In a recent article published by The Insurance Lead, “Closing the protection gap: how Faura tackles insurance’s $350 billion natural disaster problem,” the publication highlights Faura’s attempt to reframe how catastrophe risk is assessed and priced.
Insights from The Insurance Lead’s coverage of Faura and the $350B natural-disaster insurance gap
Instead of relying solely on hazard likelihood, Faura emphasizes a property’s resilience — how well it can withstand an event if one occurs. This perspective sheds light not only on Faura’s model, but also on the deeper structural and operational forces widening the protection gap across the industry.
The protection gap is widening and the consequences are real
Natural disasters are increasing in both frequency and severity, and insured losses increasingly fail to keep pace with economic losses. This widening gap has real consequences: homeowners and businesses face unaffordable premiums, carriers retreat from certain markets, and local economies experience slower recovery after destructive events. Insurance leaders — particularly those working in catastrophe-exposed regions, property underwriting, MGAs writing specialty property, and public-sector-adjacent programs — will find Faura’s reframing especially timely.
Why traditional CAT models are hitting their limits
The industry’s long-standing reliance on traditional CAT models, built around hazard frequency and severity, is reaching its limits. These models assume historical patterns will continue, but climate variability is changing hazard profiles faster than many legacy underwriting frameworks can adapt. Properties in once-stable areas now face new risks; properties historically viewed as high-risk may in reality be far more resilient than their region-level hazard scores suggest. As a result, risk is sometimes mispriced, misclassified, or rejected altogether — contributing to premium volatility and coverage inaccessibility.
Faura’s approach: shifting from hazard likelihood to survivability
Faura’s approach aims to address these shortcomings by shifting the underwriting lens from “How likely is a disaster to strike here?” to “How will this specific property perform if it does?” That distinction is profound. Resilience-based underwriting evaluates micro-level property characteristics — structure, materials, design choices, maintenance, mitigation features, and surrounding environment — to determine survivability. Where traditional models paint with broad strokes, this method gives insurers a more granular and defensible view of risk.
The operational reality: data, workflows, and legacy constraints
This matters because many carriers are held back not by lack of interest in innovation but by data limitations, technical debt, and systemic constraints that make it difficult to experiment with new methodologies. CAT models integrated into legacy systems often rely on outdated assumptions and incomplete property-level inputs. Underwriting workflows depend on data sources that vary widely in quality and consistency. And technology stacks built over decades struggle to incorporate new data types or support increasingly localized pricing logic. Even when leaders want to modernize their risk frameworks, the operational lift can be prohibitive.
Faura’s model highlights an emerging path forward: innovation through precision rather than complexity. By focusing on a property’s inherent resilience — and using structured, verifiable data to support that evaluation — insurers can underwrite with greater accuracy without overhauling their entire modeling ecosystem at once. This is particularly relevant as more properties land in the “uninsurable” category under traditional methods, even though their actual survivability may justify coverage.
The shift also creates opportunity for product development, distribution, and customer engagement. Resilience-based underwriting may allow insurers to offer coverage in regions they previously exited, price more accurately, or differentiate themselves with transparency and fairness. Property owners, for their part, gain insight into what mitigation improvements matter most — and how those investments translate into insurability. For agents and MGAs, this opens the door to more consultative conversations with clients navigating volatile markets.
What leaders can do next to modernize underwriting with resilience in mind
Leadership teams should consider several practical steps. First, evaluate where traditional CAT models may be misaligning with real-world outcomes. Are there regions where hazard scores exaggerate or understate exposure? Are there categories of properties currently priced out of the market that warrant reevaluation? Second, assess data needs. Resilience-based underwriting requires structured, property-level details that many carriers currently lack. Investing in data infrastructure — or partnering with entities that can supply verified property attributes — can materially improve underwriting precision. Third, pilot programs can help test survivability-oriented models without requiring full-scale platform changes. Starting with specific segments or territories reduces risk and builds institutional learning. Finally, communication strategy matters: helping customers understand how resilience influences pricing can strengthen trust and reinforce the value of proper mitigation.
A brief excerpt from The Insurance Lead captures the urgency behind Faura’s mission: “The protection gap is not just a market inefficiency — it’s a risk to economic stability. Addressing it requires rethinking not just how we model hazards, but how we understand the resilience of the assets we insure.”
This perspective aligns with the challenges ReSource Pro sees across carriers, MGAs, and agencies adopting modern underwriting frameworks. Closing the protection gap isn’t simply about offering more coverage — it’s about refining the foundation on which coverage decisions are made. As climate risk accelerates, the industry’s ability to evaluate exposure with nuance will determine not only profitability but relevance.
From ReSource Pro’s vantage point, Faura’s model emphasizes a broader truth: insurance innovation succeeds when data quality, operational feasibility, and market need intersect. Survivability-based underwriting represents a practical bridge between climate-adaptive risk modeling and the technological realities insurers face today. For organizations working to modernize while managing legacy constraints, this approach may unlock new markets, strengthen pricing integrity, and reduce volatility for customers and communities.
As natural disasters become more disruptive, the need for accurate, accessible coverage will only grow. Insurers that evolve their underwriting models — and ground them in defensible, property-level resilience data — will be better positioned to support policyholders and close the protection gap meaningfully.
Source: Closing the protection gap: how Faura tackles insurance’s $350 billion natural disaster problem.
Author: The Insurance Lead editorial team
Publication: The Insurance Lead
Original Publication Date: October 10, 2025
