2022 Women to Watch Awards Americas EMEA
Leticia Trevino Chief insurance compliance officer
Heffernan Insurance Brokers Inc.
Walnut Creek, California
Leticia Trevino first joined Heffernan Insurance Brokers in 2000 as a claims manager and consultant. After leaving in 2016 via an acquisition, she returned in May 2021 in her current role to tackle various challenges at the brokerage, including establishing a data infrastructure and making compliance more robust.
She’d kept in touch with CEO Michael Heffernan and he reached out to her about the new role, she said.
Ms. Trevino entered the workforce as a receptionist in a chiropractic office in 1992, where she had her first exposure to workers compensation claims.
A patient who was a paralegal recruited her to join a law firm, where she worked in client intake and administration and made use of her Spanish language skills.
In 1994, a colleague at the firm encouraged her to join a training program, which eventually led to a claims adjuster position with Fremont Compensation Insurance Group Inc., where her bilingual skills again proved valuable.
“I used to handle some of the more difficult agriculture accounts,” Ms. Trevino said, which were often high-exposure clients of the firm.
Recruited to Heffernan by a former colleague, she took on progressively more responsibility, almost on an ad hoc basis. It was a series of “We have this job, let’s give it a shot,” she said.
Preferring operations roles to broking, in 2013 she became chief operating officer of Select Solutions, a unit within Heffernan that was acquired by Patra Corp. in January 2016, and rose to chief operating officer, U.S operations, at Patra.
It was from there she was recruited back to Heffernan.
As a minority woman, Ms. Trevino says she recognizes “we have a lot of work to do” to eliminate the inequities between the genders that remain in areas such as compensation and opportunity.
Bob Murphy, chief revenue officer in San Francisco for Patra, said Ms. Trevino “makes the people around her better. Leticia has deep industry experience and expertise, and people learn from her. She is a leader and a strong manager.”
