An insurance company brings its brokers to a football ground. There are about 80 brokers, a barbecue and live music. It is São Paulo, June 2018, a week before the World Cup, and Leonardo Semenovitch’s company has arranged an evening called Corretor Craque. The name gives the brokers a promotion of their own: for a night, they are the star players. Semenovitch, then president of Travelers in Brazil, explains the timing through football’s national appeal. His business purpose is equally plain. Bring people together. Give them a reason to talk.
It is a useful place to begin a career usually described through appointments. Semenovitch has led an insurer, moved into claims services and become Crawford & Company’s Latin America president. Yet the football evening catches something a job title misses: the effort required to make an industry of contracts function as an industry of relationships. Even insurance occasionally benefits from putting down the paperwork and finding a ball.
A mechanical engineer in the insurance business
Semenovitch studied mechanical engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, then pursued specialist insurance-business education at IBMEC in Rio. His professional route took him through Unibanco, AIG, Chartis and RSA. By July 2012, when RSA appointed him claims director, he already had more than 16 years in insurance. The appointment placed him in a part of the business where technical decisions become intensely practical: assessing losses and delivering the service attached to a policy.
His stated ambition at RSA was to improve service quality and contribute to the company’s development. A year later, discussing outsourced services, he described internal supervision of assistance work and a case-by-case approach to using external partners. Those comments are small operational details, but they establish an early concern. Bringing another company into a process still leaves the insurer with a responsibility to know how that process works.
The combination of engineering education and insurance experience is distinctive without requiring an invented conversion story. His training was technical; his subsequent responsibilities crossed claims, operations, sales and underwriting. That range matters because each function sees a different part of the same transaction. The sales conversation makes a promise, underwriting defines its terms, and claims tests how the arrangement holds up when someone needs it.
Building a business around the broker
By 2015, he was leading Travelers Seguros Brasil during an expansion of its local business. Travelers took a 95 percent stake in the property-and-casualty operation associated with J. Malucelli. The Brazilian portfolio included property, engineering, liability and financial lines. Semenovitch spoke about technology supporting sales and about opportunities beyond the infrastructure work that had helped attract the company’s interest in Brazil.
The tools described during his tenure were refreshingly specific. Brokers could quote and arrange small-business cover through an online system. They could track commissions and access digital policies. Customers could retrieve policy documents online. Each feature dealt with an ordinary task that otherwise consumed time. The useful question was whether a broker could finish the job from the device already at hand.
Alongside those tools came training. Travelers reported nearly 50 percent more broker training sessions and relationship events in 2017 than in the previous year, reaching twice as many brokers. Courses averaged about 30 participants, and risk control was the most popular subject. These were company figures, rather than measures of Semenovitch’s individual performance, but they show what the organization under his leadership was spending time on.
Personal contact had its own itinerary. In June 2017, Semenovitch and fellow Travelers executives met the Clube dos Seguradores da Bahia to discuss the company and its view of product demand. The gathering drew more than 150 guests, including approximately 100 brokers. A year later came the São Paulo football evening. Taken together, the classroom, the lunch and the pitch describe several ways of keeping a commercial relationship alive.
Wind farms, building sites and the fine print
His Travelers years also put him in conversations about the physical economy. The company introduced insurance solutions for renewable-energy projects in 2016, covering interests involved in solar and wind development. By 2017 it was presenting integrated protection for construction and operation. For an executive trained in mechanical engineering, the subject brought machinery, projects and financial exposure into the same discussion.
His public comments concentrated on what could interrupt a business. Renewable generation required attention to equipment and financial losses when operations stopped. Construction presented a related problem at a different stage: smaller contractors might overlook particular insurance protections and leave themselves exposed to losses that endangered their operations. In December 2017, he described a construction package intended to help clients plan projects and manage unexpected events.
There is a consistent scale to these examples. A digital policy solves a document problem. Risk-control training helps a broker understand an exposure. A construction package addresses a project’s vulnerabilities. The subjects vary considerably, but his comments keep returning to the work someone is trying to complete. Insurance becomes easier to understand when it stays close to the building site or generating plant that gives the paperwork a purpose.
Changing sides of the claims conversation
In 2019, his career changed direction. Travelers closed its Brazilian unit, and Semenovitch moved to Crawford after more than two decades working in insurers. Crawford announced his appointment as Brazil country manager on July 31. Based in São Paulo, he would oversee operations and adjusting services, develop local client relationships and report to Roberto McQuattie, then the regional head for Latin America.
The move gave his previous experience a different commercial use. He had been a buyer and manager of insurance services. Now he would lead a business supplying claims expertise to insurers and other clients. Familiarity with an insurer’s needs could help him tailor a service to the operation buying it. It was a change of employer and of vantage point, with the claims process still at the center.
Late that year, he identified three things that needed to shrink: the number of interactions, requests for documents, and the time to payment or closure. It is an unusually legible executive agenda. A claimant can understand all three without a glossary. His comments also connected efficiency with automation and changing customer expectations, placing the administrative experience alongside the technical work of adjusting a loss.
“Inovação não é só fundamental, é uma questão de sobrevivência.”
Leonardo Semenovitch, December 2019
Innovation is a matter of survival. Translation from Portuguese.
The view from above, with a plan below
In July 2020, his discussion of drones supplied a concrete example of that thinking. Better imagery could improve documentation, help professionals assess damage and support a quicker view of necessary repairs. He also identified uses in inspecting structures, monitoring construction and following industrial operations and maintenance. The attraction was the information a drone could bring back and the decisions that information could support.
He attached conditions to the enthusiasm. Operators needed the relevant certification; local conditions could affect communication between aircraft and operator; applications required planning. That qualification gives the technology argument some weight. Equipment enters an existing chain of responsibilities. A better picture is valuable when qualified people can use it to produce a sound assessment.
Conceptual sequence based on his discussion of drone inspections. No performance results are implied.
Brazil becomes the starting point
On January 9, 2024, Semenovitch became Crawford’s Latin America president. The public announcement followed in February. McQuattie had moved into a global transformation role, and Semenovitch would report directly to Andrew Bart, CEO of International Operations. His remit expanded from the Brazilian business to a region with its own country managers and client relationships.
He described an intention to work alongside those managers, with quality, technical proficiency and customer service as priorities. In April, Eduardo Sales Ribeiro became Brazil country manager, reporting to him. The arrangement made the change tangible: Brazil now had a new operating leader while Semenovitch worked across the region. Responsibility widened, and the work depended on other leaders taking responsibility locally.
“It is an honor to serve the Latin America region.”
Leonardo Semenovitch, on his 2024 appointment
His regional role has also taken him into professional education. In March 2025, FGV Direito Rio listed him among the speakers for an open class on disputed issues arising from Brazil’s new insurance legislation. The panel brought together insurance and legal experience. For someone whose career spans underwriting, operations and claims, it was another setting where the contract and its practical consequences belonged in the same conversation.
The next appointment tells its own story
In July 2026, Crawford named Javier Yáñez country manager in Chile, effective July 1. Semenovitch’s comments emphasized the incoming leader’s technical knowledge, client commitment and familiarity with the Chilean market. Yáñez had spent more than three decades at Crawford and also held regional responsibilities. The choice offered a specific example of the local experience Semenovitch wanted within his broader operation.
That brings the story back to the football ground, by a fairly circuitous route through engineering, insurance and claims. The setting has changed; the need for capable people who know one another persists. Semenovitch’s public career is full of efforts to make those connections useful: teach brokers, simplify access to documents, improve inspections, work with country managers. The interesting measure of that work remains close to the customer. How many requests? How many exchanges? How long until a decision? Those are modest questions for a regional president. They are rather large questions for the person waiting.