The ninety-two days
nobody can see.
Until now.
Ninety-two days is your own average to fully settle a house claim. Most of those days are honest work — assessors, schedules, the Natural Hazards portion — but your customer sees none of it. This is a concept for making the wait visible, valuable, and shorter-feeling: the claim prepared in the open, and every decision still made by a person.
“An average of 92 days to fully settle a house claim.”
Consumer NZ insurance research · claims settled Sept 2022 – Aug 2023The morning after the storm
Water came through the ceiling overnight. Lodging the claim in My Tower takes minutes — your own site says online claims save an average of five minutes, and photos help validate twice as fast. Then the part nobody designed: the silence between lodgement and a decision, measured in weeks, while the customer refreshes an app that has nothing new to say.
The 2023 floods and Cyclone Gabrielle brought Tower 8,900 claims — your chief claims officer called it five years of large-loss claims in about two weeks. Half-year profit to March 2026 more than halved on $18.5m of large-event costs, while 15,000 new customers arrived in a year. The next event is a when. The claims experience during it is a choice.
What happens now
The claim is real work from the first hour — triage, photos, the assessor diary, the Natural Hazards portion. All of it invisible, so every day of it reads as neglect.
What it costs
In the 2023 surge, 35% of enquiries reaching the insurance ombudsman were about delays, against a 9% norm. The work was being done. Nobody could see it.
What the concept does
Shows the claim being prepared as it happens, pays the wait back as excess credit, asks the one question that changes triage — and stops. A person decides.
One storm. Every customer’s claim.
The same weather event, prepared for four different households. Every draft stops before it sends — and the ones that need a person say so.
A template sends the same thing to everyone and changes the name. What matters here is the case that should get something different — or nothing at all.
The rules beside each draft are placeholders. A pilot replaces them with your actual policies. We have not seen those, and this concept does not guess at them.
The check that runs before a person ever reads it
A storm claim is where a warm template does the most damage. These are the checks — and the ones that block are the point.
Drafts are held against the Fair Insurance Code 2020, CoFI fair-conduct duties, the Natural Hazards Insurance Act 2023, the Fair Trading Act 1986, and the Privacy Act 2020.
Press run to see what it catches — and what it refuses to produce at all.
One room. Your people, your agents, every action on the record.
Every concept on this page would run inside a private room like this: your team and the agents in the same space, drafts appearing with receipts, a named person saying yes. It runs on infrastructure you approve — and what is said in the room stays in it.
receipt sources: your rate card · rules: yours · held for approval
Client information stays in your room. Six months later, “where did this come from?” is one line, not a search.
Yours
Runs where you approve — your own room, your own record. Nothing in it leaves it.
On the record
Every agent action lands as a line a person can read — not a log only a vendor can open.
People decide
Drafts wait for a named person. The room shows who said yes, and when.
This panel is a concept picture, not a live room — a pilot stands up the real one, on infrastructure you approve.
The storm board, before anything sends
Illustrative and fictional. No production access is requested by this concept.
| Cohort | Claims | Prepared | Waiting on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Water damage, home liveable | — | Update drafted · assessor booked | Claims manager sign-off | Awaiting approval |
| Natural Hazards portion applies | — | NHC explainer + update drafted | Claims manager sign-off | Awaiting approval |
| Answered “we need help” | — | Accommodation call queued first | Named owner per file | Priority — held from bulk |
| Possible total loss | — | Nothing sent | Claims lead — senior call first | Held — no template |
| Photos missing or unreadable | — | One-tap photo request drafted | Customer | Parked |
Cohort sizes are deliberately blank. This concept has no Tower data and does not estimate how many customers anything affects.
Every draft carries its own working.
Not a log somebody has to go and find. The provenance travels with the work — what it read, which rules it held, who must approve it, and what it refused to do.
This matters most on the day someone asks why it said what it said.
- Artefact
- Claim status update — water damage, home liveable
- Read
- Policy wording (placeholder) · claim status fields (placeholder) · address flood-risk rating band · the customer’s one answered question
- Rules held
- Fair Insurance Code 2020 · CoFI fair-conduct duties · Natural Hazards Insurance Act 2023 · Fair Trading Act 1986 · Privacy Act 2020
- Refused
- No coverage decision was stated by any draft. No repair or settlement figure was calculated or implied. Total-loss and displaced-customer files were held for a person.
- Approver
- A named person. Unsent until then.
- Prepared
- —
- Reference
- —
What this will never do
It does not send. It prepares, and a named person sends. It does not publish to any channel, commit spend, move money, or make a decision that belongs to a person. It does not pretend to be a person — every draft says it was prepared by a machine and approved by a human.
No production access is requested by this concept.
Scope
One weather event’s house-claim cohort, lodgement to decision-drafted. Six weeks. Not the whole claims book, not assessment itself, not settlement.
Access
Policy wording, your claim-status field names, your update templates, and the address risk-rating band. No customer records. No claims history. No settlement figures.
Scorecard
Updates accepted without rewrite. Held files a person agreed should have been held. Status calls the contact centre no longer received. One claims manager’s honest answer to “would you send this?”
Fail any line of the scorecard and we change the design or stop.
Pick a verb.
Not “book a demo”. Any of these is a real next step, and the third is a perfectly good answer.
What is the one constraint we have got wrong?
Every concept is built from the outside. There is always something about how Tower actually runs that we could not see. One line is enough.
Opens your mail app to assembl@assembl.co.nz. Nothing is collected by this page.