The Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters has elected Melissa Cunningham (pictured) as its new president, making her the youngest person to hold the role in the Institute's history.
Cunningham's move to president follows a year as deputy president. She was elected to that role in September 2025 at age 39, becoming CILA's youngest-ever deputy president at the time, before moving into the top job a year later.
The appointments follow Charter and Bye-Law reforms CILA members approved in 2025, broadening the Institute's remit to reflect the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of modern loss adjusting.
John Bissell, CILA's executive director since 2023, previously described the reforms as part of a wider effort to attract and retain new talent, an industry-wide challenge he said is compounded by a persistent perception problem: many young people don't associate loss adjusting with the varied, tech-enabled, people-facing work it actually involves.
That talent concern isn't new. CILA has separately flagged the need for a wider, more skilled talent pipeline following successive record-breaking storm seasons, arguing that claims surges require both upskilling existing professionals and bringing in new ones to manage rising claim volumes.
Former CILA president Amanda Evans, only the second woman to hold the role in the Institute's 60-year history at the time, has also pointed to CILA's "5,000 Voices" initiative, which sends members into schools and colleges specifically because many young people are unaware loss adjusting exists as a career option at all.
Cunningham is a dual-qualified chartered accountant and loss adjuster who built her career in broking rather than at a traditional adjusting firm, working across property damage and business interruption as well as energy and power, product recall, warranty and indemnity, construction and political violence claims.
Chandrapalan is also dual-qualified as a chartered loss adjuster and accountant, with more than 20 years in the industry across both adjusting firms and brokers. She specialises in quantifying complex business interruption and financial loss claims and has previously served as CILA's honorary treasurer. She was appointed Sedgwick's Singapore CEO in late 2025, having been promoted to partner of forensic accounting services for Asia the year before.
Bissell said both appointees reflect the profession CILA now represents -- technically expert, international, and drawn from a range of professional backgrounds rather than solely from adjusting firms. He said Cunningham's career shows loss adjusting expertise exists across broking as well as adjusting, and that Chandrapalan brings deep technical expertise combined with an international perspective from Singapore.
Cunningham said her background is primarily in claims preparation for policyholders rather than the more traditional route of adjusting on behalf of insurers, and that she wants CILA to be accessible to people across that whole range of backgrounds, not just those on the traditional path. She said a priority would be creating routes into the profession for younger practitioners, while stressing that experience remains essential, particularly for complex losses.
Electing consecutive youngest-ever officeholders, first Cunningham as deputy, now as president, is a more concrete indicator of where CILA's 2025 reforms are actually taking the organisation than either individual appointment would be on its own.
But CILA's own prior commentary suggests the harder problem sits further down the pipeline than its leadership table: getting a broader range of young people to consider loss adjusting as a career at all, at a moment when the Institute itself has repeatedly acknowledged that awareness of the profession, not just its governance structure, is the bigger obstacle.
Whether Cunningham's presidency translates into a meaningfully different entry-level talent pool over time, rather than just different faces at the top, is the question CILA will need to answer over her term.
