Victoria Sutton: Howden’s claims director on bringing back leadership in the sector

When Howden’s business performance director for claims, Victoria Sutton, first started out in the industry as a claims handler, she was ready to kick the door down and become a team leader.

Now, two decades down the line in January 2025, Sutton has taken up her role as business performance director in the claims division at Howden – after working at the broker, formerly known as Lark, for over eight years.

Overseeing a team of 100 people, Sutton took home the award for Team Leader of the Year – Broker at the Women in Insurance 2025 awards, which she dubs her proudest achievement on a personal and professional level.

It is safe to say that leading and inspiring leadership is what makes Sutton tick and “putting yourself forward”, kicking the door down and delivering constructive ideas is, in her eyes, all part of grasping the right opportunities.

However, Sutton tells Insurance Times that she has noticed such self-driven ambition is no longer a common place.

“Our biggest challenge at the moment is people not wanting to push themselves at all,” she explains.

“There’s just a bit of lethargy at the moment. I want to have people with some [fight] next year.”

A symptom of societal turbulence, Sutton says she believes that this is a multi-generational exhaustion that requires a more “approachable” method to leading teams which goes “back to basics”.

Going into the new year, this is her key priority.

“There’s often a confusion in thinking that you need to be a manager to be a leader, but you don’t, you don’t necessarily need to be doing the management bit – you can just be a leader,” she enthuses.

“You can still be that role model. You can be that referral point. You can be that guidance for someone else. That’s a leader.”

Changing expectations

Despite having, stereotypically, fallen into the insurance world during work at a call centre handling Norwich Union claims, Sutton fell head over heels for the claims sector and, within six months, began working at Hiscox as senior commercial claims underwriter in 2006.

Remaining at Hiscox for over eight years before moving to Howden for an 11 year stint, Sutton fits into in the long-held reputation that once the industry get its claws into someone, it rarely let’s go.

However, with the average career tenure reducing, Sutton says that expectations are changing and “we have to change our management style with it”.

She says: “I’m not precious about my youngsters coming in as, while I would love them to stay in claims, let’s be realistic.

“They might not necessarily stay in claims, but what I can do is make sure they’ve got good grounding and as much of an understanding that they can get in that short period of time. If they take that on, understanding claims will set [them] up to be a much better underwriter or a much better broker because [they] know what [they’re] selling.”

Sutton adds that this need for a shift in management style is all the more relevant when considering the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), which is set to take up basic administrative roles that would often be bumped onto apprentices.

The challenge of training new claims handlers “is going to be everyone’s problem”, she continues.

Indeed, Insurance Times AI Claims Report 2025/26, published in October, revealed that 56% of respondents believe that AI will have the biggest impact on reducing manual work and admin in the next five years.

Sutton explains that while large firms can run academies for cohorts of new starters, smaller brokers do not have the turnover or resources to justify similar programmes.

Despite this, the claims leader also believes that this could be an opportunity to collaborate industry-wide and “tap into each other’s resources” for “the greater good” of the sector.

Autonomy loss

For Sutton, adapting this management style to a new era could also be imperative for speeding up the claims journey.

Gallagher Bassett’s The Carrier Perspective: 2025 Claims Insights Whitepaper, released on 12 February 2025, revealed that 72% of UK insurers are facing disruptions in efficient claims management due to labour shortages.

In turn, Sutton adds that a twin challenge to claims management is the loss of “autonomy [afforded] in decision-making” on the frontline.

Speaking from her experience from when she started her career as a claims handler, Sutton was often “trusted to make a call” in the spur of the moment for the client’s benefit – an opportunity afforded rarely in today’s market.

This loss of disruptors willing to make quick calls and question the claims process is something Sutton believes is detrimental to the sector and is indicative of an adopted “tick box mentality” to regulation.

She explains that this approach misses the intention of consumer duty to protect the client because firms are “so worried about what we need to report back to the FCA”.

“Every complaint generally stems from a communication breakdown somewhere,” she continues.

“We’re now talking three weeks before the client has had any mitigation work done so their business is now disrupted for a much longer time and that’s where we need to be smarter as an industry.”

While some insurers are beginning to restore authority to skilled handlers, Sutton stresses that the industry is still dealing with the fallout in which autonomy “was lost for a long time”.

Despite the immediate challenges looming over the sector, Sutton explains that if firms can “take that pride” in their work and adapt, it will “come full circle”.

After all, she notes, “I’m a massive fan of giving opportunity”.