The assignment given by an insurer to a technician to establish the cause, circumstances and amount of a loss, with no adjudicative force.
Loss adjustment is the assignment by which an insurer asks a technician to establish three things: what happened, whether the event falls within cover, and what it costs. The adjuster is neither judge nor arbitrator: they are appointed and paid by the insurer, their report binds the policyholder in no way, and a court seized afterward is bound neither by their technical conclusions nor by their figures. This is a frequent misunderstanding among claimants, who take the report for a decision when it is a piece of evidence. Professional ethics nonetheless require verifiable objectivity, and insurers have an interest in it: a contestable report costs more in litigation than it saves in indemnity. The report also drives the reserve booked on the balance sheet, so that systematically optimistic assessments resurface years later in the run-off deficit. The problem solved is deciding technical questions that neither the handler nor the policyholder can arbitrate, within a timeframe compatible with repair.
The 2022 drought, declared a natural catastrophe for several thousand French municipalities, produced a soil shrinkage and swelling loss estimated at about 3.5 billion euros by the national reinsurance company, a record for that peril. Every file calls for an individual geotechnical survey, with boreholes and crack monitoring across several seasons, which explains settlement times counted in years rather than months.
expert d'assurance, expertise de sinistre