Lyndel Juillerat

What Happens After a Major Loss

A large commercial claim is not a bigger version of a small one. There is more to prove, more people involved, and the business usually has to keep operating while all of it is going on.

Lyndel has spent years on that part of insurance, including catastrophe events where an insurer is working through thousands of claims at once and every one of them belongs to someone whose year has just changed.

Her job at that point is to keep the client told: what is happening, what the insurer needs from them, and what comes next. She is straight about how a claim actually runs, because knowing what is coming is most of what makes a hard few months manageable.

Underinsurance Reaches Further Than the Building

The point Lyndel most wants commercial clients to understand is that underinsurance is not only a building problem.

The values a business declares to its insurer can, depending on the policy and the circumstances, also affect a business interruption claim, which is the part of the cover that replaces income while the business cannot trade normally. A building figure that has quietly gone out of date can therefore reach further than the rebuild.

What she asks of clients is practical: that valuations and sums insured stay aligned with what replacement would actually cost today, and that they learn what an insurer will want to see before a major claim becomes the reason they find out.

Continuity When an Account Changes Hands

The other half of what she does is continuity. When a commercial account needs someone to step in, Lyndel can pick it up without the client having to tell their whole story again.

That matters more than it sounds. The detail that decides a claim lives in the relationship as much as in the file: how the business actually operates, what has changed since last year, and what was negotiated at the last renewal and why.