The 2026/27 fire season won’t break your claims budget. It will break your call centre.

17 August 2026 · 8 min read · Home Assist Technologies

NOAA now puts a very strong El Niño over the 2026/27 summer at above 90%, with a 69% chance of a record-breaking event. South African insurers and brokers are not resourced for the FNOL surge that follows.

By Keshan Patel — CEO and Co-Founder, Home Assist Technologies

Let me start with the uncomfortable part. Most South African insurers and brokers are not resourced for what is coming this summer. The plan sitting on most desks right now is overtime, a temp agency, and a quiet hope that the season is mild. Every time that plan has been run, it has been met with the same three things: service delays, unforeseen administration costs, and customer churn.

And this is no longer a forecast. It is happening.

In May, US forecasters put the odds of El Niño even forming at 82%. By June, NOAA had an El Niño Advisory in force. Its diagnostic discussion of 13 August 2026 now puts the probability of a very strong event over the coming summer at greater than 90%, and gives a 69% chance that October to December 2026 exceeds the strength of every El Niño on record back to 1950.

In southern Africa, El Niño is reliably associated with above-normal heat, and — with somewhat less certainty, because no two events unfold the same way — below-normal summer rainfall. Hot, dry, wind-driven conditions cure fuel loads and turn a routine ignition into a catastrophe event.

The claims consequence is already showing up in the numbers. Cedric Masondo, CEO of PSG Insure, has said weather-related catastrophes became the largest force on short-term insurance claims costs in the first half of 2026, with the frequency and severity of floods, storms and wildfires all rising off what was a comparatively benign base a year earlier. Daniel Stevens, Executive Head of Agriculture at Santam, is blunter still: weather-related catastrophe losses have doubled in size over the past ten years — and they have done so while insurance uptake has not kept pace.

There is also no off-season to recover in. Fire risk in South Africa does not diminish in winter, it moves: the Western Cape season runs roughly December to April, the summer-rainfall interior May to October. This year, both ends of that calendar are loaded.

The maths nobody models

Your plumbing and building claims volume is a function of your book. It is predictable. You staff to it. That is precisely why it has never really hurt you.

A catastrophe does not behave that way. It does not lift claims volume by 15% across a month. It delivers three to four months of first notification of loss in a matter of days, in one postal code, usually starting on a Saturday afternoon.

What breaks first is not your reserve. It is the phone.

Hold times go to forty minutes. Your best FNOL consultants are overwhelmed. Claims get logged with little evidence, little verification, and sometimes the wrong peril — because the person capturing them is three hours into a queue that is not shortening. Assessors are double-booked. Contractors quote whatever they like, because nobody has time to challenge them.

Then the complaints arrive, and the Ombud letters after that, and you are managing a reputational event on top of a catastrophe. Every one of those failures started as a capacity problem and ended up on your loss ratio.

Where the money actually leaks

Cash settlements rise sharply in a catastrophe. Claimants want out fast, contractors are unavailable, reinstatement timelines are impossible, and settling in cash is the path of least resistance for an overloaded desk. But a cash settlement made without verification is just a number someone agreed to under time pressure.

Nobody confirmed the geyser was out of warranty. Nobody checked whether the damage was the insured peril or pre-existing. Nobody costed the scope against a proper pro-forma.

Multiply that by a thousand claims in a fortnight and you are not looking at leakage. You are looking at a structural hit to your loss ratio that will still be visible in next year’s numbers.

What we do about it

Home Assist has run more than 40,000 property incidents in the last five years. We are built for exactly the shape of demand a catastrophe creates.

Surge FNOL capacity, outsourced. Our help centre runs seven days a week and scales into an event without you hiring, training or carrying the cost when the season is quiet. Your claimants get answered, and your own team stays on the claims that need them.

A vetted national contractor network. Every technician passes third-party KYC, holds a PIRB qualification, and has at least four years’ experience. Appointment is by proximity and availability, not by whoever answers first.

Verification before settlement. Serial and warranty decoding, COC and PIRB registration checks, and every claim costed against a Home Assist pro-forma before money moves. Our cash settlement solution exists to stop the leakage a catastrophe causes, not to speed it up.

One point of accountability. Claim data, turnaround times and cost per claim in one place, so you can see what the event is doing to your book while it is still happening.

The window is now

You cannot build surge capacity during a surge. Recruitment, vetting, systems integration and contractor onboarding take weeks you will not have in November.

If you write property, geyser or building risk in South Africa, the honest question is not whether you will see elevated claim volumes this season. It is whether your operation can absorb them without your loss ratio and your customer experience paying for it. That conversation belongs in August, not January.