The Future of Insurance Podcast – Rohit Verma
CEO, Crawford & Company
Season 1, Episode 24, August 24th, 2021
Guest Bio
Rohit Verma is the chief executive officer of Crawford & Company®. He brings more than 20 years of international strategic expertise and a proven track record for creating momentum and growth. As CEO, he is focused on company strategy and growth, business operations, investor relations and client relationships, with an emphasis on technology and innovation.
Rohit is passionate about driving cultural and operational transformation. Under his leadership, Crawford realigned to its modern global service line structure, uniting the organization with a single purpose of bringing value-added solutions to clients. He has driven growth from the front; launching several innovative solutions, capturing new business and creating an imperative for client centricity.
Rohit sees employee engagement as the most critical enabler of any organization’s success. His special interest is in identifying and developing high potential employees early in their careers to gain greater exposure and visibility within the organization.
Prior to his role at Crawford, Rohit served as the regional executive for the south region of Zurich North America, where he was accountable for profitable growth and market execution. During his ten year tenure at Zurich, Verma also served in a number of executive management positions across underwriting, finance, strategy and general management. His prior roles have included COO (2010-2011), CFO for SME business (2008-2010), head of strategy for Specialties business (2007-2008).
Before joining Zurich, Rohit was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He led several engagements at McKinsey which were often cross-functional teams of strategy, finance and IT. Rohit’s career has spanned three continents—Europe, Asia and North America, and has led numerous global teams.
Rohit was recognized by the National Underwriters Magazine as a “Top 5 Insurance Executive Under 40” in 2012. He holds an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from University of Delhi, India, and a master’s degree from Northwestern University in Chicago. He has also attended leadership programs at Harvard, Cambridge and the London Business School. Rohit is a member of the board of directors for the World Affairs Council and WeGoLook, a Crawford company. When away from work, Rohit enjoys spending time with his wife and two children and playing golf.
Highlights from the Show
- Crawford is an 80 year old company in a very traditional, people-focused, process-based, regulated industry, so re-imagining things can be hard
- Today, across functions, every aspect of the business is being rethought and reimagined
- With all of the capital priorities, it can be hard for Claims to be prioritized for carriers, while for Crawford, it’s all they do, so they can focus on reimagining it exclusively
- Post-COVID, many changes made during the pandemic will stick, but we will see a return to more in-person adjusting due to the need for human empathy on site and a lack of excuse for not providing it
- We might see a change in the level of resource going on site versus before as technology can provide expertise for more-available, lower-cost resources than the limited, highly-skilled adjusters that need to prioritize tougher claims
- This helps with the mix of challenges in getting experienced people to the site of a claim, and the lack of talent coming into the industry to create more availability
- Rather than going away, the adjuster needs deeper skills around empathy while the technical skill need is augmented by technology
- Weather is becoming more extreme, and the extent of damage from claim events like the winter weather in Texas is clear proof of this
- Across the industry, claim complexity is going up given all the new sensors in buildings (or cars); liability is getting more complex, like when an autonomous car gets in an accident
- Over the last 10 years, the CAT loss numbers were worse than the 10 years prior to that, which were higher than the 10 prior to that, and this is not due to inflation
- How do we use data, AI, ML, institutional knowledge to make decisions as opposed to individual brilliance since we will be losing some of that as the industry ages and expertise retires?
- AI and ML can get them to 65-70% of the answer today, but the last 30-35% is extremely hard, and that’s where people come in to add empathy and contextual understanding a machine can’t bring into its thought process
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Special thanks to Medallia for sponsoring this episode.
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