Every claim tells two stories. The first is the loss itself: a fire, a fraud, a flooded warehouse, a cyber breach. The second, less visible story is about what was in place before the loss, and what was not. At New Trend Loss Adjusters, the 2025 portfolio told that second story with unusual clarity.

Across cases spanning commercial banks, manufacturers, logistics companies, construction sites, and healthcare providers, five causes accounted for the overwhelming majority of significant losses: electrical and power infrastructure failure, weather-related structural damage, internal fraud and employee collusion, underinsurance and average clause exposure, and procedural non-compliance. None of these are novel risks. All of them recurred.
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The underinsurance problem is worse than most admit

In one 2025 case, a Nigerian industrial insured recovered less than 9% of their verified loss. Not because their claim was fraudulent. Not because the cause was excluded. Because their declared sum insured bore almost no relationship to the actual replacement cost of what they had insured. The average clause did its job precisely as intended, and the outcome was devastating.

"Sums insured based on book value, historical cost, or prior-year figures without restatement represent a systemic failure that brokers, underwriters, and risk surveyors must collectively address at every renewal."

This is not an isolated case. Across material damage, engineering, fire, and marine claims, the same pattern repeated: an asset insured at inception value, never restated, steadily eroded in real terms by naira depreciation and import cost inflation — until the moment it was needed.
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Internal fraud is structural, not incidental

The Fidelity Guarantee portfolio in 2025 revealed something important about how internal fraud operates in Nigerian organisations. In virtually every case, the conditions for fraud were structurally embedded long before anyone stole anything. A warehouse manager who controls both stock issuance and reconciliation records. A bank staff member whose salary transactions go unmonitored for two consecutive policy years. A sales representative who is the only person who can verify their own deliveries.

The fraud triangle namely, motive, opportunity, rationalisation was present in every case. But it was the opportunity component, created by weak segregation of duties and unchecked authority, that made each fraud possible at scale.

Two claims in this category were repudiated entirely not because the fraud did not happen, but because the perpetrators were outsourced employees not covered under the standard Fidelity Guarantee policy wording. This coverage gap is common, frequently overlooked, and entirely fixable.
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Marine claims are failing at port, not at sea

Three of seven marine cases in 2025 were materially weakened or repudiated because the insured, or their clearing agent, failed to raise a sea protest letter at the point of discharge. The sea protest is not a technicality. It is the legal instrument that preserves the insured's rights against the carrier and establishes the evidentiary chain needed to attribute damage to a covered peril.

Without it, the adjuster cannot establish where and when the loss occurred. In one case, that failure converted a well-evidenced multi-unit damage claim into an unverifiable one, and the recommendation was repudiation.
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Cyber risk is accelerating beyond current controls

The 2025 cyber case involved a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack on a banking application produced a finding that has implications beyond the individual claim: the security patch that would have prevented the attack had already been developed and tested. It simply had not been deployed. Three independent forensic investigations reached identical conclusions. The breach exploited known vulnerabilities that had been left unresolved.

As AI-enabled attack capabilities become operational realities rather than theoretical risks, the gap between what Nigerian financial institutions currently have in place and what is needed will only widen.

These are five findings from a report that covers fourteen loss categories in depth, with specific case illustrations, adjustment outcomes, key lessons, and underwriting recommendations across every class.

The full report: Lessons from Claims 2025 is available for download and is addressed primarily to claims managers, underwriters, risk surveyors, and brokers operating in the Nigerian market.

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