Why claims has outgrown its job description

Ask most people outside our profession to picture a claims handler, and they will describe a role that no longer exists. 

The image is of someone processing paperwork at the back of the building — a cost to be contained rather than a capability to be invested in. That picture is not just dated. It is wrong, and it badly undersells the people doing the most important work in insurance.

Because claims is, and has always been, where the promise is kept. Everything that comes before it — the product, the price, the broker conversation — is a commitment. 

Claims is the moment we honour that commitment, usually when a customer is having the worst day of their year. Getting it right takes far more than it once did.

Not one job, but four

Today’s handler is part technician, part relationship manager, part project manager and part analyst. The technical craft — reaching a fair decision and being able to explain it — remains the foundation, and always will. 

But layered on top, we now ask people to orchestrate a network of suppliers, manage stakeholders at substantive scale, interrogate the data behind a claim, and communicate with an immediacy customers simply did not expect a decade ago.

That breadth of role is a positive challenge, not a burden. When I started my career in claims, a great handler needed a great file. Today every handler still needs that, but also the ability to coordinate everyone touching the claim as well as to understand and interpret the information in front of them. 

That’s why we recruit for mindset as much as technical knowledge — curiosity, ownership and a comfort with change. The craft can be taught; the attitude is harder to instil.

Regulation

Some of this shift has been accelerated by regulation, and I welcome that. 

Outcome-based regulation is demanding by design: it pushes you to be better, not merely compliant. In other words, regulation should be the minimum, not the ambition.

At Pen, Consumer Duty largely formalised how we already thought about the customer. 

It did not change our direction; it simply gave it a name. Firms that treat the rules as a finishing line will always trail the ones that treat them as a starting point. 

Our focus is not on ‘clearing the bar’ but on continuing to iterate — finding the next improvement in how a customer experiences a claim.

Of course, none of this evolution is happening in calm conditions. Volumes and complexity of claims are rising, supply chains are stretched, and customer and regulatory expectations are climbing all at once. None of those pressures are easing off to make room for the others.

But pressure is the proving ground. It exposes the difference between teams that genuinely own claims and those that merely administer them.

Our suppliers are often the face of our business to a customer, so managing them closely is not a nicety — it is control, and it is accountability. Handled well, the pressure becomes the thing that sets you apart, rather than the thing that drags you down.

Differentiator

That is why claims has become a genuine differentiator — and never more so than in a competitive market like this one. When rates compress and products converge, the thing that truly separates one insurer from another is what happens at the point of claim. 

It is no longer enough to assert that you have a strong claims proposition; buyers and brokers increasingly expect you to demonstrate it, through outcomes and evidence rather than adjectives.

I find that energising. 

For years, claims made its case for investment as a cost centre. That conversation is changing, because the value is now visible to everyone. The narrative has moved from ‘claims as cost’ to ‘claims as the moment of truth’ — and, rightly, the funding is beginning to follow the value.

So yes, the role has been redefined. 

It is broader, harder and more skilled than the old job description ever allowed for. And I have never been prouder of the people who do it.