Crawford & Company has elevated Stephen Stafford to Head of Crawford Forensic Accounting Services in Australia.
After three years with us, and 30 years’ experience, Stafford will lead the 17 strong team that provides financial loss adjusting services to the insurance industry. The team specialise in business interruption losses, stock losses, fidelity guarantee, cyber, class actions, expert witness matters, product recall/contamination, recoveries and liability claims.
Crawford Australia President Jonathan Hubbard labelled Stafford a “strong advocate” of building trust within a team to maximise service levels for clients.
“Stephen has a way of motivating everyone to be the best version of whatever they want to be; whether that is ambition for leadership roles, or becoming a high-level technical expert, or simply being the most productive and efficient loss adjuster. He’s got a great rapport with the existing team.
“It’s also really pleasing to make this appointment from within our own ranks. We unapologetically have targets around internal appointments and promotions. Where we have vacancies and we also have people with the right skills internally, it just makes good business sense to appoint from within because it brings a level of continuity to our teams and our clients.”
Hubbard continued:
“I would say this is a key part of our employer value proposition; Crawford is about nurturing careers. When you work with Crawford, you are assured we want to progress with you.”
Stafford noted that his leadership style doesn’t involve hierarchy.
“The diversity of backgrounds and experiences with our forensic accounting team make for a very strong unit, with collaboration from every adjuster utilised as much as possible. There’s been lots of occasions when those of us ‘longer in the tooth’ find an alternate approach to adjusting a loss from our younger colleagues; that’s fantastic…the learning goes both ways and I encourage that,” he said.
Given the technical nature of assessing financial losses, Stafford is keen to use his position to offer increased value-add to the insurance market by way of sharing knowledge.
“We frequently come across stakeholders unaware of how business interruption policies work in the event of a loss, and this results in confusion and frustration for many. We are ramping up our work with different parties, such as insurers, brokers, and insureds to share our technical expertise through educations sessions and technical papers to try and reduce that knowledge gap.”
Stafford joined Crawford in mid-2021 as a Senior Forensic Accountant. Within four months he was promoted to Executive General Adjuster and Regional Manager for Queensland.
Crawford’s previous Head of Forensic Accounting, Grahem Peters, remains with Crawford as National Executive Adjuster and Head of Class Actions.
