A claims practice expert whose identity I have agreed to keep confidential recently sent me a question that ought to make insurance executives squirm a little: “Can you name an insurer who recently advertised that it wanted to increase claim payments to benefit its deserving policyholders?”
If you are a policyholder struggling to get paid, a public adjuster documenting an overlooked loss, or a restoration contractor explaining why an estimate will not cover the work, that question probably hits home. Nobody is asking an insurer to pay more than it owes. But when the original estimate is too low, improving the claim should mean increasing the payment. Why does that seem to get so much less attention than finding another way to reduce it?
The expert’s question arose from Verisk’s October 12, 2026, article, “Advancing Claims Efficiency Through Innovation in Contents Estimation.” It discusses improvements to XactContents Online, including less manual entry, better searches, and automation. To be fair, Verisk says time saved can allow claims professionals to serve policyholders and make informed decisions. Those are worthwhile goals. Anyone who has helped a family reconstruct a household inventory knows that better tools could make a difficult experience easier.
One recommendation nevertheless caught my attention: “Valuations you can defend.” Verisk describes tracing a replacement value to a comparable item and a source that will withstand questions. That is sensible as far as it goes. The article does not instruct insurers to select the cheapest item or underpay claims. My concern is how an insurer implements the tool. Does it investigate what this policyholder actually lost or search until it finds the lowest number it can defend? A defensible number and an accurate adjustment are not the same thing.
Suppose a family loses a well-made sofa. A photograph of another sofa on a discount website does not establish equivalent construction, fabric, size, or quality. Is it actually available? Can it be delivered? Does the estimate include taxes and other costs covered by the policy? One genuinely equivalent, available replacement may provide useful evidence. One cheap outlier may tell us very little. Two adjusters arriving at the same inadequate figure gives us consistency, but it does not buy the family its sofa back.
Restoration contractors will recognize the concern. In Xactimate Wasn’t Low Enough: The Internal Claims Manual for Paying Even Less, I discussed a purported insurer procedure that applied fixed discounts to Xactimate material prices and restricted adjustments for higher contractor costs. I expressly noted that I had not independently authenticated the document. If accurate, the procedure illustrates a pricing method engineered to move downward. Verisk’s contents article does not establish that its software works that way. It does raise the same practical question: Can the policyholder actually replace the property or complete the repair for the amount offered?
I took the expert’s advertising challenge seriously and searched for examples from the past two years. I did not locate a U.S. property-insurer advertising campaign built around deliberately increasing payments to correct underpaid claims. My search cannot establish that no such advertisement exists, and to be fair, there are meaningful examples of insurers publicly announcing more helpful payment practices.
State Farm General, for example, announced that effective April 14, 2025, it increased inventory-free contents advances for customers with total losses from the January Los Angeles wildfires from 50% to 65% of their contents limits. Its September 30 announcement expressly described supporting customers’ recovery. This announcement does not establish that ultimate settlements increased, and it seems to come following a lot of criticism about State Farm’s contents claims practices.
California’s Department of Insurance reported in March 2025 that, following the commissioner’s request, a majority of homeowners insurers agreed to provide at least 75% of contents coverage without a detailed inventory, with some agreeing to 100%, subject to their terms and exceptions. These concessions matter. They also demonstrate that insurers can reduce the paperwork burden when they decide to do so. Why should that require a special appeal after a catastrophe?
A contents inventory is more than a data-entry exercise. The insured is remembering a child’s bedroom, a parent’s belongings, and the ordinary possessions that made a house a home. Each remembered item can bring another reminder of what is gone. The same claims practice expert offered this blunt assessment and practical advice:
Current claim handlers – some, not all – have little interest in providing assistance and navigation through the process, much less any empathy. Some impose ridiculous rules for inventories that aren’t in the policy, and which don’t square with the average person’s ability to remember everything and the details of acquisition.
I recommend doing the project in partial claims. The biggest items with the biggest price come first. If the insurer gets this stage wrong, it tells you volumes about how the company is going to treat you. There’s no reason the contents loss can’t be handled in stages. Some companies want to start a fight early and keep the claim funds until the bitter end. It’s good to know that up front.
The staged approach makes practical sense. Submit the well-supported items quickly, identify the submission as partial, reserve the right to supplement, and request payment of undisputed covered amounts while the remaining inventory is developed. Keep track of policy and legal deadlines because submitting in stages does not automatically extend them. A business or family should ask why payment for a documented lost article must wait while they try to put together a full inventory of every damaged item.
Here is the improvement I would like insurers to measure: How many overlooked belongings did the adjuster help identify? How many undervalued items were corrected without an argument? How quickly were undisputed benefits paid? Were claims employees rewarded for finding everything the policy covered? Public adjusters and restoration contractors should be asking those questions and not just me. Frustrated policyholders deserve the answers.
To all my claims professionals working for insurers, if you know of an insurer that has built a claims process that looks for and finds underpayments and promptly increases benefits to the full amount owed, send me the details. I would welcome the opportunity to write about it. A business or family trying to recover should be able to see improvement in its bank account and recover faster after a loss. Otherwise, the insurer’s efficiency and dollar savings may simply become the policyholder’s shortfall.
Thought for the Day
“Good process serves you so you can serve customers.”
—Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter to Shareholders
