CCC's Creators & Innovators blog series features members of our team discussing what excites them most about the work they're doing and how they're contributing to CCC's growth and success. This month, we're featuring a Q&A with CCC's Senior Manager Safekeep, Jeffrey Capobianco on subrogation.
How long have you been with CCC and what has been your career trajectory since joining the company?I joined CCC about 5 months ago as part of the Safekeep acquisition, and I was with Safekeep for a little less than a year before that. I’ve been in management subrogation at large carriers, TPAs, and vendors for about 20 years. Now, at CCC, I’m working on the operations and presales side of the business. Sales isn’t new to me, but it’s much more prominent in this role than in previous roles I’ve held.What was it like joining the CCC team, and what makes you excited about working in subrogation?When Safekeep was a startup, we were a scrappy team trying to take every call, sign up every client, and get our foot in the door in the industry. We skipped about 20 steps ahead when we joined CCC, because we’ve been able to leverage relationships with top insurance carriers. It’s exciting to begin this new process and join these long-term discussions with large carriers. What we thought would take years has taken months. It’s accelerated so fast that it makes my head spin, and I have to stop and appreciate it every once in a while.Safekeep is helping to bring the insurance industry up to speed with technology. The subrogation process, which allows insurance carriers to recover money when a third party is at fault, has been a very manual process, relying on people power to find claims. Our niche in the industry is twofold — leveraging artificial intelligence technologies like natural language processing (NLP) to help our customers process claims more efficiently to help our customers reduce leakage after a claim has been paid.What differentiates your team and goals from other departments at CCC?While most departments at CCC focus on vehicle estimates and casualty, we are much more service-oriented. My team specifically works on helping to build models, and one thing that differentiates us is that our models are configurable to meet customer needs. My team is unique in that the subject matter experts meet daily with the data scientists and developers to work as one cohesive team, because each project has many different pieces to it.What are some of the most important things to keep in mind when building such a product?We always do a fact-finding mission at the beginning of each project to determine the client’s specific needs. We’ve learned that they vary greatly from client to client – their KPIs, what they hope to gain from automating subrogation, etc. – and we work to create configurations for our clients depending on what those specifics are. It’s always challenging to level-set that expectation with a client. Sometimes they don’t just want to find claims, they want a training tool that can take the information we give them to show adjusters where the leakage is. In those respects, clients’ needs vary greatly.What’s your favorite part of the culture at CCC?Githesh and the leadership team are some of the most hands-on executives that I’ve ever encountered in the industry. The people themselves and the culture overall have been extremely warm. Everyone has embraced our new product, and all the account managers and CSMs have asked a thousand different questions to better understand the details. I love that because it shows enthusiasm and buzz around what we’re able to offer. I’m also blown away by how bright everyone is at CCC – their level of expertise and their ability to think outside the box is amazing!What do you feel differentiates CCC from other similar technology providers?This idea of straight-through processing throughout the claims journey is the industry vision that CCC is trying to help our customers achieve, as a whole. Subrogation was the final piece of the claims journey - we’re bridging that gap between the beginning and the end of the claims process, and we fit perfectly into the claims resolution assembly line.What do you envision for the future of subrogation?We’ve done a lot of talking about this because we’re still very much in the beginning stages. I would like to see subrogation turn into an almost completely automated process where technology handles 90% of it. Insurance carriers are finally taking the first step to embrace technology, which is the most important part, and now that they see what the technology can do, we can keep pushing the envelope. Subrogation has traditionally been a very manual process for claims adjusters, and I see it turning into an almost completely automated process in the very near future where our solution is able to help the customer make liability determinations at a rapid pace, so the adjusters have time to focus on what really matters.
