2025 was the sixth consecutive year global insured natural-catastrophe losses exceeded USD 100 billion, closing at roughly $107 billion per the Swiss Re Institute, including a $40 billion hit from the Los Angeles wildfires. For P&C carriers, reinsurers, and TPAs, climate risk insurance is no longer a future-state concern — it is the operating environment. This paper explains how the Mercury Policy and Claims Administration System brings catastrophe modeling insurance data, live exposure aggregation, rapid cat event claims response, and treaty-ready reinsurance bordereaux production into one workflow — absorbing a climate claims surge without the cycle-time collapse that defined prior cat years.
The question for P&C leadership has shifted from "will this be a heavy cat year?" to "which perils will hit hardest?" The Swiss Re Institute's December 2025 sigma estimates put global insured losses from natural catastrophes at roughly $107 billion — the sixth straight year above the $100 billion threshold. Independent analysts at Risk & Insurance project a 5-to-7% annual growth trend and a one-in-ten probability of a $300 billion peak year within this cycle.
Claims organizations built for a world where a cat year was an exception now face one where it is the baseline. This paper describes how Quick Silver Systems has extended the Mercury platform to meet that reality: ingesting RMS and AIR cat models, driving ZIP-level exposure views, orchestrating rapid field response, and producing regulator- and treaty-ready loss registers on the clock.
Two structural shifts define today's environment. First, the mix of perils has changed: Swiss Re reports roughly 92% of 2025 insured losses came from secondary perils — severe convective storms, wildfires, floods, and hail — rather than the hurricanes and earthquakes that dominated historic cat budgets. Second, the regulatory lens is sharpening. The NAIC Climate Risk Disclosure Survey received filings from more than 1,700 companies in its 2023 cycle, and the 2025 Ceres benchmarking report documented 27 billion-dollar weather disasters causing $182.7 billion in damages across the United States alone.
For claims leaders, this means the operational plans designed around a handful of named-storm events no longer fit a loss distribution dominated by many smaller, geographically diffuse events — and the data a carrier collects for claims is increasingly the same data it must disclose to regulators.
The Swiss Re Institute attributes about 92% of 2025 insured nat-cat losses to secondary perils. Convective storms, wildfires, floods, and hail now dominate the loss pattern that used to be shaped by a handful of named hurricanes. Claims platforms optimized for one-or-two-a-year hurricane FNOL surges need to handle many smaller, overlapping events with the same discipline.
Modern catastrophe modeling insurance workflows treat cat models as live data feeds, not annual reports. Mercury consumes event-level output from RMS and AIR cat models through a versioned ingestion API. Each ingestion carries a model vendor, model version, peril, event set identifier, and a geographic footprint — typically a polygon or a set of ZIP or Census tract identifiers — so that downstream analytics trace back to a specific model run.
Three behaviors flow from that foundation. Modeled loss estimates attach to in-force policies in near real time, giving underwriting and claims a shared exposure view. Pre-event warning footprints trigger operational readiness — pre-staging adjusters, alerting reinsurance, and pre-scoring claims for priority FNOL routing. And after an event, actual claim outcomes feed back into model validation, so each cat year improves the next year's calibration.
Most national carriers license more than one cat model vendor and blend the outputs. Mercury is deliberately vendor-neutral: the same ingestion schema accepts both primary vendors plus newer climate-adjusted models that incorporate forward-looking temperature pathways. That neutrality protects carriers from lock-in and supports the sensitivity analyses that boards and rating agencies now routinely request.
Exposure aggregation is the discipline of knowing, at any moment, how much in-force limit a carrier has concentrated in a given geography, peril, or construction class. Historically this was done quarterly in spreadsheets — a cadence no longer defensible during a climate claims surge season when multiple secondary-peril events overlap across a portfolio in a single month.
Mercury treats portfolio rollups as an always-on function. Policies are geocoded at bind; in-force limits roll up nightly by ZIP, county, and custom cat zones; and the same aggregate views feed underwriting governance, reinsurance placements, and NAIC climate-disclosure narratives. When a pre-event footprint arrives, the platform intersects it with the live exposure table in seconds, not days, and flags policies inside the cone of uncertainty for operational readiness.
The quality of cat event claims response is decided before the event declares, not after. Mercury implements a seven-phase playbook that begins with model ingestion and ends with portfolio re-rating — configurable by line and geography, but always built on the same structural stages.
| Phase | Trigger | System Action | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Pre-event warning | Model footprint ingested from RMS or AIR | Intersect with live exposure, score policies in the cone | Pre-alert list, staffing forecast |
| 2. Event declared | Operations or regulator declaration | Apply cat event code to impacted policies and future FNOLs | Event-tagged book of claims |
| 3. FNOL surge handling | Inbound volume exceeds baseline by 3x | Auto-triage by severity model, fast-path low-complexity claims | Prioritized queue, capacity plan |
| 4. Field adjuster dispatch | Complex or total-loss claims identified | Route by geo, license, and capacity; issue mobile assignment | Scheduled inspections, SLA clock |
| 5. Reserve adjustments | Early severity signal vs. modeled loss | Bulk-update case and IBNR reserves with audit trail | Updated GL feed, rating-agency packet |
| 6. Reinsurance notification | Threshold breach on treaty or facultative layer | Generate event bordereau, attach cedant statement | Notice to reinsurer, portal upload |
| 7. Portfolio re-rating | Event closed or trued-up | Feed loss experience back to model and underwriting | Revised rate plan, renewal guidance |
A heavy cat season breaks the linear "FNOL → adjust → close" flow claims platforms were built for. The pre-event stages keep the surge itself from becoming a cycle-time collapse; the post-event stages convert operational data into the disclosures and re-rating work that regulators and reinsurers now require.
Reinsurance bordereaux — the premium and loss registers cedants send to treaty reinsurers — have become the highest-frequency, highest-scrutiny reporting obligation in the claims operation. Reinsurers increasingly require monthly or event-based filings in standardized schemas rather than quarterly PDFs. Mercury produces treaty-ready loss, premium, and claim-listing registers directly from the transactional ledger, with each row linkable back to a source claim transaction.
The same transactional spine feeds regulatory disclosure. The NAIC Climate Resiliency resource hub and the TCFD-aligned Climate Risk Disclosure Survey both require carriers to describe governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics for climate risk. When portfolio rollups and event-level loss data live in one system, drafting those disclosures stops being a forensic exercise and becomes a query.
Six consecutive $100B+ cat years, a loss distribution now dominated by secondary perils, and a rising regulatory floor on climate disclosure have permanently changed what a claims platform must do. Modeling, portfolio monitoring, field response, and treaty reporting must run as a single connected workflow rather than four disconnected projects.
Quick Silver Systems designed the Mercury platform around that connected workflow: vendor-neutral cat-model ingestion, always-on ZIP-level rollups, a configurable seven-phase playbook, and treaty-ready output built for the climate era rather than retrofitted for it.
We would welcome a working session to walk your cat-response runbook, your reinsurance treaty structure, and your NAIC disclosure posture against the Mercury capability map and benchmark your current cycle times against peers.
Quick Silver Systems supports P&C carriers, reinsurers, and TPAs through cat-season readiness reviews, RMS/AIR integration design, and bordereaux automation on the Mercury Policy and Claims Administration System. Contact us to scope an engagement tailored to your portfolio and treaty structure.