Seven months after Hurricane Melissa drove a Category 5 wall through Westmoreland — the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane on record, and a storm the Planning Institute of Jamaica now estimates caused $1.952 trillion in damage and losses, equivalent to well over half of the national gross domestic product (GDP) — my family’s property insurance claim sits exactly where it sat in November: open, unresolved, and effectively in the dark.

We have been a policyholder with the company since at least 1993 — more than 30 years. We pay our premiums on time. We renew without negotiation. We are precisely the kind of long-tenured customer the Jamaican insurance industry says it values. And yet, in the one moment for which the entire concept of insurance exists — the moment of catastrophic loss — we have been met with silence.

That silence is being administered, in our case, by a loss adjuster acting as agent for the insurance company. This is not a complaint about the speed of complex hurricane claims. We understand that Melissa created an unprecedented backlog. Westmoreland alone lost thousands of structures. Adjusters are stretched thin. We are not asking for miracles; we are asking the people who are paid to process our claim to communicate with us about it on a predictable cadence.

Meanwhile, our small business has been doing the work that institutional insurance was meant to fund. In the months since Melissa, Bluefields Bay Villas and our team have:

• distributed more than 16,000 hot meals to neighbours who lost kitchens, roofs, and, in many cases, everything;

Andrew Moncurel

• delivered building supplies to families trying to put their homes back together;

• supplied labour to help neighbours rebuild damaged houses;

• run our generators and communications equipment as the only reliable source of power and connectivity in our area for months after the grid and the cell networks went down.

We did this without waiting for a cheque. We did this because if you own a business in a Jamaican coastal community, you do not get to wait. The community is the business; the business is the community. When the storm hits, you show up.

It is, therefore, difficult to watch a regulated financial institution — one that has banked our premiums for more than 30 years — fail to meet that same basic standard for its own customers. The legal obligation is not vague. Regulation 135 of the Insurance Regulations requires Jamaican insurers to settle valid claims within 30 days of the conditions for payment being met, with statutory interest running thereafter. The Financial Services Commission’s (FSC) Market Conduct Rules, Version 2.0, in force since 2022, require insurers and their intermediaries to settle claims “fairly” and “without undue delay”, using “transparent and effective claims procedures”.

Our experience suggests the gap between what those rules say and what is happening in the market today is enormous. And we are not unique. We are simply unusually positioned to say so publicly. Most Jamaican policyholders affected by Melissa do not have a platform; they are exhausted, they are still rebuilding, and they cannot afford to make enemies of the only entities they may ever need to renew a policy with again.

The structural problem is not that the rules do not exist. It is that the regulator has historically been a prudential supervisor first and a consumer protection regulator a distant second. For two decades, market conduct in Jamaican insurance has been treated as an aspiration rather than an enforcement priority. Industry observers have written about this for years; the country’s most respected insurance columnist has spent a decade in the wilderness calling for genuine “twin peaks” regulation. The market has noticed his isolation, and behaved accordingly.

A statutory deadline for written acknowledgement of a hurricane claim and the assignment of a named adjuster is needed..

Hurricane Melissa is the moment to fix this. The country is staring at between US$8.8 billion and US$12.2 billion in damage — by some measures more than half Jamaica’s GDP. Private insurance payouts are not a side issue in Jamaica’s recovery; they are arguably the single-largest channel of private capital available to rebuild this country. Every month that legitimate claims sit unprocessed is a month that small contractors do not get hired, imported building materials do not get ordered, and families do not move out of shelters.

A serious consumer protection framework would not be exotic by international standards. It would include a hard statutory deadline for written acknowledgement of a hurricane claim and the assignment of a named adjuster; a requirement that adjusters provide written status updates to policyholders on a fixed cadence, with breach-triggering automatic regulatory review; meaningful, automatic interest penalties on delayed settlements paid to the policyholder, not absorbed into the insurer’s reserves; a public scoreboard, published quarterly by the FSC, of average claim cycle times and complaint volumes by insurer; and an independent insurance ombudsman empowered to make binding decisions on disputed claims under a defined threshold — a structure the World Bank itself recommended for Jamaica more than a decade ago, which Jamaica still does not have.

None of this requires reinventing the wheel. It requires the political will to treat Jamaican insurance customers as customers rather than as a captive base.

The insurance company will, eventually, settle our claim. We will pay our premium next year, and the year after that, because we have to. That is precisely the asymmetry that consumer protection regulation exists to correct. Decades of paid premiums should buy more than silence after the worst storm in Jamaican history.

The minister of finance, the FSC, and the leadership of the Insurance Association of Jamaica should not need a hurricane of this scale to act. But here we are. The hurricane has happened. The only question left is whether the Jamaican insurance industry will be required to learn from it, or permitted to ignore it.

Andrew Houston Moncure is managing director of Bluefields Bay Villas & Suites in Westmoreland.