Growing up on a tobacco farm, Laurie Walker learned a key piece of advice from the first of her many mentors – her father. “My dad said, ‘You should treat people the way you want to be treated.’ And that helped when I dealt with people in claims; sometimes there’s not going to be coverage, and sometimes you can’t pay what they want to be paid. You can at least satisfy people as long as you treat them the way you want to be treated.”
It’s a mantra that has served her well, as she takes on a new role as senior vice president and director of operations at
Sedgwick, a leading global provider of technology-enabled risk and benefits solutions.
She’ll be leading up Sedgwick’s third-party administration team for property, casualty and auto claims in her new role, as well as oversee all TPA processes. It’s an area where she feels a service need exists in Canada, and one she’s keen to build out.
“I think I’m most excited about providing the Canadian marketplace with something new, a fresher approach to claims management,” she says. “Certainly in Canada we’ve been lagging behind what the U.S. models are offering in terms of claims service end to end, cradle to grave.
“Typically we’ve seen Canada take a true loss adjusting approach to a client’s needs when in fact a third-part administration (TPA) approach is something entirely different in that it manages everything from data to financials to capturing performance indicators.”
Walker, who is celebrating her 30
th year in the industry, got her start fresh out of college, when she applied for a claims position in her hometown. “As almost all insurance people do, you don’t wake up in childhood and say, ‘I want to be in the insurance industry,’” she says.
“It sounded really quite exciting, if you can believe it or not – in a sense there was never any boredom or repetitive moments in my career in claims handling. I was always challenged, I was always interested, and always grasping for more.”
From there, she specialized in Ontario accident benefits, working her way to teaching and auditing positions. “That’s where my niche was developed. I became extremely good and active at working a number of catastrophic-style injury claims and the benefits that are available here in Ontario are significant,” she says.
“The more I taught and the more I became involved with groups of people, my employers said I was pretty good at taking on a TPA role, where it’s an intensive approach to handling a client’s entire risk management piece or claims exposure piece, and how do I help a customer and help younger people in the group learn to become better claims professionals, and challenge them in different ways.”
She adds she’s been fortunate enough to have had a number of mentors along the way – an integral part of her professional growth.
“Because I worked at an insurance company for 13 years, and then I worked for a loss adjusting for a period of time, I had a number of mentors along the way in those roles that taught me about the business I was in, and the kind of way I wanted to do business,” she says.
It’s a takeaway she intends to pass on to her own team. “I think I do enjoy challenging the people who work for me, I enjoy expanding their knowledge,” she says. “I can pick out attributes of colleagues that I work with and know that they’re going to be very good at this and if I just keep feeding them or expanding that horizon for them, then their horizon is broadened.”
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