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Sedgwick Releases 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook

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New guide highlights emerging CAT trends and field-tested strategies to strengthen people, processes and technology ahead of a complex season

MEMPHIS, Tenn., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Sedgwick, the world’s leading risk and claims administration partner has released the 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook, a new guide that equips insurance carriers with emerging CAT trends and field-tested strategies to strengthen preparedness before the season begins.

Built on proprietary claims data and insights from Sedgwick’s catastrophe response leaders, the playbook is designed to help insurance carriers navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable catastrophe environment with data, insights, and strategies to help stay ahead of the 2026 catastrophe season.

The 2025 CAT season reveals that 2026 is set to face a more distributed and harder-to-predict risk landscape than carriers have historically planned for. The reasons behind the shift go beyond weather patterns. As weather related catastrophe events grow more frequent and geographically dispersed, carriers are facing a growing risk of losing early claim control to third parties. Simultaneously, experienced talent continues to leave the industry, compounding the challenge of managing a higher volume of complex claims at the worst possible time. Together, these pressures could make claims harder to manage, more expensive to resolve, and more likely to drift.

“The 2025 season may have felt quieter on the surface, but what it actually revealed was a more distributed and persistent form of risk, and one that doesn’t announce itself the way a major hurricane does,” said David Armstrong, Executive Vice President at Sedgwick. “2026 is shaping up to be one of the most complex catastrophe seasons that carriers have ever faced and the response models most carriers have in place aren’t built for this new reality. This playbook is about closing that gap and giving carriers the frameworks, the data, and the honest assessment of where preparedness falls short so they can get ahead of it before conditions change.”

Top insights from the playbook include: 

$78 billion: The price tag from the three costliest U.S. weather disasters in 2025, each driven by non-hurricane perils outside the traditional peak season.23 disasters: The total number of billion-dollar U.S. weather events in 2025, with the most expensive events driven by non-hurricane perils outside of the traditional peak season, and continuing a years-long trend of rising frequency and geographic spread.12%: The increase of total modeled risk in 2025 vs. 2024 from non-hurricane perils including wildfires, inland flooding, and severe convective storms.10 days: The current interval of billion-dollar disasters that occur, compared to in the 1980s when it was roughly every 82 days.Nearly 25%: The percentage of claim adjusters that are expected to retire by end of 2027. Carriers with high turnover among experienced adjusters have already seen operational costs rise by 12%. This is draining institutional knowledge from the industry at a critical moment.

“A quiet early season can be a misleading signal because you don’t get time back once an event hits, and you can’t prepare after the fact,” said Andy McCallum, Vice President of Specialty Operations at Sedgwick. “In responding to catastrophes, the key is to prepare and plan, and always be ready with your resources, no matter the forecast. We always advise taking a proactive, multi-layered approach to CAT preparedness, and balance short-term readiness with long-term resilience.”

The 2026 Catastrophe Season Playbook is available for download online. To connect with Sedgwick’s catastrophe response experts, visit sedgwick.com.

About Sedgwick
Sedgwick is the world’s leading risk and claims administration partner, helping clients thrive by navigating the unexpected. The company’s expertise, combined with the most advanced AI-enabled technology available, sets the standard for solutions in claims administration, loss adjusting, benefits administration and product recall. With over 33,000 colleagues and 10,000 clients across 80 countries, Sedgwick provides unmatched perspective, caring that counts, and solutions for the rapidly changing and complex risk landscape. Sedgwick’s majority shareholder is The Carlyle Group; Stone Point Capital LLC, Altas Partners, CDPQ, Onex and other management investors are minority shareholders. For more, see sedgwick

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SOURCE Sedgwick Claims Management Services, Inc.

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SmartOrg releases Version 10.x of its Decision Intelligence platform

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New release expands SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence platform with a cleaner, more configurable experience and new product capabilities.

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — SmartOrg, Inc., a Palo Alto-based provider of Decision Intelligence solutions, today announced the release of version 10.x of its software platform, with its standard products Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator® now deployed by configuring modules on a newly integrated platform.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges.”

Combined in other ways, these modules support deployments optimized for other contexts.

“This release is really about giving customers a better experience and more flexibility in how they apply the platform to their specific decision challenges,” said David Matheson, President and CEO of SmartOrg. “We’re delighted to see customers using SmartOrg’s Decision Intelligence Platform in more targeted ways, for example in Technology Assessment, Energy Exploration and Drug Discovery. Version 10.x gives them a cleaner, more configurable foundation for doing that work.”

The release includes major updates to Innovation Navigator®, including flexible brainstorming canvases, enhanced Learning Plan modules, and upgraded Discovery Grid visualizations. These enhancements help innovation teams capture ideas, organize learning activities, and focus attention on the uncertainties that matter most.

Portfolio Navigator® also receives significant new capabilities, including a Maturity Matrix, Probability of Success calculator, and portfolio goal analysis. These features help leaders better assess projects, compare them, and support portfolio decisions.

“Version 10.x is part of our ongoing commitment to keeping SmartOrg’s software current, useful, and easier for customers to apply,” said Dave Wachenschwanz, Director of Development at SmartOrg. “The platform has significant upgrades in its user interface, improving consistency and usability.”

To see highlights of the new release, SmartOrg has published a short video overview from its development team that you can watch here: https://bit.ly/4xdA7QY

About SmartOrg

SmartOrg helps innovation, R&D, and strategy teams convert uncertainty to opportunity. Its software products—Innovation Navigator® and Portfolio Navigator®—apply quantitative methods to prioritize learning, build confidence in the business case, and guide investment decisions at both the project and portfolio levels to help organizations meet their growth objectives.

Media Contact

Doug Williams, SmartOrg, Inc., 1 3399270834, dwilliams@smartorg.com, https://smartorg.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prweb.com/releases/smartorg-releases-version-10x-of-its-decision-intelligence-platform-302796404.html

SOURCE SmartOrg, Inc.

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Cathay Financial Holdings Leverages Open-Source Small Language Models to Identify Customer Intent

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Fine-tuning Small Language Models to Better Understand Local Financial Service Contexts, Domain Terminology, and Ambiguous Customer Queries

TAIPEI, June 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — To enhance operational efficiency and customer experience, Cathay Financial Holdings (Cathay FHC) continues to advance the application of generative AI in financial services through its generative AI technical framework, GAIA, and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) strategy. Building on last year’s validation of large language models (LLMs) for financial applications, Cathay FHC recently unveiled its latest AI research findings at NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026, demonstrating how open-source small language models (SLMs) can be fine-tuned for customer intent classification and applied to future financial service scenarios.

The study evaluated several leading open-source models from Meta, TAIDE, TAME, NVIDIA and OpenAI. Preliminary results showed that, under the testing framework, fine-tuned SLMs may reduce dependence on complex prompt engineering and vector retrieval modules, potentially simplifying system architecture while lowering future operational and maintenance complexity.

The findings indicated that, when combined with carefully designed financial-domain datasets and targeted model fine-tuning, SLMs can further improve model stability, inference efficiency, and deployment controllability. In customer intent classification, the fine-tuned SLM achieved performance close to mainstream closed-source LLMs, approaching that of leading proprietary LLMs, providing enterprises with a practical reference for evaluating AI model training and deployment strategies.

From a data governance and privacy perspective, the study adopted a fully synthetic data approach, ensuring that no real customer information was used during model training. Through techniques including service-function clustering, single-intent and multi-intent dataset design, Taiwan-context localization, and keyword expansion, Cathay FHC strengthened the model’s ability to understand local financial service contexts, industry-specific terminology, and ambiguous customer queries.

Potential future applications include mortgage balance inquiries, credit card payment assistance, and branch service navigation, laying the groundwork for intelligent search, service routing, and next-generation customer engagement experiences.

From a technical architecture standpoint, Cathay FHC integrated NVIDIA AI tools—including NVIDIA NeMo Customizer, NVIDIA NeMo Curator, and NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM—together with NVIDIA Hopper architecture computing resources to support data generation, model fine-tuning, inference optimization, and experimental evaluation. Leveraging NVIDIA AI ecosystem, Cathay FHC continues to strengthen its capabilities in financial-domain model development, data governance, and application validation.

In recent years, Cathay FHC has steadily expanded AI innovation across a wide range of financial scenarios, building scalable technological foundations spanning internal process optimization, customer service enhancement, financial knowledge understanding, and model governance. As financial institutions navigate an increasingly regulated environment, stringent data governance requirements, and rapidly evolving customer expectations, Cathay FHC remains committed to advancing AI research in a compliant, secure, and resilient manner.

Looking ahead, Cathay FHC will continue exploring long-context classification, advanced financial document understanding, and cross-scenario AI applications. By developing model training and deployment approaches tailored to the financial sector, the company aims to accelerate innovation and create more intelligent, efficient, and customer-centric financial services.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/cathay-financial-holdings-leverages-open-source-small-language-models-to-identify-customer-intent-302798631.html

SOURCE Cathay Financial Holdings

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First Advantage Set to Join S&P SmallCap 600

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NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — First Advantage Corporation (NASD: FA) will replace Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc. (NYSE: KW) in the S&P SmallCap 600 effective prior to the opening of trading on Tuesday, June 16. A consortium led by KW’s CEO with Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited (TSE: FFH) is acquiring Kennedy-Wilson Holdings in a deal expected to close soon, pending final closing conditions.

Following is a summary of the changes that will take place prior to the open of trading on the effective date:

Effective Date     

Index Name      

Action

Company Name

Ticker     

GICS Sector     

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600     

Addition     

First Advantage

FA

Industrials

June 16, 2026

S&P SmallCap 600

Deletion

Kennedy-Wilson Holdings     

KW

Real Estate

ABOUT S&P DOW JONES INDICES

S&P Dow Jones Indices is the largest global resource for essential index-based concepts, data and research, and home to iconic financial market indicators, such as the S&P 500® and the Dow Jones Industrial Average®. More assets are invested in products based on our indices than products based on indices from any other provider in the world. Since Charles Dow invented the first index in 1884, S&P DJI has been innovating and developing indices across the spectrum of asset classes helping to define the way investors measure and trade the markets.

S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), which provides essential intelligence for individuals, companies, and governments to make decisions with confidence. For more information, visit www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

S&P Dow Jones Indices
index_services@spglobal.com 

Media Inquiries
spdji.comms@spglobal.com 

 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-advantage-set-to-join-sp-smallcap-600-302798639.html

SOURCE S&P Dow Jones Indices

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