At Benekiva, “built by claims professionals, for claims professionals” isn’t just a tagline. It’s the lived experience of the people shaping the platform. Jes Vargas, Director of Product & Solutions, brings that perspective every day.
Before helping carriers rethink what claims transformation can look like, Jes was in the trenches herself: processing life and annuity claims, handling complex beneficiary scenarios, navigating escalations, managing manual workflows, and helping families through some of the hardest moments of their lives.
She knows what it feels like to be the person on the other end of the phone when a claim is delayed. She knows how much time gets lost to reports, letters, calculations, and workarounds. And she knows that real transformation is not about taking a broken process and putting it on a screen. It’s about making the process better.
This is Jes’s story.
Like many people in claims, Jes didn’t exactly plan on an insurance career. After college, she worked as a pastry chef, spending time in kitchens at resorts, ski areas, and national parks out west. The work was creative, but exhausting working on her feet 14 hours a day. She started thinking about what came next: a stable job, benefits, and a more sustainable career path. She went through a temp agency to explore her options, which, in turn, placed her at Prudential as a claims examiner.
For what was technically a temp job, the training was anything but temporary. Jes joined a group of six people who went through more than three months of claims examiner training before moving to a training floor, ramping up, and eventually joining the broader claims team. Then she advanced into more complex claims work, learning how to handle estates, trusts, minors, and other advanced scenarios.
For Jes, part of the answer is simple: she likes solving puzzles.
“My naturally sleuthy nature,” she said. “I was really interested in the research piece of it.”
Claims gave her something to investigate. There were documents to review, facts to verify, rules to understand, and details that mattered. As she moved into advanced claims, she found herself learning more and interacting more directly with people.
That human side mattered, too. Claims can be frustrating. People are grieving. They are angry. They are scared. They may be calling during one of the worst periods of their lives, trying to understand why something is delayed or what happens next.
“You deal with a fair amount of people getting angry and ugly at a really, really bad time in their life,” Jes said. “But then you get the people that are very grateful for your help. That tends to be very rewarding.”
That combination kept her in claims: the investigation, the learning, and the chance to help people when they needed it most.
Jes first encountered Benekiva while working at another company. Benekiva was part of the vendor ecosystem, and Jes was introduced to the platform.
Her reaction was immediate.
“When can I come work for you?” she asked.
At the time, she had recently started a new job, so she wasn’t going anywhere right away. But the impression stuck. Jes had seen enough legacy claims systems to know what was normal. When she saw Benekiva, she saw something different: a solution aimed directly at problems she understood from experience.
She stayed connected with Benekiva over time, even training people on the system while she was still at another company. She provided input from the claims side, shared best practices, and watched the platform evolve. Eventually, when a role opened and she was ready for a change, she applied. Nearly three years later, she is still here.
Jes helps carriers understand what is possible in claims. That means listening to their claims transformation goals, understanding their pain points, and helping them map a practical path forward. Jes brings the examiner’s perspective into those conversations. She knows what claims teams need because she has been one of the people doing the work. She also knows that transformation requires more than recreating old workflows inside a new system.
Jes helps carriers think beyond implementation and rethink how claims should operate.
Transformation is not a lift-and-shift exercise. For Jes, one of the biggest traps carriers fall into is taking every existing workflow, exception, report, letter, and manual step and asking a new system to replicate it exactly.
But that misses the point. Real transformation means asking harder questions:
In another Claimversation recap, Jes highlighted several common pitfalls: treating implementation like transformation, underestimating change management, failing to build system trust, over-configuring, over-specializing teams, and allowing small inefficiencies to pile up until they become operational drag.
That perspective reflects Jes’s practical approach. She is not interested in transformation theater. She is interested in changes that actually make the work better.
Jes has a few favorites, depending on the lens.
Jes has handled plenty of complex claims, but one story still stands out.
In one role, she worked on a homicide claim where the team was waiting for confirmation from the police department that the beneficiary was not under investigation. Without that confirmation, they could not move forward.
The beneficiary called every day. Every single day, around the same time, someone on the team would answer the phone and spend 45 minutes being yelled at. The team worked in a pod, so everyone could hear the calls. No one knew who would get the call that day.
“It was like playing Russian roulette every day,” Jes said.
The situation went on for months. When Jes left the team years later, the claim still had not been paid due to the complex legal situation involved, though she later heard it was eventually resolved. It was a hard example of what claims professionals often carry: the frustration of claimants and beneficiaries, the constraints of regulation and investigation, and the emotional weight of being unable to provide the answer someone desperately wants.
Stories like that are part of why Jes is so passionate about better claims operations. Claims work will always involve difficult moments. But systems, processes, and communication should not make those moments harder than they need to be.
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Jes’s story is exactly what Benekiva means by built by claims professionals, for claims professionals. She has worked the complex claims. She has taken the hard calls. She has built the reports, managed the workarounds, and seen firsthand how much better the process could be.
Now, she brings that experience into every conversation with carriers, helping them think beyond legacy habits and toward claims operations that actually support the people doing the work.
Because better claims transformation starts with people who understand claims.
