Crawford Australia has bolstered its expertise across the liability claims sphere, bringing in seasoned senior loss adjuster Jon Stagg.
With 11 years’ experience, Jon has joined as Senior General Adjuster focusing on major public and product liability, product recall, property damage, service and repair liability and cyber liability.
His appointment comes as Crawford Australia’s relatively new ‘One Crawford’ liability claims solution builds momentum in the local and London markets.
Crawford Australia President Tim Jarman said customers today, such as corporates with large deductibles, underwriting agencies and insurers, are understandably constantly looking for innovative solutions to costly claims challenges.
“I very much see our role in the claims landscape to come up with new ways of working and what we have devised for cost-effectively dealing with liability related claims has been labelled as the industry’s best kept secret by one of our clients!
“Our liability product reduces claim durations, controls indemnity spend and drives down defence costs. It’s tried and tested and it works.
“Crawford’s model integrates traditional desk-based claims management and adjusting, together with legal experts and proprietary technology platforms in one seamless package.
“Being one collaborative team, under the one roof, effortlessly leads to faster, more decisive strategising on the claim, therefore reducing overall claim durations - this results in client cost savings with no compromise on expertise or service quality,”
Jarman explained.
The product is genuinely unique; Crawford is the only claims provider in Australia to be able to offer such a solution because it owns all pieces to the claims puzzle – a third-party administration business, adjusting expertise dating back 80 years, plus a law firm. Crawford TPA sits at the core of the model, controlling all inputs and output to the claim.
“We reduce indemnity spend and expert spend, by combining the power of our in-house claims, adjusting, legal and risk experts to ensure that the relevant expertise is on every file, and importantly that the files are not overworked because that leads to cost for the client,” Jarman said.
Head of Crawford TPA, Sean Hayes, explained that Crawford’s mantra of saving on legal costs is a big attraction for clients dealing with these types of claims.
“While many third-party claims businesses promise to keep lawyers at bay to reduce costs, we know that the targeted use of lawyers is the key to reducing costs. Time and time again, we’ve experienced that that early intervention and rapid, holistic risk review at key points along the claim journey is key to saving clients’ money.
“It’s how we achieve early settlement and reduce escalation of claims to the formal legal stage,” he said.
Hayes professes that the results speak for themselves.
“We had a potential client come to us who was faced with claim cost blowout to such an extent that its binder had become unprofitable. We then stepped in and discovered that the vast majority of claims were over reserved by a significant margin and higher reserves were driving higher defense costs. Over the course of 30 months, we reduced the clients TPA and legal fees by 74%, we reduced total indemnity spend by 64%, average defence costs per claim were less than half compared to previous years before our involvement and, critically, fewer claims began proceeding to the legal defence stage, decreasing claim costs further.”
