American Modern, Westhill, Fidelis and Praedicat Make Appointments

American Modern Names New Chief Claims Officer

American Modern Insurance Group announced the appointment of Eric Hunziker as chief claims officer effective July 1. Hunziker will also become a member of American Modern’s Executive Management Board.

Hunziker has been with American Modern for more than 25 years, the Amelia, Ohio-based carrier said. He most recently served as vice president of producer management. Since he began his career at American Modern in 1994 as a staff adjuster and examiner, Hunziker has served in various claims leadership roles covering all key aspects of claims management, American Modern said.

During the past four years, Hunziker led and transformed the company’s producer management department. He also spearheaded the implementation of new robotics technologies to automate workflows to deliver a better, faster and a more consistent customer experience.

Hunziker succeeds Dave McNutt, who retired from the company at the end of June.

Westhill Appoints George Jones CEO

Westhill Inc., which provides a collaboration platform that helps property and casualty carriers schedule and manage interactions with third-party vendors, announced the appointment of George Jones as chief executive officer.

Since 2001, Jones has been a leader in the property claims area at carriers including USAA, Farmers Insurance, and Chubb, Westhill said. The company said Jones’ experience as an insurance claims executive and his operational insight make him well-positioned to take the helm at Westhill, which is building tighter relationships with managed repair network partners.

“Claims is a manual, and often disjointed process, in the insurance value chain,” Jones said in a prepared statement. “When you consider all the communication that has to happen between the customer, claims managers, adjusters, and contractors who are part of a managed repair network, it is not surprising that there is so much friction and cost associated with claims. Westhill has an opportunity to introduce a new level of transparency into the insurance claims process. I’m looking forward to being a part of it.”

Westhill, based in Atlanta, is owned by Eos Venture Partners, a venture capital fund that focuses exclusively on insurtech.

Fidelis Group Hires Mark Taylor as Senior Claims Manager

Fidelis Group Holdings has hired Mark Taylor as senior manager of its claims division. Taylor will be based at the Fidelis Claims Service headquarters in Covington, Louisiana.

Taylor comes to Fidelis after a 13-year career in the insurance industry, specializing in marine, Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, auto liability, general Lliability, workers’ compensation and trucking, the company said in a press release. He most recently served as vice president of claims for The Gray Insurance Co.

Taylor is an attorney who previously worked as a staff attorney for Waller Associates and the law office of Alan Zaunbrecher, according to his Linkedin page.

Taylor graduated from Southeastern Louisiana University, earned his Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School and received a master’s degree in public administration from Louisiana State University.

Praedicat Appoints VP for Global Sales

Praedicat, Inc., a risk analytics software company for casualty insurers based in Los Angeles, announced the appointment of Grant Dewar as vice president, global industrials.

Grant will report to Praedicat’s Vice President and Head of Sales Charles Clarke.He will be based in London.

Praedicat said in a press release that Grant’s focus will be on bringing its products and expertise to the industrials market on a global basis, working with organizations that manufacture and distribute products such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals and consumer packaged goods. Praedicat said CPG is a key market, representing a starting point of the “end-to-end value chain for product risks, from production through to risk management and the purchase of insurance.”

Praedicat said it uses a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to read peer-reviewed scientific literature, currently around 31 million scientific papers. Praedicat’s algorithms look for evidence of a causal link between a product or chemical, and a harm, for example asbestos and mesothelioma. It then mines scientific papers, and extracts metadata to develop a computational weight of evidence assessment describing the maturity and consensus of the scientific literature and the industrial footprint of that agent. Praedicat then builds a probabilistic casualty catastrophe model for latent liability risks.

Grant was previously chief operating officer for EMEA Insurance Group. He also managed large multi-cultural insurance and financial services teams. He spent three years at Willis Towers Watson as a senior vice president of sales for Europe.