Claims - Insights on emerging trends

Air date: 10/25/23
Record date: 9/8/23

Join Keith Daly, Chief Claims Office at Zurich North America, as he delves into various aspects surrounding claims, and the role claims plays in reinforcing organizational security, the emerging trends in data collection and unfamiliar aspects of the claims function. Listen as Daly gives insight to the benefits and opportunities of working in Claims. The fulfilling career of restoring people's lives and businesses, that has a strong impact on communities within the Claims Department.

Guest: 

Keith Daly
Chief Claims Officer
Zurich North America

Keith Daly is Chief Claims Officer for Zurich North America, where he is responsible for leading the Claims unit in delivering transactional excellence in claim handling and achieving a consistent level of superior customer service. Prior to his current position, Daly was President of Personal Lines for Farmers Insurance®, where he was responsible for product development, strategy and underwriting efforts for the Farmers® Personal Lines, Bristol West® and Foremost® lines of business. Daly was also responsible for Toggle, Farmers’ subscription-based Renters Insurance program. He also previously served as Chief Claims Officer for Farmers, and before that led their Property and Auto Claims units. Prior to Farmers, Daly served in a number of senior leadership roles with 21st Century Insurance and was the Vice President of Field Claims Operations. His career in the insurance industry began in 1993 as a claims representative trainee at Progressive Casualty Insurance Co. in Atlanta, Georgia.

 Host:

Stephani Gordon
Executive Employee Communications Business Partner
Zurich North America

As part of the Zurich North America Communications team, Stephani Gordon finds and shares stories by asking questions that connect people with ideas to pique curiosity, broaden awareness and create communities. Fondly considered a compassionate interrogator, she has coached executive communications for the CEOs of Zurich North America and Zurich Canada, lead C-suite video productions and connected employees with corporate strategy through storytelling and engagement. In addition to hosting this podcast, she unabashedly admits to spending too much time on TikTok in the guise of “anthropological study.”

Episode transcript:

STEPHANI GORDON: Hi, my name is Stephani Gordon. I'm today's host for the Zurich North America Future of Risk podcast, and I have the pleasure today of talking with a colleague that I met just over a year and a half ago when he joined Zurich as our North America Chief Claims Officer, Keith Daly. So, Keith, thank you for joining us today.

KEITH DALY: Thanks, Stephani. Glad to be here.

GORDON: So, we're going to talk today about several different topics related to claims, like the role claims can play in actually helping a company better protect itself and trends that you're seeing in claims data collection. I also want to talk about the parts of the claims function that people may not be as familiar with. I thought we'd start with a little bit about your background because I think you've literally spent your entire career in claims. Is that right?

DALY: Almost, I think it's enough that you can say I'm a “lifer” in claims. [laugh] So, I would say my professional journey started post-college. I bumped around for a couple years in sales before I landed at a carrier as a Claims Rep trainee. It was… I won't date myself. It was, well… I guess I will… the early nineties and ended up as a trainee for an auto company as a Claims Adjuster. I didn't know much about the role when a friend actually told me about it. I jumped into that career, and I literally did every technical role that you could imagine over the first couple of years in my career. It was a great training ground. I got exposed to a lot of different parts of the claim lifecycle before I got into supervision and branch management. It was an organization that was really fast-paced and growing in the early nineties. At some point, probably about nine to 10 years into my career with them, I got the opportunity to be recruited away to another carrier for kind of a higher-level role. More of running a territory of the U.S., predominantly in the Southeast that then grew into running half of the country. Then, ultimately a field operation for predominantly an auto claims organization. At the time then – I'm now talking probably late two thousands – that company went through some financial distress. They ended up selling their U.S. Personal Lines Business, put it on the market from a due diligence perspective and that business got purchased by Farmers Insurance. So, I ended up with Farmers by acquisition and continued my claims journey again in Auto, running the East Coast. I was based in Atlanta at the time. I then moved to the West Coast of the U.S. I moved to California and ran the West Coast for that operation. I then diversified and got out of Auto and into Property. It was my first foray really out of Property, but the fundamentals of claims are pretty universal. It was learning a new line of business and then I got the “lifelong achievement award” or dream of mine. I was selected to be the Chief Claims Officer at Farmers in late 2013 and got to run that organization for five years before I took a slight detour into Product Management and Underwriting. I think really to round out my career and to give me perspective of growing up in the stovepipe of claims gave me a new opportunity and it was one that I learned a ton about. Which ultimately led me back to claims because I think I unabashedly would say I actually love claims. I love the environment that we're in. The amount of people that you get to lead and interact with. So, I ended up transferring from Farmers over to Zurich at the end of the first quarter of 2022. And here I am today about a year and a half into the role, leading the Zurich North America Claims team. You know, mostly a personal lines background, but now firmly in a commercial space. Again, fundamentals are very similar. You learn too. It's a different language, some different lines of business. But, the beauty of this role is I have a wonderful team, it’s an honor to lead them and it's been a great learning experience. I think when you're in claims, you're a lifelong learner because there are new claims situations that you have to deal with and adapt. I think I pride myself on being adaptable, this job has certainly given me those challenges and I'm really loving it.

GORDON: We're so glad you're here. Thank you for sharing that with us. You mentioned something about a lifelong love of claims, and I know you feel that you've used the words that claims is a “noble profession”. So, I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about when people buy insurance, what is it that they're actually buying? Because I think the answer lies in claims.

DALY: Yeah, it's an intangible product to some degree. You're buying some future protection for a future loss that you don't know if it will come. So, you actually are buying a Claims Department and I think in knowing that when something goes wrong, that it'll be corrected. That's where I think the nobility that I often speak of in claims is. You restore people's lives. You restore people's businesses. You impact communities that are affected after a natural disaster because you want businesses to get back online. So, people in that area can go back to work and can restore the infrastructure of an environment. So, I think in our world as a commercial insurance provider; why people buy insurance is for a lot of different reasons.

It's to protect their balance sheet, it's to protect their company, it's to protect their employees. So, any number of losses in all the different lines of business that we write them is really to de-risk their company from a financial perspective. Because without insurance, depending on the calamity that you experience it could end a corporation. So, that's why somebody looks at their portfolio and says, “this is the coverages I need for all of these different risks”. Then ultimately, when those perils happen, we get to stand in their shoes and represent Zurich and work with our insureds on getting them back to where they're supposed to be.

GORDON: It really is a safety net because if something happens to a company… If the peril is so significant that the company were to go out of business; it's not just the company that's impacted, like you said. It's all the people who are working there and the communities that they live in, and the businesses that they as community members would support, etc. So, it really is a pretty extensive reach and responsibility.

DALY: Absolutely. I think it shows how interconnected we all are. Businesses, consumers – you know – all of us. There is a fabric to society and I think insurance plays a critical role in protecting that system and that structure.

GORDON: Absolutely. So, you've mentioned being in a lot of different roles within claims, etc. So now as the Chief Claims Officer, you have a unique vantage point that you really see a broad spectrum across Claims in addition to adjusters, which, most people are probably familiar with an interaction with an adjuster when they file a claim. What are the other components that make up a company's claims function?

DALY: Yeah, it's a good question. I think… because you are right. I think most people kind of get the role of what a claims professional does. It's the person they deal with. It's the face of the organization, so to speak. But there is an entire network of people in not necessarily customer facing roles that have to deliver on their piece of the equation. That puts the claims professional in the very best position to be able to deliver the best outcomes for our customers and it runs the gamut. I think you, you're all right because you tend to, I tend to do this for a living, so you forget what people would think of. It gets down to the systems need to work. So, reliance on our IT partners to ensure that our systems are up and running and functioning and that our people can access the technology that they need to do the job, projects that make our systems better or our processes better.

So, you have to have a whole group of project managers that are really good at identifying obstacles that get in the way of our adjusters delivering outstanding experiences. How do we work through eliminating those obstacles and then you'll have vendors that we rely on. There's a huge ecosystem that sits outside of the insurance industry that are technology vendors that enable us to be able to provide, for our customers. And so, you need a group of people that are interfacing with them on how to optimize our spend with them, but also the delivery of accuracy. Then you have a lot of people within the function that are just here to help the adjusters along the way whether that be with guidance. So, we have a Claims Training University that helps in the career development for every one of our claims professionals.

It gives them leadership development. How you grow your career within a carrier. So, that's vitally important and then you have a whole bunch of specialty components like recovery, which is subrogation. Which is when we have to pay something, but there's another party that was responsible; we have a Subrogation Unit, we have a Special Investigative Unit. You know that when we uncover elements of fraud that we need to investigate, that's a big part of what the function has to do. And so, we have those specialty units and then you can break claims up into a lot of different pieces. But there's a lot of claims professionals that are just supporting other claims professionals to allow them to really deliver the very best outcome that they can. There's a whole actuarial and finance function as well, managing our budgets or managing our data. So, we have data analysts and things like that. It's often viewed as just a claims professional, but there is literally a village around them that supports them to be - again, I’m probably a broken record, but – to be able to deliver the very best outcomes that they can.

GORDON: Right. And then there are a couple attorneys.

DALY: There are certainly a lot of the claims professionals themselves based on the specialization of the work that we do within the financial line space within more of our late and environmental risks. We have several attorneys that work for us and certainly we have a staff legal function that really, they represent our policyholders and individual actions in states all across the United States. So, they would literally be the law firm that gets hired to represent our policyholders when litigation is filed against them.

GORDON: Right. One of those functions that you mentioned that I wanted to segue into was technology and the IT support. You have compared insurance companies to data collection giants like Google and Microsoft in terms of the power of collecting harnessing data. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

DALY: Yeah, it's probably more collection. Not necessarily maybe the right word there, but it's big data. I think consumers and businesspeople would think of big data companies as the ones you mentioned, big technology companies. But the reality is, insurance companies were the original big data company. We as an industry and certainly here at Zurich, we've been collecting loss information for decades and that is really the foundation of how you build rate, how you establish new risk and so actuaries are - I think - the precursor to data scientists.

Actuaries got a really cool name over the last decade. Okay. They've evolved from just being predicting what the future loss is going to be, but really taking that same data set and starting to harness what are driving the outcomes. Then, how do you break that into pieces so that you can provide better data insights to our customers to help them navigate risk.

I think that's a big part of it and I think too, somebody who is not familiar with insurance, you wouldn't know that we have data scientists and business analysts that are doing similar work that you would do at a big tech company on trying to solve a different piece of the puzzle. But it is a growing part of our business. Then obviously the introduction of Chat GPT and AI. Those are all business cases that we're working on within insurance carriers and Zurich is certainly no exception. I think we're ahead of the curve in some places on really thinking through what is the impact of this new and emerging technology to be able to automate data collection or be able to use natural language processing to then deliver better insights to the claims professional for them to make the decision. For us, the claims professional is really the decision maker on the file. How we can unearth information during an investigation that makes them more efficient and helpful, that is really what we're trying to accomplish. Our IT partners, our data scientists are critical relationships within the firm on working on projects that are really designed to put the claims professional in the best position possible to deliver for our customer.

GORDON: It is really a very sophisticated use of the data and in addition to using that for the claims professionals to help get the best outcome for customers. We also share that within the organization because that makes us better underwriters especially. So, when it comes to sharing insights, how does claims do that with the rest of the organization? What's that relationship like?

DALY: Yeah, I think it's critical. I'd say this is where I think the claims function has evolved over certainly the time period that I've been involved in Claims. I already mentioned it, in the early nineties, the claims function was somewhat considered back office. Claims has evolved to be very much customer facing, market facing today. And it's an exciting kind of - I think - evolution to be a part of. But that also to your point, one of the critical stakeholders is the underwriter on what we see. We are often the eyes and the ears of an organization because we are out dealing with customers and dealing with losses that have occurred. Generally, you get to see a risk in a very different way than when you potentially wrote it. The risk has evolved to some degree of, “it's not what it once was.” It's something different, it's evolved. The business has evolved. And so those insights are really critical for a claims department and an underwriting organization to stay completely synced up. That's obviously through data insights. So, we have built a lot of data assets within the organization that underwriters can access to understand not a specific claim per se, but a body of claim or a, a type of claim. You know what insights I can glean from that's going to help me ask the right questions, partner with our insured and their risk manager to really tailor an insurance product for them that best fits their needs. Sometimes it's a new loss that, we hadn't really contemplated before. The world evolves at a breakneck pace. So, those insights are wildly important to the underwriter, as well as to Zurich Resilient Solutions. So, our risk engineering function, they're often out there working with our big corporate clients on how to make work sites safer. How to make manufacturing processes better, so they are literally hand-in-glove with our customers. So, they see a lot of potential risks that could occur but they're not everyone. So, then we'll have a loss and work back with risk with ZRS and how do we then think about guidance that they should give a risk manager on how to navigate a new and emerging area that could present a new risk for a corporation. So, it's a bit of a virtuous circle. There's a lot of interaction that claims is now very much a part of that really delivers a value proposition for our clients that choose to do business with Zurich.

GORDON: Right. And that virtuous circle is exactly what I was thinking as you were talking about that is the Risk Engineers are out there helping customers. Claims see something that they think could be applicable that they could start to help the customer evolve in their risk mitigation. Which kind of leads to my next question. Would it be fair to say that sometimes claims gets an early look at trends that might be changing in society?

DALY: Yes, without a doubt and I think it's the society changes are… they happen quickly and sometimes they don't. But what we certainly do get a front row [seat] because a loss occurs and we're out there dealing with it and you get to see sort of how things evolve. I'd say it's one that I think is a good example of it would've been within the area of Workers' Comp and Workers' Comp doesn't get discussed probably enough as how complicated it is. But our country has gone through an opioid pandemic over the last several decades. When opioids were produced and put into the marketplace as a pain management function, you definitely saw a move in prescription pain management show up in claim files in the mid two thousands because that became the way we're going to manage pain for an injured worker to try to get them cured, get them the physical therapy and get them back to work.

GORDON: That was new at the time.

DALY: New at the time. Exactly. So, managing your prescription spend kind of came out. It was always there, but it became a huge part of a workers' comp organization to how do we affect, all of a sudden there's this huge spike of, “wow, we're seeing this happen”. I don't know if it's the greatest example of how connected we potentially were with the rest of the organization, but that [is] obviously what has manifested with opioids and now opioid litigation at the state level and things like that has taken on a life of its own. Obviously, there's a lot of impacted lives that happened out of there of the manifest of how potentially overprescribed it was.

Again, through data and through pharmacy management, I think that certainly you started to look at how can we effectuate this? I think all those data insights with underwriters and risk managers, it's all a part of the process of talking about a trend you're seeing and what's the cause and effect. It is looking at your data to try to figure out exactly what it means. Intended or unintended consequences and sharing it within your organization to then create products and solutions for your customers.

GORDON: Well, like you said, the claims function has evolved significantly over the past couple decades. As well, to begin to recognize the power of the data that it has access to. Then how can we actually harness this for good and start to use it more proactively instead of reactively just at the time of a loss sort of thing. So, I think we're evolving along that journey. So, I wanted to ask about another trend. What's happening right now within auto claims?

DALY: So, auto claims in a commercial carrier like us, it's actually a significant part of our business but not like it would be on a personal lines’ carrier that most consumers would be familiar with. Auto really took center stage during the pandemic where supply chains were really stressed and everybody has heard about everything that we bought and needed. During that time period when much of the world was locked down it has had a lingering impact, probably more so than most other lines of business just due to the supply chain. I think it showed how fragile it was. The used car prices, new car prices, part prices in general and parts availability, really came to a screeching halt. Now, at the time, we also had a drop in frequency, so people were driving less. So, we saw less accidents. And I think that signal was ignored pretty significantly across the industry. And as people came back and post-recovery driving, it was almost like revenge driving Everybody wanted to get out and do something. You saw that spike and so frequency came roaring back, but the impact…

GORDON: Frequency of claims.

DALY: Frequency of claims came back. And then I think the, the supply chain wasn't back yet. We have labor shortages that occur within the body shop repair industry. So, you had kind of a bottleneck of, now we have a whole bunch of losses. We don't have the parts, we don't have the people. A lot of people left the industry during COVID and body shop technicians. We haven't been growing them at the pace we need. So, across the entire motor spectrum today, you see cycle times far more exaggerated than you did over the last decade where cycle time has just grown. It takes longer to fix your car than it would've. Now, cars have gotten far more sophisticated. A bumper's no longer a bumper. A bumper has sensors throughout it and how it integrates with the computer system of a car. Cars have gotten incredibly challenging to fix. And again, that makes it longer to fix them. It means we need more people to do it and we don't have enough people going into that field. So, you have elevated rental days. So, you have severity going up. Things are more expensive and to a consumer. You're getting into an accident today and that could be your personal car, it could be you're a company and you need to have that delivery truck back on the road. It's going to take longer to fix your vehicle. You can't just walk into a body shop today like you could maybe 10 years ago and schedule your repairs and its maybe next week you have a significant portion. It's almost like 50% of the time you're scheduling out four weeks in advance now to get your car repaired or your truck repaired. So auto in general has just had a lot of disruption from the last several years. But it's an industry challenge for, I think anybody who's associated with any motor claims. We have to ensure that you were driving more people into the profession of auto repair. It's a synergistic relationship that has to occur there, because that's how you get a car back on the road.

GORDON: You were talking a lot about personal consumer vehicles, etc. But you've made a couple references to trucks, which really makes me think about organizations that rely on a truck fleet to move parts and services or goods into the economy. If they're having trouble maintaining that fleet, then that is further exacerbating the supply chain issue for some other entity that's relying on the availability of trucks that we used to take for granted. Right?

DALY: You're exactly correct. It goes back to that interconnectedness again. That one thing happens here and you don't think of what's the impact going to be across the whole of society and that's exactly the case. If you have a trucking company and you have a vehicle down, that's an element of not getting goods out and so it just kind of builds upon itself.

GORDON: So, to take a step from there and talk about a widespread impact that we maybe didn't realize previously. Claims “nuclear jury verdicts” in claims disputes and things like we've talked about reptilian legal tactics that influence trial outcomes. Can you talk about that for a little bit? Because then I want to talk about the broader impact that is having on society from your perspective.

DALY: Yeah, it is a great question and it's often spoke about or written about under the term social inflation. So, we have inflation that happens, that we all feel as consumers but this really is a bucket that's called “social inflation”. I have a colleague, Allen Kirsh, who spends a lot of his time talking about this topic. He's a lawyer by trade and has done some really good work in the industry on educating customers and consumers and other carriers on what the impacts here. In a nutshell, the plaintiff bar has really been well organized for decades. This is an area where they have gotten rather sophisticated on sharing their wins and losses with each other. How to get in front of a jury and create almost an anger towards somebody who caused a loss and how they can get a jury in a local venue to punish that person who did something wrong, created an accident. It grew up in trucking and motor claims. You mentioned reptilian theory and it's more of a fight or flight mentality. It's the truck driver who is on a long-haul trucking assignment. They're putting a lot of hours behind the wheel trying to get to their destination. They're supposed to bring their goods to and maybe they've been on the road too long and they're drowsy or not paying attention as they should, and they cause a loss. Sometimes these losses are horrific. It's severe injuries, lifelong injuries, including death. The way the plaintiff bar approaches is to get in front of a jury and say, “This driver knows he should have stopped death. There's this certain hour but he kept on going and he works for a corporation. It's really the corporation that's pushing him to spend more time on the road, take more risk because it's their bottom line and they're trying to drive up their profits.” So, you need to not only punish the driver, but you need to punish the company so that they'll take risk management more seriously. They've gotten really good at asking for big, big verdicts from juries and it probably then gets into a little bit of generational dynamics of jury pools or changing and becoming younger. Less boomers in those jury pools, less Gen X and more, millennials and Generation Z where the value of a dollar seems to have changed, as well because of, I think, other things that happened in society around, athletes and celebrities, salaries and what they make and how much money, is involved in social media, etc. Where younger juries are more willing to put astronomical sums on injuries and cases where we haven't seen that from prior generations.

It's probably a little element of distrust of corporations that play in there, as well. That older generations had more of a parental relationship with corporations. You went and worked for a company for a long part of your career and you had an affinity for a corporation. That's changed a little bit, right? People move around jobs more and so younger generations are willing to hold corporations more responsible. So, it's a kind of a perfect storm of events of the plaintiff bar being really good at telling their story and asking for big numbers. Juries are more willing to give those big numbers. So, our corporate clients have to be better at their procedures and making sure that their risk managers are on top of every part of their safety protocols. Because when a loss does occur and if God forbid there are serious injuries that occur with it, they're not going to get the benefit of the doubt. I think that's the messaging that certainly we're trying to educate our large corporate customers on. Really pay attention to your hiring procedures, your safety protocols and there has to be flawless execution in them. If there's not, and if there's a lackadaisical approach, ultimately there will be verdicts that will far exceed their insurance coverage and expose them, their corporation, their shareholders to outsize losses that are certainly hard to recover.

GORDON: I think it's interesting because we have seen some research that younger generations who are growing up now do have a lot more distrust of big corporations. They assume they have deep pockets so it's a different mentality and approach. I think it's really interesting that you mentioned salaries of sports superstars and movie stars. We sort of normalized these enormous numbers that would've been unfathomable in the past, right?

DALY: Yeah. it all comes together in that sense of a perfect storm. It's somewhat that they have a lot of revenue or they have a lot of profit. So therefore, extracting a piece of that doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But I think to anybody who's running an organization, those are precious resources and if you have to pay something here, it has to come from somewhere else. It goes back to the theme that we've had throughout this of interconnectedness where, somebody might have to raise prices on a product that then the consumer pays more for or you don't have that product any longer because they want to get out of it, and then it's something somebody wanted. Anytime there's these big, big jury verdicts and it's to hurt a corporation, there is a cause and effect. It's throwing the stone into a pond and seeing the ripples go out. You can't speak to what are all of the implications that are going to happen, but we know they're there. It drives up goods and services. It drives up what we have to spend as consumers to acquire products because companies have to spend more on insurance premiums because the values are larger and insurance companies have to charge more premium because they're paying out bigger numbers on claims. So, it's all, again, a very cause and effect relationship.

GORDON: Right, I appreciate your time today. This is a fascinating conversation. I love hearing about some different aspects of claims that people might not be as familiar with. One of the things that's really struck me is how passionate you are about the field. Obviously, you've chosen to spend the bulk of your career in it and you love being in claims. So final question is, would you recommend it as a profession? Either for someone who's coming out of school or maybe looking for a second career or something like that and if so, could you give people a little idea about where they might look at Zurich?

DALY: Yeah, of course. So, as you'd expect the answer to that question is going to be of course, I would recommend it as a career.

GORDON: That's good. [laugh]

DALY: [laugh] So, I think it's the diversity of the tasks of the day. It's not a “you get to do new things”. You get to experience new events. Every claim is unique. So, it's solving a puzzle almost every time. So, there's a lot of critical thinking involved. There's a lot of interactions with stakeholders, customers, internal, defense lawyers, plaintiff lawyers. It always kind of attracted me that you got to wear a lot of different hats. So, to me none of it was mundane. It was always very exciting and kind of goes back to a comment I made earlier about a lifelong learning. So, I think us in Claims, we recognize that if a college kid or a high school kid is thinking about insurance, they're usually not thinking about Claims.

They're probably thinking more about being an underwriter or being in sales, even if they're more of the finance track and want to be an actuary. Those are kind of destinations within an organization. In Claims, we probably haven't done a good enough job describing what it is you'd be exposed to and how you can grow a career. I think whether you want to get into the Insurance industry, claims is a wonderful place to start. You learn the insurance contract, you would learn what losses look like. How they get adjudicated, and it could be the front door to an organization. You can get into a claims organization, learn insurance 101. We have, like I said, a university to be able to train you. So, it's not something you have to bring a lot of experience to.

Most of the people in claims were not in an insurance risk program. They probably had a very diverse background. Certainly, most of the people that I work with came from a lot of different subject matters to land in claims. But you can land here and get to another part of our organization or grow your entire career within claims because there are so many different lines of business specialties. You can go up one stove pipe and become a subject matter expert in financial lines or surety or late in environmental or property or workers' comp. We have so many different career paths, but you can also then bounce around. I've done this, I've learned that now I want to go learn a new line of business because I want to make myself a bit of a generalist.

So, it's certainly a place where you can grow your career, grow your talents, grow your skills, get opportunity to lead people. So, obviously I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I said otherwise because it's been able to provide for myself. It's given me a lot of career opportunities and obviously for my family. So, I'd say somebody who is thinking about insurance or curious about it, I think you mentioned mid-year career changes…there's a lot of customer experience roles or customer service roles that are those skill sets. Because you, as a claims professional, at the end of the day, you're navigating a life event for somebody and being able to connect with them and being able to know that “Hey, this is what's going to happen next, and then this is what's going to happen after that.”

You're kind of a walking them through something that is traumatic. We do this for a living, but sometimes it's the first time somebody has had to deal with this. So, you get to play the role of a concierge of walking somebody through it and assuring them that it's going to work out and it's going to be good on the other side. There's a whole bunch of different skill sets I think, that come to the center of the equation when you choose to be a claims professional. Anybody who would be interested in joining us, we're always looking for talent to bring into our organization. We have several ways of doing it. You can come as experienced, or you can come as a trainee into our Claims Training Program.
Then at Zurich we have something pretty unique called Apprentices. And so, if post high school and you're in college and junior college, we have a program that you work with us part-time and you continue your pursuit of a degree where we assist you with that financial aid, while building a career learning about insurance. And then when you graduate from that program, you have a pathway into starting your insurance career. A really unique approach that Zurich has something we're super proud of and if somebody is interested in learning more about it visiting us at Zurichna.com, would certainly be able to answer your questions and know how to connect with us and grow together.

GORDON: I think that's a fantastic way to close. It's a great plug. I do think we have a lot of wonderful learning and growth career opportunities within Zurich. I'm really glad that's where we'll close our conversation today. Keith, thank you so much. It's a pleasure talking to you again, really appreciate your insights, your experience and the passion that you bring to your role. Thank you.

DALY: Well, thank you very much, Stephani. I enjoyed it.

GORDON: And thank you to our listeners for joining today's podcast, the Future of Risk. We look forward to having you tune in again next time.