Big Interview: Sedgwick CEO Paul White

When he was a young boy, Paul White, who became regional CEO for international at Sedgwick when Neil Gibson was named CEO in the UK in November, wanted to be a police officer.

Thirty-five years ago, the fact that he wore glasses meant his application to join the thin blue line was rejected, which his wife observes meant: “Insurance’s gain was the police force’s loss.”

“I started in the industry straight from school,” he says. “I got a job with Norwich Union, as it was, in Glasgow. It was an entry-level role in the claims department. I spent seven years there and had an interest in liability claims, needed a car and was fed-up of working in the office.

“I wanted to get out there investigating claims. I moved to Iron Trades and spent three great years there investigating liability claims, such as industrial disease, shipyards, construction sites, heavy engineering, all that sort of stuff. I loved it.

With a twinkle in his eye, he remembers: “It was before mobile phones. Golf clubs in the car.”

As CEO of Sedgwick UK since 2019, he doesn’t get time to play much golf these days and since his role was expanded to cover international in April 2023, he has been clocking up air miles flying to the organisation’s overseas offices.

These days, with mobile phones, he can be thousands of miles away from Sedgwick’s Fenchurch Street head office, yet he is rarely ever off the grid.

Over the last 35 years of his career, which has included many operations roles, he has seen systems and technology change the way claims are handled as well as raised consumers expectations of how they should be kept informed.

“There is a lot more the customer is involved in with in the process now than there was historically. It forces us to raise the bar in how we respond.

“We have great instances of where we have handled claims in a rapid way or where it has been complicated and difficult with vulnerable customers and we have included them in [the process in] a very successful way.”

White first joined Sedgwick in 2009, when the business bought Cunningham Lindsey, where he led operations.

Operation Covid

This background proved invaluable when early into his tenure as CEO, Covid struck.

He views the world entering lockdown as a “standout period” in his leadership, with the need to get 2,000 people working from home rather than in the organisation’s 19 offices across the country forcing a mass procurement of laptops.

“We were all predominantly office-based, with loss adjustors in and out of locations. We were very traditional up until that point and then there was a big shift for a couple of years.

“A lot of organisations are now looking at what is the right thing to do: whether to have people back in offices, move to a hybrid model or whether they have reached a point where they can run the business on a remote working basis.

“There is still a lot of ongoing activity with that as different businesses try to work out what is right for them and their colleagues. We went for a hybrid model as we think that works best for us and, at the moment, it is very flexible compared with how we worked in the past.

“New talent coming into the sector are looking for that flexible model rather than just working in the office five days a week.”

Hybrid working means different things for different individuals working in different parts of the country, he observes.

For less experienced individuals, White says working with more experienced claims and loss adjusting people in the office on a regular basis is vital as the opportunities to learn from colleagues through MS Teams, etc, is limited.

Post Covid, Sedgwick now has less square footage of office space in major cities and typically people are in three days a week.

As well as causing reflection on floorspace, the pandemic also prompted White to reflect on other areas to operate in.

“Coming out of Covid was an interesting dynamic for us,” White says. “Covid was such a major shift for us in what we do.

“We are fundamentally a loss adjustor and claims management business and that will always be at the heart of what we do but to grow our business, because of the scale we have, we had to look at other areas.

“We will never be completely detached from that core but there will be activity that complements it.”

Off the back of Covid, White says the quite a few insurers needed additional support - not in traditional claims handling and loss adjusting - but around “the facility of additional resource.”

“Covid created problems with supply chains, labour, materials and parts in the motor industry so insurers were asking us for resource so we developed a resource solutions business.

“That has been a big success over the last few years, and we will continue to build on that into 2024 as well.”

Extreme weather

As well as the pandemic, the last few years have been seen a growing number of extreme weather events dominating Sedgwick’s workload.

White says Sedgwick’s technology plus having 2500 colleagues working in the UK today, as well as additional support that can be brought in from overseas operations, has allowed the business to deal with the claims surges that occur.

He adds: “The enhancements in technology have allowed us to respond quicker, faster, we can handle more scale. Our smart intake tool helps us digest a large volume of claims and undertakes some of the initial activity you would undertake at that initial point of contact.

“We are getting more extreme weather events. Everyone knows the reason why and it is difficult to predict when these weather events will hit. They are varying in nature.

“You had the deep freeze followed by a rapid thaw at the end of 2022, which kept us very busy in 2023. The claims are higher value, longer tail and more complex. It was a very significant event for the UK.

“We’ve had wind and storm and the dry period in 2022, which saw a spike in subsidence claims in August, September, and October. We had wildfires last summer as well.

“I went out to where it was to see how it affected customers in that area. It was frightening. If it had happened at night, you would have been dealing with a lot more serious incident.”

The volume of claims, and damage done by extreme weather, means even though Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may have pressed the brakes of the UK’s net zero ambitions, White has no plan to slow down work to achieve carbon neutrality at Sedgwick.

Having achieved carbon neutrality for Sedgwick’s UK repair solutions division in 2022, he signed the business up to the Science Based Targets initiative, pledging to ensure the business becomes carbon net-zero by 2030.

When asked how it will hit that target, he says the business employs people to focus on this as a “key priority. We have to be at the forefront of this.”

“You have to have a proper anchor to measure activity against. A lot of work has gone into the creation of calculators to measure progress.

“We have done lots of things to reduce and offset the carbon expenditure of the company whether that is buying trees or the approach to building repairs to how do you dispose of paint you are no longer going to use.”

Branching out

With a focus on the shift from fossil fuels to green energy, Sedgwick launched a new power and energy division in the UK in June, which White says “is going well” as it is tied to a lot of activity the organisation already does.

In the coming months he says the business will also branch out into the aviation space.

“We see that as a new growth sector for us.” he says. “We haven’t really got any capability for aviation claims in the UK.”

Other areas Sedgwick is looking to expand into include commercial property repairs as White observes: “We do a lot of work in the private home, building repairs sector, but obviously there are commercial properties that get damaged in a similar way.

“Linked to that would be commercial building surveying activity. Another area is our legal services. It has taken us longer than anticipated [to establish] but our aim is to grow that out of recovery activity. We will see where that takes us. It is very much a fledgling.”

On whether he sees the new legal services division differentiating Sedgwick from rivals, he says: “We see ourselves as quite a broad church provider of services to our clients who are predominantly insurers. Where they have a need, we are happy to talk to them.

“We think there are opportunities in legal services that we haven’t tapped into over the last few years.”

Future of claims

Looking ahead to the future of claims prompts White to reflect on his history in the industry, and back to memories of visiting sites in an age before mobile phones.

On artificial intelligence looming on the horizon, White says he welcomes the possibilities associated with it and has lots of people looking at how it could speed-up processes or remove manual activity adding “the technology is an enabler to what we do.”

But he doesn’t think AI will replace human insurers anytime soon, observing: “This is a people business. The complexity associated with vulnerable customers are significant, so I think there is a long way to go before AI replaces loss adjustors. I see it as an enabler rather than a replacement.

“Over the next couple of years there is a lot of testing and research required. Confidentiality, data, regulation - there is a whole lot of activity that needs to be undertaken before AI can be used as it is envisaged.

“Right here and now I have vulnerable customers whose claims need to be handled and I will be using our existing technology, which is really good, to support people in the field undertaking that work.”

On whether technology could cut human claims handlers out of the loop, he can see how non-complex, standard, easier claims could utilise AI a lot more - but where more input is needed so “are humans.”

On the make-up of that human workforce, White is clear that as a father-of-three daughters he wants to improve diversity and inclusion in insurance.

Historically, he says because of links to the building trade, the claims and loss adjusting profession has been male dominated.

Today Sedgwick’s executive leadership team is 60% female in the UK and 52% of the overall workforce are women.

He says: “That represents a lot of work over the last five to 10 years to change that dynamic. We’ve got more to do but I am really pleased with that progress. Talent into the industry and organisation is a key priority.”

For a man who was excluded from his dream job in his youth because of his eyesight, his vision that the human face of the insurance industry is one that would be inclusive of his daughters is crystal clear.