When a claim is made, customers do not distinguish between the insurer, the broker or the third-party administrator. They judge the brand they bought from.
That observation, made by Wayne Brand, head of corporate TPA and platforms at Crawford, helps explain why the role of the third-party administrator has changed more in the last five years than in the previous two decades.
"The client only sees their brand," Brand said. "So we have to take that forward, we know how hard it is to retain business and achieve new business. If we can do a good job at that first point of interaction, it goes a long way."
That shift, from transactional claims processor to custodian of client reputation, is taking place at the same time as claims themselves are becoming more expensive, more complex and more difficult to resolve. Together, those changes are forcing the industry to rethink what good claims handling now looks like.
Jade Boothroyd, client director at Sedgwick, has spent a decade in claims. Her assessment of the current environment is straightforward: the conditions created after Covid are no longer temporary, they have become the new baseline.
"Whilst everybody was expecting a return to normal, what normal looks like has shifted fundamentally," she said.
The drivers are well documented: inflation, supply chain disruption, court backlogs, material shortages and geopolitical instability. What is less well understood is how they interact. Liability costs have risen sharply over the past four years, driven less by claim volumes than by the increasing severity of the most expensive cases. Climate-related losses continue to rise as a proportion of overall claims activity.
Claims are becoming harder to resolve not because of one isolated factor, but because several are converging at once. Multi-party losses, longer lifecycles, more litigation and AI-generated fraudulent evidence all increase the time and expertise required to reach an outcome.
"When you compound all of those together," Boothroyd said, "the claims that we are receiving are not necessarily more numerous, but more complex and much more costly."
That changes what insurers should be measuring. Frequency has traditionally been the benchmark for claims performance. As severity becomes the dominant driver of cost, that approach is becoming less useful.
"We need to shift away from focusing on claims through a frequency lens," she said. "It is important to look at and understand the types of losses we are seeing in more detail."
For Brand, responding to that environment requires more than processing claims efficiently. It requires redefining the role of a TPA.
Crawford has invested heavily in AI and data analytics, not to replace claims handlers but to remove routine administrative work and allow experienced people to focus on the decisions that shape outcomes.
"More recently the market recognises that AI can really support some of the non-value functions within a claims process," he said. "What we are able to do then is reposition to focus on the value-add functions."
The opportunity extends beyond efficiency. Brand believes the next generation of TPAs will differentiate themselves by understanding a client's culture, operations and appetite for risk well enough to help prevent losses, not simply manage them afterwards.
"We can become more predictive rather than reactive," he said. "Using data to identify a trend, act upon it, and say, actually, we might want to pivot, we might want to do something different."
Customer expectations are accelerating that shift. Consumers increasingly expect the speed, transparency and responsiveness they experience from other digital services. Claims handling is no longer judged against other insurers, but against every customer experience they have elsewhere.
Manan Sagar, who leads Gallagher Bassett's Europe, Middle East and Asia business, said claims data has become a strategic asset rather than simply an operational record.
Comparing what risk registers predict with what claims actually reveal is now one of the most valuable sources of risk intelligence available, he argued. Organisations that consistently learn from that gap will increasingly outperform those that do not.
"Claims data related insights is becoming a significant driver in organisational competitiveness," Sagar said. "Organisations which learn from those insights will start to lead the pack."
The pattern Sagar sees most clearly is a shift from internal drivers of claims, such as process failures and human error, towards external pressures including inflation, supply chain disruption, geopolitical instability and technology. Those are risks organisations have less direct control over, making claims intelligence more valuable than ever.
The three perspectives point to a broader shift. Claims are no longer simply about settling losses. They shape customer experience, expose emerging risks and increasingly influence competitive advantage.
As claims become more complex and more consequential, managing them well is becoming as much a strategic capability as an operational one.
