We are pleased to announce the appointment of James Parry into the newly created role of Head of Supply Chain to lead the strategic development of Avantia Group’s supplier network. Bringing extensive industry expertise, he will oversee the development of our end-to-end supply chain strategy (including supplier performance and contract management, governance, and procurement) with a focus on growing and refining Avantia Group’s partnerships to support the business’ ambition of delivering an even faster, more efficient claims service for customers.
Our CEO, Mark Eastham, said: “We have a big ambition to become a top 10 home insurer in the UK, and we believe that it’s a combination of having the right talent in our business combined with the latest AI-driven tech that will help us get there. By bringing together cutting-edge technology with best-in-class claims management, we’re able to deliver an experience that is smoother, faster, and always puts customers front and centre. We were early adopters of AI and have been using it for years to make intelligent real-time decisions for our customers, and automation is a key enabler in improving the customer experience – but building a specialist in-house claims team gives us an additional competitive advantage. James brings extensive expertise and a fresh perspective that will be instrumental in strengthening our supplier network and ensuring we continue to deliver exceptional service to our customers.”
Commenting on his appointment, James Parry said: “I was drawn to Avantia Group and Homeprotect because of the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on both claims management and their supply chain strategy. Avantia has a strong reputation for driving change quickly and effectively, and it’s exciting to be part of a company that truly turns ambition into action. Having the opportunity to work alongside a talented and forward-thinking team was also a big factor in my decision to join.”
We interviewed James about his career path and his journey to becoming a part of the Avantia Group team…
What has your career path looked like up until joining Avantia Group?
The start of my career in insurance is probably something that will resonate with a few people – a contact centre role handling Motor FNOL claims at DLG. That was getting on for 17/18 years ago now, and as is the way with insurance it often grabs you and doesn’t let go. Since then, I’ve moved through some varied claims adjacent roles with LV and QBE before transitioning into the world of supply chain, first in a governance and oversight role and then Procurement and supplier management and haven’t looked back since!
I’ve worked in supply chain at QBE, First Central and LV/Allianz for the past seven years and had the opportunity to lead and be involved in some really interesting and diverse projects including Procurement Transformation, Outsourcing, Offshoring, Tech Enablement to name a few across a range of different categories and geographies. All of which has led me to Avantia Group and the opportunity to bring the experiences and learnings from my career to date and add real value to the growth journey we’re on.
Tell us about a topic/trend that interests you, or you think will influence the future of the insurance industry?
It has to be AI and how the widescale adoption of AI technologies across differing areas of the insurance value chain will fundamentally change pretty much everything we do as an industry. From a claims perspective it’s long moved past the early battlegrounds of back-office efficiency and things like payments, reserving, updates etc, on to a place where someone somewhere is doing something with AI across every claims journey and touchpoint. Beyond that though, the benefits that AI will have across supply chain are huge in terms of how we contract and manage relationships, how we ingest and pull insights from performance information, and how we carry out effective due diligence and ongoing governance oversight – a world where I am presented with actionable insights and callouts in less than a second, and where we can leverage AI to collate and summarise vast swathes of claims performance data to provide better more meaningful insights to feed continuous improvement is a really exciting prospect.
What interests you most about Supply Chain Management?
Put simply; variety. Variety in the work I do on a day-to-day basis, variety in the ever-changing face of the supply industry and variety in the people I interact with on an ongoing basis and the different perspectives they bring. The challenge is in turning all of the opportunity and variety the supply chain community brings into solutions that add value to our specific operating environments and customer base, and how we collaboratively work together to ensure that this leads to great outcomes for customers, supply partners and Avantia Group – not an easy task by any stretch given the amount of variables at play, but that pursuit of better outcomes is what keeps us all turning up day in and day out.
What are you most looking forward to in your new role?
What I’m most excited about is the scale of the opportunity around supply chain and crucially having that empowerment to go out and drive change. It’s evident from spending just a short amount of time at Avantia Group that we aren’t putting any limits on what we want to achieve – from the investment in systems, people, tech and AI. That’s a really exciting place to start from, and should also be an exciting draw for supply chain partners as we look at how we can elevate what we do and how we do it; we have a relatively young internal claims function but we are adding maturity to our operations at a phenomenal rate, and with that comes the opportunity to really look at how we can differentiate ourselves in the market.