The small profession making a big impact

Loss adjusters are embracing technology, but are confident the human touch will endure

By Miranda Maxwell

A casual observer might be forgiven for thinking 2024 has brought a reprieve for the local loss adjusting community. After tens of billions of dollars of insured losses were racked up in recent years due to fires, floods and cyclones in Australia and New Zealand, there have been no catastrophe declarations since December.

But there is little respite, say loss adjuster leaders, as complex claims continue to be fuelled by business interruption and cybercrime – keeping the profession busy even when Mother Nature behaves.  

“There’s really no letting up for the loss adjusting profession. There’s still a demand for our services in non-catastrophe times,” McLarens Asia-Pacific managing director Martyn Wicht tells Insurance News. 

Brisbane-based Mr Wicht has been with McLarens and associated companies for more than 25 years. In 2014 he led the group’s re-entry to the Australian market as general manager, and he now oversees operations in Asia, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and Vanuatu.

Mr Wicht is a third-generation loss adjuster who started out alongside his father.  

“I recall him recounting my grandfather being asked, if he had his time again, what would he do? The response was, ‘I would do loss adjusting.’ It’s such an interesting profession.” 

For those not from a loss-adjusting dynasty, succession planning and building the next generation has been a “real challenge”, Mr Wicht says, and loss adjusting executives continue to wrestle with the two Ts – training and technology. “For our profession, fostering young up-and-coming talent within an organisation has been an increasing focus. Providing clear progression pathways and qualifications is critical.” 

Recruiting talent from other industries has provided “really exciting opportunities and some new ideas to the business”, he says, with trainees entering with engineering or financial backgrounds, for example.

McLarens also started a training program just over two years ago, and almost 10% of its loss adjusting workforce today are graduates.  

“Historically, a lot of us have just started off on small domestic losses and you work your way up into commercial and then into either specialist lines or major loss. Our program is designed to accelerate learnings in a particular area, whether that be property major and complex loss or one of the specialists such as casualty or marine. 

“It’s been incredibly successful. They receive one-on-one mentoring from some of the best in the industry. They are on the job training and they have a role at the end of that training period.”

Image Box text McLarens Asia-Pacific MD Martyn Wicht says human adjusters will still be needed to make determinations in complex cases

Over at Crawford & Company, Jonathan Hubbard has been Australia president about a year.  He made sure his credibility was cemented by returning to work as a technical large and complex loss property adjuster for five years before taking his current role.

“That was important to me,” he says. “I wanted to really establish myself within the Crawford team.”

Crawford has 39 branches across Australia and an international workforce to draw on, which it made use of during the 2022 floods in New South Wales and Queensland, when the industry was swamped by a record $6.31 billion of insured losses from almost 250,000 claims. 

“We brought in loss adjusters from overseas, including from Canada,” Mr Hubbard says. “That’s a big advantage for us and gives us a good level of business-as-usual support, so we have a more stable workforce. Inevitably, if you’ve got new employees, then that requires training and supervision, and that’s challenging.”  

He says recent surge events have seen the industry “really looking at how it can address the need to ramp up resources when claim volume spikes so massively”, while being mindful that loss adjusting is, in a nutshell, about delivering prime customer experience. 

“We’re quite a small industry, but we can’t underestimate the impact that we have,” Mr Hubbard says.

“Crawford’s purpose is to restore lives, businesses and communities. It’s a very noble profession.

“The claim is that moment of truth for the policyholder and accentuates the importance of the loss adjusting approach, whether that’s an earthquake, flood or a bushfire. So we are proud of our ability to flex and stand up and support the industry at those times.

“One of the advantages of being around a long while is I do know a lot of people and … there’s a lot of trust built up there over the years.

“We try to do the right thing and make sure we absolutely are giving you our very best endeavour. Genuinely wanting to help the person or the business get through that difficult time, that’s what we’re about. That’s what our adjusting team does every day.”

Mr Hubbard, who moved from the UK in 1994 to work as a liability adjuster, is conscious loss adjusting is not usually a first choice after school or university. Crawford runs an in-house graduate program, attends career expos and targets professionals such as solicitors or accountants looking for a career change.

“The war for talent has never been tougher,” he says. “Probably the biggest challenge for us is identifying, developing and retaining talent. The industry has to be smarter about attracting talent. I’m very passionate about it.”

At Technical Assessing, managing director David Cambridge runs a cadet program. He says insurance should be up there with banking, law and accounting as a desired profession, and the industry still needs to do more to win over talent.

“We aim to attract talent that not only possesses technical skills but also the soft skills that lead to positive long-term relationships for our clients,” he says.

“We’re not seeing an influx of a lot of that new blood, and it’s not just loss adjusters, it’s the insurance claims managers as well. There’s definitely still a war for talent, we’re seeing a lot of the brains trust leave the industry.” 

For Mr Cambridge, technology is less of an immediate threat. The industry still has a long way to go, he tells Insurance News, and while there “are uses for it”, applications may be limited to lower-value claims for the time being. 

“I don’t think the sort of work we do is going to get highly commoditised because we’re in the higher-value, lower-volume claims space,” says Mr Cambridge, who led a management buyout of the loss adjuster, which was founded in 1986 and has more than 60 staff.  

“I think at some point, insurers will look at their claims and simply come up with a technology solution to deal with high-volume, low-value claims. It becomes cost-prohibitive to allocate an adjuster to work on those claims when you might end up settling it in a very short space of time.”  

He says this gives the insured a better experience and settles sooner, so insurers may tolerate “a little bit of leakage on that claim”. “It might mean you’ve got a claim settled for close to $1000, even if the true value if you got a loss adjuster involved might have only been to settle at $750. The $250 [extra] that’s been paid out is saved on time and effort. That’s where you’ll see technology really coming into its own.”  

For more complex claims, care and the “human touch” are critical to the client’s experience, he says.

“Higher-value or complex claims with a heightened emotional stake are less suited to systemisation.” 

Mr Wicht says McLarens is taking a “measured approach” while exploring artificial intelligence solutions in areas such as data collection and analytics, execution of certain technical functions, and reducing costs.

Technology is reinventing how McLarens collects and distributes data to clients and is improving the speed and quality of its client responses and reserve/loss estimates, and lowering indemnity spend and resolving claims faster, as well as streamlining its operations. 

Technology is definitely helping, Mr Wicht says, but the shift towards digitalisation demands a balance between new tech and “maintaining essential soft skills”.  

“We’ve invested significantly in this area … we’ve built a global team of data scientists. However, we are also mindful that, particularly within complex, commercial, specialty, we still need humans to make coverage/quantum determinations … and of the need to protect personal data.” 

Crawford uses a program to help interpret coverage documentation, and tech also helps its “triage”, capturing data to ensure “we’re not repeatedly asking the same questions and the customer gets in the hands of the right adjuster, because that generally dictates the best outcome”. 

Mr Hubbard says tech will automate entry-level work that is “quite mundane” and allow staff to spend more time on customer interaction. But technology and AI will never replace loss adjusters and the “particular empathy that we deliver to a claim scenario, and helping the customer at their real time of need”.  

“There is ongoing investment in AI and tech by Crawford, but you still need people meeting with customers, connecting with them, diagnosing the problems, helping them and working out what actions are needed to take the claim forward,” Mr Hubbard says. 

“The fundamental importance of that people interaction, that’s not going to change.”