risk more precisely but from reducing it collaboratively. 

Becoming preventive requires a profound shift in mindset, moving the insurer from reacting and paying for losses to actively managing future risk. This shift must be supported by an operating model that moves beyond efficient claims handling to orchestrating value networks that anticipate, mitigate, and co-manage threats. 

The transformation from reaction to prevention unfolds through five stages of maturity. Each stage of the Prevention Maturity Model strengthens data capability, broadens the organisation’s role, reshapes the business model, enhances product design, deepens collaboration across ecosystems, and increases the insurer’s wider societal impact. 

This evolution also reflects a shift in mindset from seeing prevention as individual behaviour change to understanding it as a system with collective impact. In a mature prevention stage insurers do not act as watchdogs over policyholders. Instead, they co-create ecosystems that create balance, predictability, and resilience that extend beyond single customers to communities and economies. 

True prevention is not a product or a campaign — it is a continuously learning, closed-loop system that connects the following core pillars: 

Together, these five pillars shift the insurer’s role from payer of losses to partner in protection. They establish a continuous engagement model in which every avoided or mitigated claim becomes a shared success, and every non-event carries value for both insurer and insured. 

As this loop operates over time, it becomes a systemic and data-driven process that learns and adapts across physical, digital, and human environments, delivering more resilient and predictable outcomes. 

Prevention relies on a network of interconnected partners, with insurers, technology innovators, regulators, and customers, each playing a distinct and complementary role. Its full value is realised only when these actors are coordinated and guided by a coherent ecosystem approach that enables preventive models to scale, endure and deliver meaningful impact. 

Zühlke plays a pivotal role here, not only by integrating the technology behind these solutions but also by orchestrating the wider ecosystems. We connect insurers, startups, and healthtech innovators to make prevention models viable within complex legacy infrastructures. As always, the devil lies in the details, and this work depends on building solutions that perform under real-world conditions. 

Insurers should start with small, data-backed pilots that allow them to test, measure, and refine early concepts while simultaneously building cross-sector partnerships. It is through these early, collaborative experiments that prevention can eventually operate at scale. 

1. Select high-impact use cases from areas with measurable prevention and mitigation outcomes, such as water leakage, diabetes management, or ransomware containment.
2. Build a prevention platform that connects IoT, analytics, and service partners, creating the foundation for continuous detection and early intervention.
3. Pilot impact-based underwriting by linking verified prevention behaviour to premiums or coverage, creating incentives that reinforce risk reduction.
4. Embed compliance and ethical AI to ensure that regulatory requirements, data governance and ethical AI principles are integrated from the start. 
5. Publish a prevention scorecard which demonstrates progress by reporting avoided losses, improved recoveries, and customer value. 

The world’s risk landscape is changing faster than ever. If insurers continue to operate reactively, the protection gap will continue to widen. If on the other hand, they shift towards prevention and mitigation, then they can redefine both their purpose and societal value. 

The future insurer will not simply write policies. It will design systems that keep people healthy, homes safe, and businesses resilient. It will partner across ecosystems, bringing together technology, institutions, and individuals to turn foresight into practical action and crisis into control. 

Because, ultimately, real progress in insurance lies not in the claims handled, but in the ones prevented or softened.