Prevention: a rising area of expertise in commercial lines

Long regarded as a support function for underwriting, prevention is now establishing itself as one of the most strategic areas of expertise in commercial insurance. Larger claims, faster-moving risks, and rising expectations from regulators and reinsurers: the forces are converging. And for the first time, data allows risk engineers to extend their analysis across the entire portfolio.

A role undergoing rapid transformation

In my conversations with technical departments and risk-prevention managers, one point keeps coming up: prevention is no longer solely a matter for teams on the ground. It has become a topic that now commands the executive committee’s attention. Three trends explain why.

The first is the nature of the risk. For professional property damage cover, 2025 was a better year than 2024: the sector’s claims-to-premiums ratio stood at 47 per cent, down 12 percentage points, according to France Assureurs. But this respite should not mask the underlying trend. The claims rate remains 25 per cent above the ten-year average, and is concentrated in the more severe losses: the average cost of a fire claim has risen by 118 per cent over twenty years, even as frequency has fallen. A favourable cycle is precisely the moment to invest in measures that protect profits through the harder years. (Source: Argus de l’Assurance)

The second development comes from the regulator. In July 2026, the ACPR encouraged property and casualty insurers to press ahead with the precise geolocation of insured property, so as to identify the most exposed customers and offer them a tailored premium and, where appropriate, a prevention plan. The regulator stresses that insurers have a major part to play in understanding and preventing risk, for individuals and businesses alike, in order to keep property insurable. (Source: ACPR)

The third factor is the industry’s own mobilisation. Insurers say they are acting to strengthen prevention within businesses, and in particular are funding full-scale fire tests to better understand how fires start, spread and can be put out. Presenting the industry’s latest risk map, Florence Lustman, President of France Assureurs, summed up the trend: “risks are converging, accumulating and intensifying”. (Sources: Le Journal des Entreprises, France Assureurs)

Together, these three trends explain why prevention has surged in importance across the insurance sector.

What the engineer sees

A site survey reveals what no questionnaire can capture: the true condition of an electrical installation, a pallet-storage area backing onto a building, the discipline with which a hot-work permit is applied, the safety culture of a site manager. The engineer estimates the maximum possible loss, ranks the areas of concern and sets out recommendations. When those recommendations are followed, they produce a lasting change in the risk profile.

This expertise is rare. It calls for solid technical training, years of field experience and an eye for detail that nothing can replace. That is precisely what makes it so valuable, and why it is a resource to be allocated with care.

A scarce resource against vast portfolios

A site visit means an engineer’s time, travel, a report and follow-up, at a cost of roughly €1,000 to €2,000. Prevention teams run a few hundred to a few thousand visits a year, whilst portfolios run to tens of thousands of sites. Some selection is therefore unavoidable.

The criteria guiding that choice are well-established and rational: periodic rotation, route optimisation, the policyholder’s request, recent claims history. Each has its logic. Taken together, they naturally steer visits towards what is already known: major accounts, sites already surveyed, and those that have had a claim.

That leaves the long tail. The French market holds nearly 5.8 million professional property damage policies, of which around 163,000 cover business risks alone, at an average premium of close to €18,000. An SME with mixed activities, a secondary warehouse, a workshop attached to a multi-site policy: on its own, none of these risks justifies sending an engineer. Together, they make up the bulk of the portfolio. This is the part of the book the engineer sees least. Not by choice, but simply because of the numbers. (Source: France Assureurs)

Between two visits, the risk changes

A visit is a snapshot. Risk is a moving picture. And it plays out on two levels at once.

The site itself changes. A warehouse becomes a workshop, a new activity appears, floor space grows, a building ages. These changes are rarely reported as they happen, and the gap between the policy and reality widens unnoticed. Analysis of more than a million policies shows that, at any given moment, over 15 per cent of commercial policies no longer reflect the policyholder’s actual situation.

The site’s surroundings change too, even when the site itself stays put. A neighbouring business opens up and, above all, exposure to natural hazards shifts. Swiss Re notes that in Europe, insured losses from convective storms are rising twice as fast as exposure, driven by more intense hazards and more vulnerable property. A building unchanged from ten years ago is therefore no longer exposed to the same risk.

France’s summer of 2026 illustrated this vividly. The fires in Gironde, the Landes and the Var produced around 25,000 claims, at an estimated cost of nearly €500 million, against 2,000 claims and €80 million for the wildfires of summer 2022. None of this waits for the next scheduled inspection. A calendar-based schedule sees the site as it was. The risk is the one that exists today. (Sources: insurance-edge, France Assureurs).

Data: the engineer’s ally

What is changing now is the ability to analyse an entire portfolio, site by site, and track how it evolves over time. Building characteristics, the real nature of the business, the immediate surroundings, exposure to hazards: this information exists and can be cross-referenced at scale. It does not replace the engineer’s judgement. It tells the engineer where that judgement matters most.

This works at two points in the cycle. At new business, an alert triggered during underwriting flags the sites whose characteristics warrant a visit, and lets the underwriter make one a condition of acceptance. That condition already sits in most insurers’ guidelines; it simply works better when built directly into the underwriter’s day-to-day. For the in-force book, continuous monitoring gives prevention teams a prioritised list of sites, refreshed as risk profiles change.

A virtuous circle forms between the two: the underwriter flags a site, the prevention team steps in, and each visit sharpens understanding of the risk, which in turn refines the next alerts. One major French mutual already organises its engineers’ visits this way, concentrating their effort where it can matter most. Risk scoring is nothing new in commercial insurance. What is new is applying it to the whole portfolio, continuously.

Expertise that now weighs on decisions

Prevention teams know what their visits achieve. What is changing is their ability to say so in the language of the people who decide on budgets and programmes. Implementation rates for recommendations, shifts in the risk profile before and after a visit, comparisons across similar sites: these indicators put numbers to what engineers see in the field. Measuring a loss that never happened is hard, and that is exactly where their expertise is needed to read the figures.

Put to the finance function in these terms, prevention reads as an ongoing investment, on a par with other technical measures. With reinsurers, the stakes are just as concrete. Reinsurers will readily add 5 to 10 per cent to the modelled technical price when the cedant’s data is of poor quality. And in a market that has grown more competitive, where around 60 per cent of insurers plan to buy more facultative cover in what Willis calls a market saturated with capacity, a well-documented portfolio becomes a real point of difference. (Source: The Insurer)

The site visit is a one-off event, but the risk is ongoing

Prevention is gaining momentum because risk is becoming more severe, evolving and shifting faster than before. For a long time, engineers’ expertise had to contend with a simple constraint: it was impossible to see everything, so they had to choose where to look.

That constraint is now falling away. Continuous, granular monitoring of an entire portfolio is now possible.