Insurance News magazine June/July 2026

Inside the Suncorp situation room

We visit the insurer’s disaster management hub

By Harris Pozderovic

Since launching in late 2024, Suncorp’s Disaster Management Centre has played a growing role in how the insurer prepares for and responds to significant weather events across Australia.

Located at the group’s Brisbane headquarters, the centre brings together disaster management specialists, operational leaders, customers response teams and an in-house meteorologist to support coordinated decision-making during severe weather events.

“This centre effectively connects the technology with our people and brings that together so we can prepare for and then respond to natural disasters in a more sophisticated way,” Suncorp executive general manager home claims customers Alli Smith told Insurance News on its recent visit to the centre.

Ms Smith was at the forefront of a disaster preparedness drive that led to the centre’s creation, accelerated by the Halloween hailstorms that hit southeast Queensland in 2020. While the event resulted in 10,000 claims, she says it highlighted the pressure weather events can place on the insurer’s supply chain, especially around damage to tiled roofs.

“We got together and asked what we could do to get ahead of weather events,” Ms Smith says.

“Looking at how we can add more value to our customers so they can prepare for the weather before it even happens, and then when it’s happening, being able to mobilise and speed up our claims processes so we’re responding when it matters most.”

Before the DMC came the creation of a simpler control centre for disasters. During this time, Suncorp partnered with a US technology provider to build a platform combining geospatial imagery, operational data and weather intelligence.

By 2022, these systems were operational and were put to the test during the record floods in Queensland and New South Wales that February and March.

The experience of the 2022 floods shaped the next stage of the insurer’s planning and supported the decision to create a permanent facility that would remain operational year-round.

The platform combines multiple operational and risk data sources across integrated displays within the DMC. An LED screen, spanning nine metres along one wall, provides an operational picture of Suncorp’s exposure and response to weather events across Australia.

The centre uses geospatial exposure mapping and operational overlays that help teams understand concentrations of customer impacts and emerging event trends.

Suncorp executive manager for disaster management Lilly Broodbank has overseen the centre’s operational rollout since joining the team four years ago.

She says it has streamlined processes that once took hours, bringing them into a single, more accessible platform.

“The idea is to put the right information in front of the team, so they can move quickly and with fewer interruptions,” Ms Broodbank tells Insurance News.

Other features include the insurer’s use of third-party aerial mapping with machine learning to create a pre-event risk profile of insured properties based on characteristics such as swimming pools, solar panels and roof compositions.

“Where you used to have to answer multiple questions if you’re online or on the phone, we’ve now reduced that by around 40 per cent, so customers are simply validating the information we have, rather than actually having to answer,” Ms Broodbank says.

When disaster strikes, pre-event images can be combined with post-event mapping to spot identifiable damage to buildings and roofs.

The team’s next goal is to develop an AI-based forecasting model to process historical claims data, enabling projections of a claim’s cost and damage before an assessor arrives.

“We already forecast for claim volume and we forecast for cost,” Ms Broodbank says. “What we’re looking at with an agentic AI model is getting information a lot quicker by bringing actual damage analytics into it as well.”

Ms Broodbank also leads the DMC’s simulation program, which runs through various disaster scenarios to improve the insurer’s response capabilities.

The team regularly undertakes simulation exercises and scenario testing to strengthen operational preparedness and response co-ordination.

Recently, the centre has begun exploring simulations beyond natural disasters, including worst-case outcomes from fuel shortages amid the conflict in the Middle East.

When responding to an event, the disaster management team relies on both its pre-established responses and information from satellite-based imagery sources before assessors can arrive on-site.

For flood events, the team uses synthetic aperture radar to identify areas affected by inundation, alongside light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and customer policy information to assess how many policyholders are likely to have experienced inundation, and its extent. The team is working to incorporate floor height data to improve the accuracy of its flood estimates.

The centre’s resources are also being used to assist on-the-ground assessors.  In one of the first use cases during flooding in Lismore, Suncorp agents employed the technology to identify customers and check whether they had lodged claims. The assessors would then document visible house and contents damage, sparing customers the need to itemise when they lodged claims.

During the Longwood fires earlier this year, the centre provided preliminary damage detection assessments within 48 hours by documenting burn scars through heat mapping and satellite imagery.

These assessments estimated whether a property was damaged at high degree of accuracy, with further quality assurance conducted by on-the-ground assessors.

Suncorp’s commercial claims team also utilises the DMC’s data before a weather event to relay information and recommendations to local brokers and those in other locations who cannot monitor events directly.

The team also help brokers identify and manage any vulnerable clients detected by its systems. “We want to make sure that our broker is the hero, and the broker is the person who’s really looking after the client,” commercial claims head Kira Pellicano tells Insurance News.

“We’ve done similar showcases to brokers, and the feedback we’ve received is that they are blown away and they’re excited about how we’ll be able to support them and their clients going forward.”

While the capability continues to mature, the DMC has already supported improvements in visibility, prioritisation and operational co-ordination during severe weather events.

Suncorp says the platform’s capabilities continue to expand, with future enhancements focused on improving operational visibility, workflow integration and decision support capabilities, designed to support operational efficiency and customer outcomes.

“Where we want to go next is, how do we take this into our claims processes and supply chain and really speed up cycle times to assess and repair damage?” Ms Smith says.

The team is also working towards developing a large language model for the platform. This would allow team members to communicate with the system to gain insights, rather than relying solely on the current viewing interface. Ms Broodbank believes such a development would allow Suncorp’s training to focus more on agents’ ability to respond to customers overwhelmed by disasters, rather than on technical skills.

“If you’re taking the complexity out of having to navigate so many platforms, you’re giving that investment for them to be empathetic and compassionate and focus on their soft skills during that experience,” she says.

Ms Smith points to the challenge of training more than 1000 new employees, many of whom had no insurance background, within a six-week period during the 2022 floods.

“That event reinforced the need for systems and training that can help teams respond faster and more consistently when customers need support most,” she says.

Ms Smith recognises concerns about potential job losses due to automation, but says the nature of claims means “there will always need to be a human in the loop”.

“The work will shift over time … [it] will be less transactional and more complex,” she says.

When asked how the DMC may evolve over the next five years, Ms Smith outlines an ambitious vision.

“If you imagine a world where you know your home is as resilient as it could be, because it’s been informed through insights coming out of [the DMC] at a one-to-one level before an event.

“Then, fast forward to it from a claims perspective … When disaster strikes, our customers aren’t just lodging a claim, they’re trying to return home and rebuild their lives. In those moments, speed and clarity are everything.

“We’re building the next generation of disaster response, where visibility is instant, insights are predictive, and seamlessly connected workflows orchestrate decisions in real time across the entire response.”