Kieran Rigby, Chair GHG Solutions Ltd., non-exec Rradar law firm, Rrelentless MGA. Former Global President / CEO International, Crawford & Company shares his thoughts.
A reflection on the pressures reshaping the sector — and on the difference between running a business and helping to steward one.
The outsourced claims sector has always lived with pressure. Across a career spent first running these businesses and now serving on their boards, I have watched loss adjusters, claims managers and TPAs wrestle, for decades, with multiple challenges that cut to the core of their activities. What has changed today is not the existence of the challenges so much as their character. The familiar headings — talent, cost, technology, security, regulation — remain on the agenda. But each now presents itself in a form that would have been only partly recognisable a decade ago, and the pace at which they compound is unfamiliar even to those who have spent a career in the industry.
Talent: from scarcity to a different kind of contest
The shortage of experienced adjusters and claims professionals is not new. What is new is that the contest for talent is no longer chiefly with peer firms. It is with adjacent industries that offer comparable analytical work without the unsocial demands of surge events and catastrophe response, and increasingly with the expectation among younger professionals that work be flexible, purposeful and technologically current. Retention now depends less on remuneration alone and more on whether a firm can offer a credible development path in a business that is visibly investing in its own future. A firm that looks tired to a graduate or experienced professional will lose that party, however competitive the salary.
Artificial intelligence and the question of preparedness
Automation in claims is not a recent arrival; rules-based triage and straight-through processing have been with us for years. The difference today is the breadth of what generative and predictive tools can plausibly touch — from first-notification handling and document review to fraud signals, estimation and reserving support. The genuine challenge is not whether to adopt these tools but whether a firm is prepared to govern them; to understand where a model adds judgement and where it merely adds speed. It is essential to retain accountability for outcomes, and to avoid the twin errors of reckless adoption and paralysed caution. Preparedness, here, is as much a matter of leadership posture and data discipline as it is of software.
Inflation on both sides of the ledger
Rising costs press on these businesses twice over. The firms themselves face wage, technology and compliance inflation. Simultaneously, the claims they manage on behalf of clients have grown more expensive — building materials, labour, medical and motor costs have all moved, and settlement values with them. This dual exposure is distinctive to the outsourced model. A firm must defend its own margin while demonstrating that it is containing a cost base it does not ultimately own. The present iteration of an old problem is that inflation has become structural and uneven rather than cyclical and broad, demanding a far more granular grip on indemnity spend than a general provision once required.
Cyber: from IT risk to existential exposure
Cyber threat was once treated as an operational matter for the IT function. For businesses that hold large volumes of sensitive personal and financial data on behalf of others, it is now a question of survival and trust. A breach is no longer simply a cost; it is a reputational event that can sever client relationships built over years. The threat has also professionalised, with organised actors targeting precisely the kind of data-rich, third-party intermediaries that the claims sector comprises. The modern obligation is to treat resilience as a board-level discipline, tested and rehearsed, rather than an assurance taken on trust from a supplier.
Regulation and the expectations of the served
Regulatory expectation and customer expectation have converged. Conduct regimes increasingly ask firms to demonstrate fair value and good outcomes, not merely procedural compliance, while policyholders — shaped by their experience of every other service they consume — expect speed, transparency and empathy as standard. For the outsourced provider this is a double accountability; to the regulator and to the client whose customers they serve. The older world of being judged on cycle time and cost per claim has given way to one in which the experience of the claimant is core to the product.
From the executive chair to the board: a change of vantage
Having led large and complex loss adjusting and claims operations — with global responsibility for several thousand people, billions in claim spend and substantial fee income — and now serving as a non-executive chairman and director across a loss adjuster, a managing general agent and a law firm, the contrast between the two roles is instructive. They are not the same job at a different altitude; they are different jobs.
The chief executive lives in the immediate. The role is one of mobilisation — of allocating people and capital, of meeting the quarter, of resolving the crisis that did not exist yesterday. That immediacy is absolutely necessary but it is also gravitational: the urgent has a way of consuming the important. The non-executive director or chairman exists, in large part, to resist that gravity. The value of the role lies in the strategic overview — the ability to see the trends that are forming before they harden into pressures, to hold a management team to the long-term goals that short-term immediacy would quietly erode, and to be the voice of experience at the table when decisions are being made.
This is not management at one remove; it is a distinct contribution. The non-executive who merely shadows the executive adds little. The one who asks the question that the operating rhythm leaves no room to ask — about talent three years out, about whether AI adoption is being governed or merely deployed, about whether resilience has been tested rather than assumed — earns the seat. Experience, used well, is not nostalgia for how things were done. It is pattern recognition: the quiet knowledge that a particular configuration of pressures has been seen before, and a steadying sense of which of them will pass and which will define the decade.
Holding the long view
The challenges facing the outsourced claims sector are, in their headings, the same as they have long been. In their present form they are faster, more interconnected and less forgiving. Meeting them requires capable executives running hard at the immediate, and it requires others whose task is precisely the opposite — to lift their eyes, to keep the long-term goal in sight, and to ensure that the business surviving today is also the business that thrives tomorrow. The two perspectives are not in tension. They are the two halves of stewardship.
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All the best,
Gary Pike
Founder & MD Right International
garypike@rightinternational.com
