Agency reinvents risk management

David Chiappino, co-founder and principal consultant at HealthKeys, had what he calls his “seminal moment,” which changed his career trajectory, about five years ago.

“I was a full-time benefit consultant working in the mid-market,” he remembers, “and I talked to a man who owned 10 or 15 grocery stores in western and central Pennsylvania, and he’d just purchased eight or 10 stores in New York – and he received a 70 percent rate increase from his insurance carrier. He was desperate for solutions, and there weren’t a lot of solutions available. And I thought, ‘Why can’t we in the benefits business manage risk the same way they do in the property and casualty business?’”