WFI Insurance announced June 24 that all farming clients and their families across Australia will receive 24/7 access to mental health and safety support through a new arrangement with Sonder, a workplace health, safety, and wellbeing platform. The service, available at no additional cost to eligible WFI policyholders, includes app-based wellbeing guidance, confidential self-assessments, counselling and psychology support, and location-based alerts for severe weather events including floods and bushfires.
The arrangement is notable for the general insurance industry because of how it applies Sonder’s technology. Until now, Sonder’s insurance sector clients – which the company lists as including Allianz, IAG, AMP, Bank of Queensland, Australian Retirement Trust, and TelstraSuper – have used the platform to support their own employees, not their policyholders. The WFI deal extends that model into a general insurance product, embedding mental health support as a feature of farm cover itself. WFI and IAG have not identified a comparable offering from an Australian general insurer, and no equivalent arrangement was found among the publicly available product information of major rural insurance competitors including QBE and Elders Insurance at the time of publication.
The commercial logic sits against a backdrop of escalating mental health-related claim costs across the insurance industry. According to the Council of Australian Life Insurers (CALI), Australian life insurers paid out more than $2.2 billion in mental health claims in 2024 – approximately double the figure from five years earlier. Mental ill-health is now the leading cause of total and permanent disability (TPD) claims in Australia, accounting for almost one in three claims paid. It is also driving one in five income protection claims, with payouts reaching $887 million in 2024 alone. CALI CEO Christine Cupitt has described the scale of the problem as a systemic one, extending beyond life insurance. “Australia is reaching a tipping point. The entire safety net, not just life insurance, is under pressure. Every year we see a growing number of people, particularly younger Australians, leaving the workforce for good due to mental health conditions,” she said.
A KPMG report commissioned by CALI, published in December 2024, found that almost 80% of the overall increase in permanent disability claims over the past decade was attributable to mental health, with those claims growing at approximately 10% annually compared with 0.5% for physical causes. Among Australians aged 30 to 40, the TPD claims rate for mental health has increased 732% over the decade – the steepest rise across all age groups.
While those figures relate to life insurance, the pressure extends across general lines. The Insurance Council of Australia’s (ICA) September 2025 submission to the Productivity Commission’s Interim Report on Delivering Quality Care More Efficiently noted that mental injury claims have risen substantially in workers’ compensation, compulsory third party (CTP), and public liability insurance. The median time lost for mental health conditions in workers’ compensation reached 30.7 working weeks per serious claim in 2019-20, compared with 6.2 weeks for physical injuries and diseases, with median compensation of $55,270 per serious claim against $13,883 for physical injuries.
IAG group executive for people, performance and reputation Christine Stasi described the Sonder investment in explicitly commercial terms as well as welfare ones. “It signals IAG’s intent to move beyond claims response towards earlier intervention and prevention. Earlier support in these moments can improve mental health outcomes, helping reduce the broader cost of harm to individuals and communities,” Stasi said. The logic is direct for general insurers facing rising mental health-related claim costs: if early intervention reduces the severity or frequency of claims – particularly post-disaster psychological injury claims, which the ICA submission identifies as a growing cost driver in CTP and workers’ compensation – the investment pays for itself through the claims ledger, not only through policyholder goodwill. Whether IAG can demonstrate that outcome over the next 12 to 24 months will likely determine how other general insurers respond to the model.
WFI executive general manager Damien Gallagher framed the initiative in terms of the specific pressures facing farming communities, where mental health access has historically been limited by geography and the particular stressors of agricultural life. “We recognise the urgent need to address mental wellbeing for farmers and their families. The mental health statistics for those living and working within agricultural settings are staggering – with one farmer losing their life to suicide every 10 days,” Gallagher said. Research released by the University of Canberra, as cited in WFI’s announcement, found that only one in seven farmers can easily access mental health support, and that 60% had been affected by two or more major natural hazards in the past five years, with wellbeing outcomes deteriorating as the number of hazard events increases.
University of Canberra figures are reported as cited by WFI; the full research had not been independently published at the time of writing. The 42% crop claims figure is a WFI-reported internal figure and has not been benchmarked against industry-wide data. WFI is a member of the National Farmers’ Federation Coalition for Mental Health and Wellbeing in Agriculture. Its authorised representatives live and work in the communities they serve, which Gallagher said gives the insurer direct visibility of the pressures its clients face.
Rob Deeming, chief operating officer of Sonder, said the platform was built for situations where support needs to be immediate and geography is not an obstacle. “Farmers and their families face unique pressures, from the impacts of extreme weather and financial uncertainty to the challenges that can come with living and working in regional communities. We know that early access to support can make a meaningful difference. Together, we’re helping ensure farmers and their families can access the right support at the right time, wherever they are in Australia,” Deeming said.
The WFI arrangement builds on a strategic investment in Sonder made by IAG – WFI’s parent company – through its corporate venture capital arm, Firemark Ventures, announced June 15. IAG is Australia’s largest general insurer, with brands including NRMA Insurance, CGU, WFI, and ROLLiN’. Sonder, founded in 2017, reported surpassing one million members in October 2025, when it also completed an $40 million funding round led by Blackbird Ventures and SEEK, with additional investment from Hostplus Super. The company has recorded 40% year-on-year growth and holds accreditation from the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS). Its own platform data indicates that 56% of members said they would not have sought help without Sonder, and 77% reported feeling better after using the platform. Sonder’s finance and insurance solutions page lists its named clients in that sector – all engaged for employee wellbeing purposes. The WFI policyholder arrangement represents a new application of the model outside the workforce context.
IAG Firemark Ventures general partner Scott Gunther said the investment fits the fund’s focus on technology that reshapes how risk is understood and managed. “Firemark Ventures invests in technology that can transform how risks are understood, prevented, and managed. Sonder’s platform represents a compelling example of innovation that enhances health, safety, and wellbeing outcomes,” he said. Sonder co-founder and CEO Craig Cowdrey said the IAG partnership opens a new category for the platform. “Partnering with IAG gives us the opportunity to extend that well beyond the workplace, to people navigating some of the hardest moments of their lives, whether that’s recovering from an injury, getting back to work, or rebuilding after a major life event,” Cowdrey said.
The WFI arrangement raises a question general insurers, product managers, and distribution leaders across the market will need to assess: whether embedding preventive mental health support in general insurance products is an emerging product design standard, or a niche response to an acute problem in one segment. The wellbeing-in-insurance model has precedent in life and health insurance. AIA Australia has embedded AIA Vitality – a behaviour-incentive wellness program – into its life and health insurance products since 2014. However, AIA Vitality is a rewards-based engagement model: it incentivises healthy behaviours through premium adjustments and retail benefits rather than providing on-demand clinical mental health access. The WFI model is structurally different in that it provides policyholders with direct, real-time access to accredited mental health and safety professionals as a feature of a general insurance product.
The model’s commercial case rests on a specific hypothesis: that earlier mental health intervention reduces the severity and duration of downstream claims, particularly psychological injury claims in the wake of natural hazard events. If IAG is able to demonstrate measurable reductions in post-event claim costs within its farm insurance book over the next one to two years, the calculus for other general insurers – particularly those with significant rural, emergency services, or high-distress policyholder segments – changes significantly. If it cannot, the arrangement is more likely to remain a differentiation play in a niche segment than a template for the broader market. The industry data on the claims cost trajectory gives general insurers a strong incentive to find out.
