At Benekiva, we talk a lot about building a claims platform by claims professionals for claims professionals. Krista Eger is exactly what that looks like in practice.
As VP of Product, she's helping shape the Benekiva platform, but before that, she spent years in the trenches of claims, including life, annuity, waiver, pensions, structured settlements, long-term care, travel, disability, and more. She's been a call center rep, a claims examiner, a people leader, and a transformation champion inside carriers. She's helped families through some of the hardest moments of their lives, managed incredibly complex claims, and then asked a big question:
"How do we make this better—for examiners and for beneficiaries and claimants?"
This is Krista's story.
Honestly, I fell into it.
My husband was in the military, I was in nursing school, and I needed a job. A long-term care insurance company was looking for a temp, and I thought, "Why not?" I started in the call center, taking calls and learning the basics. It wasn't a grand plan at all—but I stuck with it, and here I am, years later, still in insurance.
On a practical level, there was stability. I started as a temp, then they brought me on full time. I liked the routine, and it felt like a real career path.
But the deeper reason is that I've always wanted to help people. That's why I went into nursing originally. Claims gave me a different way to do that—not hands-on medical care, but guiding people through crises and getting them the benefits they were counting on.
When I moved from the call center into claims, that's where it really clicked. Claims work is fascinating—there's an investigative aspect, a legal aspect, and a very human aspect. If I hadn't stayed in claims, I probably would have gone into SIU. I love piecing together what really happened.
Claims felt like the sweet spot between helping people and solving puzzles.
You're not just pushing paper; you're figuring out what's true, who's entitled to what, which laws apply, and how to get money into the right hands as quickly as possible. There's a lot of critical thinking and investigation. You're pulling death certificates, reading medical records, understanding beneficiary designations, and navigating things like contestability and slayer statutes.
But the best part is still the human side. Some of my favorite moments were unreported death claims: calling someone to say, "You may not know this, but your loved one had a policy, and you're the beneficiary," being able to tell someone, "There's $500,000 coming to you," at one of the lowest points of their life, that never gets old. It's heavy work at times, but it's meaningful.
When I started, claims was very much the "back burner" function. Carriers poured money into new business platforms—slick, digital, lots of bells and whistles—because that's where the premium dollars came in. Claims was the cost center: paper files, manila folders, spreadsheets, very little automation. The most "digital" thing we had was often a shared spreadsheet.
A few things changed that:
That's how I got pulled into transformation work. I went from being a claims examiner to asking, "How do we speed this up? How do we get money out the door faster—both to help families and to reduce leakage for the company?" That journey eventually led me to product work and, ultimately, to Benekiva.
I first met Benekiva when I was working for a carrier. We were evaluating platforms for a claims transformation initiative. That carrier didn't end up choosing Benekiva, and I later moved to another company, but I kept in touch with Benekiva. When a product position opened, I was hesitant at first. Moving from a carrier to a startup is a big leap. But now, I get to help transform claims across many carriers, not just one. That's what sold me: bigger impact, same mission.
Anything that eliminates boring, repetitive, manual tasks gets me excited, because I know exactly how much time those tasks eat up.
Some of my favorites:
Those are the kinds of features that make examiners sit up and say, "You get it. You understand what my day is actually like."
That "going digital" is not the same as transforming.
A lot of carriers want to take their manual process and simply recreate it on a screen. They'll say, "Here's our checklist, here's our template, here's our flow—just put this into your platform."
But if your current process is slow, confusing, or inefficient, putting it into software doesn't magically fix it. You've just digitized the pain.
Transformation means asking:
We see across dozens of carriers that everyone is trying to accomplish the same things. The requirements and regulations are similar. The difference is how they get from A to Z. Some are taking the scenic (and painful) route. Our job is to help them take the straight line.
A few things:
Ultimately, remember that at the core of every claim is a person. If that motivates you, you'll find a lot of meaning in this work.
Krista's journey embodies Benekiva's mission as a claims platform built by claims professionals for claims professionals. She's lived through the late-night investigations, the emotionally heavy calls, and the frustration of platforms built by people who've never worked a single claim. Now she's turning that experience into tools and workflows that actually work for the people doing the work.
If you're looking at your own claims operations and thinking, "There has to be a better way," you don't have to figure it out alone.
Talk to a Benekiva claims expert about your current processes, pain points, and transformation goals. We'll share what we're seeing across carriers, where technology can create the biggest impact, and practical steps you can take—whether you're just starting your modernization journey or ready for a full platform shift.
