Maybe it had something to do with being a kid when the first “Star Wars” movie was released.

Or maybe it was that sense of satisfaction from writing a line of code on an Apple II and watching the computer act on it.

It could have been his love of finding answers with new tools.

Whatever it was that hooked Ken Tolson on technology, in the years since leaving the computer programming lab in his rural North Carolina high school, the InsurTech CEO has molded his career with technological evolution.

Today, he’s leading Turvi, a global insurance claims processing startup under the Crawford & Company umbrella.

“I’ve always had a slant toward technology and whatever’s new,” said Tolson, who worked at Crawford for more than three decades before leaving to lead the Turvi offshoot. “[I’ve always had] curiosity around technology.”

Turvi is a SaaS company that aims to enhance efficiency, accuracy and customer satisfaction in the P/C claims ecosystem. The InsurTech launched in October 2024. Its products are designed to streamline claims and the claim coverage review process as well as expedite the estimating process.

In the Field to Leading Teams

Tolson studied architecture at North Carolina State University and built houses in the summers to pay the bills. After graduation, he began his career at Crawford in the field as an entry-level property adjuster. He joined the company at the beginning of the claims industry’s shift to workflow computerization.

That timing was fortunate, Tolson said. It likely tethered him to the insurance industry.

“It’s always been a curiosity for me how we can take technology and make the process better,” Tolson said. “I’ve been in [the claims] industry for over 30 years now. From the early days of such a paper-intensive industry, it’s almost completely digital now.”

He’s seen handwritten estimates become digitized, traditional telephones turn into VOIP handsets, fax machines kicked to the curb and employees moved to remote offices long before the Covid-19 pandemic began. These changes weren’t just happening around him. Tolson’s hand was involved in many of his company’s technology-related initiatives.

He worked for nearly 13 years of his tenure at Crawford — a claims management and outsourcing provider — as a branch manager. Tolson spent six years as a vice president and roughly four more as Crawford’s chief information officer.

During a two-year stint as the U.S. property and casualty CEO from 2017 to 2019, he led all of the division’s field and catastrophe operations teams. Other Crawford positions Tolson has held include U.S. claims solutions president, network solutions president and digital solutions CEO.

“The thing I really value, I think more than anything, is my ability to have worked in a variety of roles here,” he said of his time at Crawford. Tolson later spoke of the importance of understanding service delivery models when entering a new leadership position. Once those are fully grasped, then it becomes a question of having the right people to optimize them.

“The people part of this industry is the most important part,” Tolson said. “Because if you find the right people, invariably, you’re going to deliver. That’s more than half of the battle. Now, you have to also get out of their way a little bit, too. But really understanding your customer and really supporting and setting your people up for success — that’s it in a nutshell.”

Turvi launched last fall with Tolson as its CEO. The InsurTech currently has fewer than 20 internal and external customers. Crawford remains Turvi’s primary customer, but the company is actively fundraising and will eventually be spun out from under the Crawford umbrella.

Turvi’s History and Products

Turvi is the product of a journey that began at Crawford about three years ago.

Around that time, the company’s Crawford Innovative Ventures (CIV) wing began tackling claims triage, which focuses on automating the process of claims segmentation into complexity and severity levels.

Tolson recalled a conversation with Crawford’s CEO, Rohit Verma, where he told Verma that if Crawford was going to build technology that solved triage, “we should absolutely put it out on the marketplace,” Tolson said. “Because it’s not just solving a problem for Crawford; it’s solving a problem for the industry.”

Tolson wondered if Crawford leaders thought the product was great for their company, why wouldn’t it be great for the industry? And if it wasn’t great for Crawford and the industry, the company may be on the wrong page, possibly looking too inwardly.

He viewed this crossroads as the litmus test for whether Crawford was building tech that solves industry problems or internal Crawford problems. It took some convincing, but ultimately, that discussion with Verma planted the seed from which Turvi would bloom.

After Crawford acquired WeGoLook, another alternative inspection solution, Crawford leaders found industrywide rigidness. Adjusters tend to be very habitual, Tolson said, and they want to follow the same process every time they respond to a claim.

“So, we started attacking that with data,” he said. “We wanted to create a triage engine that would say, if you followed this process, this is the outcome. We could actually lower your loss adjusting expense, and we can drive the same or better customer experience outcomes.”

Essentially, Turvi leaders found that by channeling some claims down an alternative, self-service option for low-severity and low-complexity claims, costs could be lowered, and customer experiences would be improved through the increased speed.

In January 2024, CIV was carved out of Crawford. As Turvi went to market, its leaders realized that it needed to separate and rebrand from the Crawford name because its products could be used by anyone in the industry — including Crawford competitors.

“Our product vision is never static,” Tolson explained, later adding that the company’s triage engine is up and running. He described it as “a machine learning model that looks at decisioning for triage.” Turvi works to enhance it by feeding it transaction data.

“There are about 10 million property claims that happen every year in the U.S.,” Tolson said, “and we want to get as many of those outcomes into that engine as possible so that we can learn from it.”

In addition to the triage product, Turvi has also acquired and transformed Asservio into a SaaS offering to the market. Tolson described Asservio as an accuracy tool for property insurance that examines millions of lines of estimates and helps users drive consistent application of estimating rules.

Turvi’s third product is CoverAI, which ingests contracts, coverage forms and more. Its aim is to interpret coverage and contracts and inform adjusters about coverage weaknesses, limits, sublimits and gaps. This is “to help the adjuster be more accurate and consistent in policy interpretation,” Tolson said.

“We’re just scratching the surface there,” he said. “That is a vast landscape that is really the new frontier for us.”

The real advantage, whether within Crawford or one of its segments, is that the company talks to lots of customers, Tolson said.

“But actually, more importantly, we listen to a lot of customers all the time,” he said. “And what you’ll find, what’s fascinating to me about this industry … [worldwide], the problems are not that different. The systems and maybe the terminology and the taxonomy for how you handle claims and how you handle risk is slightly different, and it evolved differently. But the problems have a common thread to them.”