This insights piece is by: Richard Reggel, Chief Commercial Officer, Europe, Vitesse
New research from the Lloyd’s Market Association makes a point that is difficult to argue with. The proportion of managing agent claims professionals with more than 15 years’ experience fell from 37% in 2023 to 31% in 2025. At the same time, the five-to-seven-year and 15-plus-year cohorts remain among the hardest to recruit.
The market is becoming shorter of precisely the people it can least afford to lose: those with the judgement to assess and reserve a complex loss, manage difficult negotiations and help less experienced colleagues make better decisions.
The natural response is to focus on recruitment, training and, increasingly, AI. All three matter. But that risks overlooking a more immediate question: how much of the experienced talent already in the market is being consumed by manual and inefficient work?
A significant part of the answer sits in how claims money actually moves.
Money continues to move through complex chains involving brokers, carriers, MGAs, TPAs and other claims partners. Funds may sit in multiple accounts while payment instructions, claims records, bordereaux and ledgers are reconciled across different systems.
Responsibility for resolving these issues does not always sit neatly with one function. It may touch claims, finance, operations and underwriting without being wholly owned by any of them. Much of the work remains invisible until a payment is delayed, a balance cannot be explained or two records no longer agree.
That matters because the real value of an experienced claims professional lies in judgement. It lies in knowing when a loss requires further investigation, recognising when a settlement does not reflect the policy, and managing difficult relationships that make a claim easier to close. It’s also what let’s experienced people give the next generation room to develop their own judgement, rather than handing down instructions.
Yet when a payment has gone missing between several parties or a claims bordereaux does not reconcile with the underlying cash position, experienced people are often drawn into resolving the exception. They become involved because they understand the claim, the relationships and the history, not because tracing payments is the best use of their expertise.
It is also a workload problem. Every hour spent chasing funds, reconciling positions or reconstructing an audit trail is an hour that cannot be spent handling complex losses or developing less experienced colleagues. The market may not only have too little experienced talent; it may also be using too much of that talent on work that should not require it.
This becomes increasingly important as market conditions soften. When pricing is strong, operational inefficiency can be easier to absorb. As that cushion reduces, service quality, cost control and the ability to pay claims quickly and confidently become more visible sources of differentiation.
AI and automation clearly have a role to play. The LMA itself points to the opportunity for technology to create more space for higher-value work while retaining the technical and human qualities that define effective claims professionals.
But technology will deliver less value if it is simply placed on top of fragmented processes, unclear ownership and disconnected financial information.
The more immediate priority should be to make the movement of claims money and information easier to see and control. That means establishing clear ownership, connecting payment and claims data, and automating the reconciliation work that’s routine, so people spend their time on genuine exceptions, not rebuilding the basic facts.
Market leaders should also measure where experienced claims time is actually being spent. Most organisations know how many claims people they employ. Far fewer know how much of their senior capacity is being lost to operational administration that could be removed or redesigned.
Solving the claims talent challenge will still require recruitment, development and thoughtful adoption of AI. But it should also involve protecting the time of the people the market already has.
Experienced claims professionals are too valuable to become the market’s most expensive reconciliation tool.
Be the first to comment