8 Questions for SnapRISK Founder and CEO Kristin Carrington

Even in the diverse world of commercial insurance, Kristin Carrington, founder and CEO of SnapRISK, has an eyebrow-raising background.

All through high school and college, she worked as a bricklayer for her father’s masonry construction business. She also competed as a softball pitcher at Plano High School and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

After stints at FM, AIG and Aon, Carrington founded SnapRISK, a data collection and risk engineering consulting company.

In August, Dan Reynolds, the editor-in-chief of Risk & Insurance, spoke to Carrington about her career.

What follows is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity.

Risk & Insurance: Nice to meet you, Kristin. Can you brief us on your background and what led to the formation of your company?

Kristin Carrington: Great to meet you too, Dan. I really appreciate this opportunity. I have a degree in systems engineering and design from the University of Illinois, and through on-campus interviews, FM was my first stop. I had the choice between FM, a construction company in California and the Illinois Department of Transportation.

I chose FM because of the ability to do fieldwork and operate independently. FM was a perfect fit for my engineering degree and business administration secondary field. FM was hiring three or four people every few months back then, so it was a great opportunity to start my career with others having the same background.

There were 25 people in my FM “training class” in Norwood, Massachusetts. After about four years at FM Chicago, Hurricane Andrew hit Southeast Florida. FM looked for volunteers throughout the country to go back to Norwood for focused training on roof construction and windstorm protection. After this training, they sent everybody to Florida and the Gulf Coast to survey everything that wasn’t impacted by Andrew. We were doing really technical “windstorm loss expectancies” (WLEs) on roofing and the building envelope. I was with a great FM team in Orlando during that time. That experience was the first entry into the windstorm work we do today.

I moved over to Allendale for one year, and then to Commerce and Industry, which was the property division of AIG at the time. In 1996, after just one year at C&I, I was recruited by Alexander & Alexander, which became Aon. I was a risk consultant and account engineer at those companies. Finally, in 2007, I founded SnapRISK.

Actually, my kids were young (6 and 3 years old). I didn’t want to miss anything. I considered leaving corporate America for a little while. I made the decision and said, “I’m going to take a break.”

My largest client at Aon heard this and responded with “Don’t go.” I was intrigued and asked, “Well, what can we do?” Suddenly, I had the best of both worlds: continuing to work with my best client and the ability to focus more on my daughter and son. Looking back, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

I started the company just to work for that client. I had a lot of success with them, for a long time, as they had a very knowledgeable risk manager who really took my advice on risk control and data management.

The next milestone was about 2009 to 2011, when modeling became prevalent in the property markets. We were modeling U.S. wind and quake via RMS for this client. They had been viewed as a fire risk for a lot of years, and they’re really a CAT risk.

The risk manager and I agreed that we really needed to gather the required primary and secondary modifier data and make sure they were getting proper credit in the marketplace, because they built their buildings to FM standards, above and beyond local code. So I helped them do exactly that. During that process, I saw some of the markets rejecting data because they couldn’t trust it. There was no field verification. I didn’t blame them!

This was a very concerning issue that I knew we had to resolve. I personally surveyed buildings and gathered the data, so it was urgent that I find a way to gather, justify and memorialize everything. That was the beginning of SnapCAT, the original app in our current SnapRISK suite. SnapCAT allowed us to gather this data in a logical, efficient way in the field. I took the exact data points from the RMS models and created the right technology to gather and database at the same time so the markets would get a model-ready export of the data.

The final deliverable is a PDF report to show the visuals, which is automatically created in the field during the survey — photos of all these modifiers proving field verification and being able to give markets a product that confirmed everything that we saw in the field — along with the spreadsheet of usable data. SnapCAT was the framework of how we do all of our work today.

Following Nat CAT/SnapCAT, we proceeded to SnapCOPE. The same concept works for gathering COPE information: construction, occupancy, protection and exposure. In the property world, it’s the most important data to describe a building. You can visualize construction to be able to prove that it’s concrete or show that it’s wood. Protection, showing that the sprinkler systems are there, the control valves are open and even the design detail. The occupancy visual and exposure, taking the geospatial location of a building and noting all the risks to it.

To me, it really enhanced spreadsheets with a visual of the building and then housing everything in that building, all the data about it. I’d say the modeling started that. And now I’d like to think that we’re doing things differently than our competition. We really focus more on working directly for clients — clients who don’t have any information at all about their buildings are those we can help the most and directly impact premium dollars.

R&I: What does your client mix look like?

KC: Mostly commercial. We started with REIT and retail. We’ve been doing more technical risks in the past five years, and we’re growing in traditional HPR [highly protected risk]. We’ve hired some people who do fabrication plants, some of those type of risks. We’re also realizing that some residential clients and multifamily clients need the same data. If they have a building in Florida, it’s no different to gather that dataset for commercial versus residential.

We have from one to 50 different insurers utilizing the data we gather. We want our clients, the insureds, to walk into their market meetings every year armed with this data to present to the markets. They can use it to underwrite, to model — whatever they need to. Also, they’re ready to answer any questions that the insurers have for them.

R&I: Let’s just say I’m an MGA, and I’ve got a bunch of residential properties that I want to bring to a carrier. Could you analyze what this book looks like in terms of risk exposure?

KC: Definitely. We have a good example of an MGA we’ve worked with for about a year. They are doing builder’s risk. We’ve been asked specifically to look at water damage to try and help them prevent that during construction. It’s the data sets that we can collect that have expanded beyond the basic COPE that you would gather about a building. We’re having a lot of success with that. We’ve built out specific content to help them analyze a building and help prevent water damage in combination with using IoT sensors.

R&I: As technology advances, what are you finding works for you in the way you collect data? What do you hope to see evolve in your field?

KC: There is a lot out there right now. The traditional method of data gathering (and the way we used to do it at FM) is still, unbelievably, being utilized. We used to grab a clipboard, write notes, take pictures and match them all up later during the dreaded report-writing following the survey.

Now, we do it all on a device. Data is all gathered on iPhone or iPad mini or another iOS or Android tablet. A lot is happening simultaneously during a field survey. You’re answering questions and completing data fields. If you take a photo, it drops it right into SnapRISK, right into the correct location in the report.

There’s no matching up at the end anymore. This is our main technology platform for gathering data in the field. We have three operations running simultaneously in the field. First, a standard, streamlined data-gathering procedure; second, data fields being databased so that they are usable in an instant Excel or .csv export; and third, a beautiful .pdf report that is a snapshot in time of the data gathered, and is available immediately with one tap.

We’re not just filling out forms. The .pdf shows everything gathered during the survey. One major differentiator is that traditionally, a client is issued a .pdf report, and that’s it until the next year when an engineer returns for the next annual survey. SnapRISK is live. If a client makes progress on a recommendation, maybe they clean up a flammable liquids room or add a new roof, we can add the update, tap a button and then the new report is published.

So it’s always live, and we’re helping clients get things done. Our technology, gathering the data the way we do, memorializes it. Clients can avoid the “Groundhog Day” of the renewal. We can help them move on to more meaningful analysis once we have the baseline data gathered and memorialized. Much of the COPE should be a one-time gather. So many are not taking the time to start with great data. Plus, it allows updates a lot easier than the traditional method.

We have come a long way, but we are not there yet. I truly believe SnapRISK is at the highest level of the interim technology in our niche industry. I think the next step of this is something we can’t even imagine yet. I would compare this to the time before my current iPhone existed. How do you imagine the evolution of the technology, from having to talk on a phone attached to the wall to being able to do your entire job on a phone? That is the leap I expect to happen next in our industry.

R&I: You founded the company in 2007. What have been some of your biggest lessons learned about what you’re doing in the field you’re in?

KC: [Laughs] Sometimes I think that when I started the company, I wasn’t as scared as I should have been! I just kept trying to make the best decision that I could in my career. Seriously, looking back, it was a great decision, and I should have probably done it sooner.

One lesson would be to not take too much time to make a decision. I would say, looking back, that a lot of the decisions I stewed over and overthought. I think a great lesson is to know that there are a lot of right answers. It’s usually easier to shuffle out the wrong answers. I jumped in to working for one client not knowing what it would turn into. If someone had told me back then, “You know, in 2024, you’ll have 25 employees and the technology you adapted really turned out to be a great decision,” I’d have been happy with that. But I didn’t really have a future vision of it getting to this point. I just tried to make the best decisions possible along the way.

R&I: You’re also a woman in the engineering field — and when you started, there weren’t a lot of female engineers.

KC: I think out of our class of 25, there were three. I have one sister, and she and I both worked for my dad as bricklayers. We started out in a male-dominated industry, and I didn’t really think anything of it along the way. I’ve been blessed to have mostly great people around me and have really been fine with being a woman in all-male industry.

R&I: Do you think you’ve had an influence on other women in terms of founding a company and rolling it out?

KC: I think so. I hope so! I’ve had comments from a few of the women that work for us now saying “Wow, I really like how you handled that in that all-male meeting.” I’d like to think from what I’ve done in my career and how I operate every day that others will see that. I’m an “actions speak louder that words” person.

R&I: Beyond the data, what do you think your clients are valuing in what you’re bringing to the table?

KC: I think our focus on working for them is most valuable. At FM, they want to make the client’s business perfectly protected for them to insure. They’re the best at engineering risk. Taking that a step further, we want to utilize our FM training and knowledge for our clients to be as well-protected as possible but also considering they have a business to run. We know they can’t do 100% of what we suggest to 100% protect their properties. We want to arm that risk manager with what they need to make those decisions based on what’s best for their company. I think that’s where we’ve been able to help our clients the most. &