International Finance Corporation ( IFC ) has partnered with QBE Asia to advance building resilience and address the persistent property insurance gap across the Asia-Pacific region.

The collaboration will focus on the Building Resilience Index ( BRI ) programme. An innovation of IFC, BRI is a web-based hazard mapping and resilience assessment framework that evaluates climate-related risks for real-estate projects and portfolios. QBE Asia is the first insurance company to join the programme since its pilot launch in 2021.

The agreement will also broaden the scope of BRI beyond developers to include homebuyers, financial institutions, and governments, supporting the development of innovative insurance products that reward resilience in building design, construction, and operation, particularly across climate-vulnerable countries and regions.

The collaboration will focus on several key areas:

• Awareness and capacity building: IFC and QBE will work on joint initiatives to promote BRI adoption across Asia-Pacific, including holding workshops and training sessions for local and international stakeholders in markets including Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam.
• Product Innovation: Together with third parties, IFC and QBE will collaborate on developing insurance products with favourable underwriting terms for buildings with superior BRI ratings, including broader coverage options, risk-driven and sustainable pricing, expedited claims processing, and parametric insurance solutions that provide rapid payouts based on predefined triggers.
• Technical Integration: The partners will also explore ways to integrate BRI’s and QBE's risk-modelling tools to enhance assessment capabilities.

Economic impact

As climate-related hazards intensify, developers across Asia-Pacific are seeing more assets becoming economically unattractive or uninsurable, IFC and QBE say. This shrinking pool of insurable assets creates significant ripple effects across the financial system and can lead to economic disruption, particularly affecting vulnerable populations in emerging and developing markets where insurance penetration rates remain low.

 "The frequency and severity of extreme weather events are placing unprecedented pressure on buildings and communities across Asia and the Pacific," says Katia Daude Gonçalves, country manager for Singapore and Brunei at IFC. "Together with QBE, we’re determined to help close the property insurance gap while promoting resilient development across the region."

Ronak Shah, chief executive officer of Wholesale Markets Asia at QBE, adds: “A key feature of this partnership is the development of innovative insurance solutions for building owners and operators. Rewarding building resilience through favourable underwriting terms and conditions for properties with high BRI ratings, for example, is one such solution.

“Another is to improve risk modelling by combining our data and technology. By both incentivizing resilience and leveraging our technological capabilities, not only will we help build more resilience overall; we will also improve our own risk-taking capabilities as well.”

The collaboration builds on BRI's pilot launch in the Philippines and subsequent rollouts across East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia. The initiative also exemplifies BRI's “Pathways” approach, a strategic series of sustained engagements designed to create lasting momentum across stakeholder groups in the built environment.

Funded by the Australian government, BRI was developed and piloted with seed funding from the government of the Netherlands and the Rockefeller Foundation, in cooperation with leading organizations including the ARISE Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies, Build Change, FM Global, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, Miyamoto International, and Resilience Action Fund.