This paper shows the kernel Poisson regression which can be applied in the claims reserving, where the row effect is assumed to be a nonlinear function of the row index. The paper concentrates on the chain-ladder technique, within the framework of the chain-ladder linear model. It is shown that the proposed method can provide better reserve estimates than the Poisson model. The cross validation function is introduced to choose optimal hyper-parameters in the procedure. Experimental results are then presented which indicate the performance of the proposed model.