IBC: Why, in the current market, is the role of CAT adjusters so crucial?
Kyle Winston: There are myriad reasons. We have cyclical weather systems and storms that run in cycles of 15 or 20 years, and we happen to be in a period of higher intensity. Within the Canadian and US marketplace, we don’t have adjusters who are really specialized in being able to go out into the field, to assess damage, write reports and turn things around in a quick fashion like they used to.
That opened the door for us to come in as a dedicated CAT adjusting firm that specialized in going out and assessing damages, seeing how they apply to an individual policy, and then trying to settle it in the field or within a very short time cycle.
IBC: There has been a steady decline in qualified field adjusters in the last decade. Why has this happened?
KW: It’s a two-pronged answer. The biggest reason was that, rightly or wrongly, insurance claims aren’t sexy. As a result, we don’t have a younger generation who are interested in becoming claims adjusters, because they don’t know what it entails. When I was growing up, I chose to go into insurance, and most people would joke that I’d fallen into the industry. Young people don’t know how fun and exciting it can be.
Also, as an industry, a lot of companies have stepped back from their training and educational programs. You used to have companies who would spend big dollars on training and teaching, but in the past five to 10 years there has been a serious decline.
IBC: What is your approach to education and training?
KW: We have invested a lot of money in our training programs and actually have an educational arm of our company called AIA, the Academy of Insurance Adjusting. We put on courses for a lot of the insurance markets out there. Our courses are credentialled by FSCO and AIC, and we are trying to push the educational side of practical, in-field use. How do you take the book knowledge of what you’ve learnt from your test and apply that to realworld interactions with customers?
On the CAT side, we do a lot of training in damage recognition, which helps adjusters identify how damage relates to a policy or claim. For example, a lot of people think that if there is a storm and a few shingles come off the roof, the whole roof should be replaced, but many policies don’t allow for that.
IBC: Can you tell me a little bit about why the Catastrophe Response Group was started? And what were some of your key aims?
KW: It was started by my father and me because, in Canada, we saw that more insurance companies were relying on third parties who had vested interests in writing the reports. We saw an opportunity to tell those insurance companies that they were leaving a lot of indemnity dollars on the table and that the true wording and spirit of policies was not being fulfilled.
When we first started, the average turnaround on a file under the previous model was anywhere from 30 to 40 days.
We were able to shorten that to less than 18 days in the first year, and our cycle time has shortened drastically since then. We were able to demonstrate to insurance companies that bringing in skilled adjusters who could handle claims from start to finish would give them back the speed and efficiency to deliver a better level of customer care.
