The people who understand claims best are often the ones who have experienced its friction firsthand. They have searched through years of policy documents to identify the correct beneficiary, returned incomplete forms, moved between multiple systems to issue one payment, and answered calls from families waiting for an update.
Jason Warren, Business Analyst at Benekiva, spent nearly eight years working across life and annuity claims before moving into technology. Today, he helps translate between the people processing claims and the teams building the systems that support them.
This is Jason’s story.
Like many claims professionals, Jason didn’t plan on building a career in insurance. After several years in retail management, he began looking for a role with more traditional working hours and accepted an entry-level position with an insurance carrier. What began as a move away from retail became a career spanning life claims, annuities, and variable annuities.
One of his earliest responsibilities was beneficiary research. When a claim was submitted, Jason reviewed years of scanned documents to identify the most recent valid beneficiary designation.
“I liked the research part of it,” he said. “You had to go through everything and find the most up-to-date information.”
As his knowledge of the policies and systems grew, he moved into increasingly complex claims roles. By the time he left the carrier, he was working primarily with variable annuities.
Jason has always been technically inclined. When his carrier introduced a new customer relationship management system, he quickly became one of the people who understood how to use it efficiently. He found faster ways to complete tasks, configured reports, and identified workarounds when processes did not function as expected. Over time, he began learning more about the work of business analysts.
“I realized my talents were probably better suited there,” he said.
As a claims examiner, Jason could see opportunities to improve the systems around him. He often found himself asking why a process worked a certain way or imagining how the technology could make it easier. At the time, he could identify the problem but was not in a position to change it. Now, those are exactly the questions people bring to him.
“It’s funny being on the other end of it now,” Jason said. “People come to me and say, ‘What if it did this instead?’ and I know exactly what they mean.”
His claims background allows him to understand the operational need and translate it into something a technical team can evaluate and build. That perspective is particularly valuable when a carrier is implementing a new claims platform for the first time.
“Having a claims background means I can talk to someone about claims, but I also know enough of the technical side to ease them into it,” he said. “It shouldn’t feel like you clicked on a random YouTube video and suddenly ended up way down a rabbit hole.”
One of the most persistent challenges was also one of the most basic: receiving forms that were completed correctly. A claimant might forget to select a tax-withholding option. A form might be signed but missing a required witness signature. Each omission created another round of correspondence and another delay for the person waiting for payment.
“The simplest thing was the most difficult,” Jason said. “It was getting the forms back correctly.”
Jason also saw how delays created more incoming calls. Examiners might become frustrated by repeated status inquiries, but he believed those calls were often a symptom of the larger problem.
“The reason you have all those calls is that the claim hasn’t been paid and it has been sitting there,” he said. “When I could pay something within a few days of receiving it, I didn’t get as many return calls.”
For Jason, improving the claims experience is not simply about handling status calls more efficiently. It is about preventing the delays that cause people to call in the first place.
Depending on the type of annuity he was processing, Jason sometimes had to work across as many as six systems. A single variable annuity claim could require one system to review documents, another to process the policy, and a third to initiate payment. If one application stopped working, the claim could stall while a support ticket was resolved. Meanwhile, the beneficiary was still waiting.
“That puts more pressure back on the beneficiary,” Jason said. “It isn’t their fault, but because of the way the systems are set up, it takes longer for them to get the payment they are waiting for.”
That is one of the biggest differences Jason sees in Benekiva: the ability to bring claim details, documents, workflows, and supporting processes into a more connected experience. For someone who has personally navigated the alternative, that connection is more than a convenience. It removes friction for examiners while helping beneficiaries receive answers and payments faster.
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Jason’s career has taken him from retail management to life and annuity claims, and from processing work inside complex systems to helping carriers improve them. He understands the frustration of incomplete forms, disconnected technology, and processes that make examiners work harder than necessary. More importantly, he understands what those inefficiencies mean for the person waiting on the other side.
That perspective now shapes his work as a business analyst, helping connect claims experience with technical possibility. Because better claims technology starts with people who understand why every step matters.
