Reshaping Personal Insurance Underwriting: Inside the MyChoice–Billyard Collaboration

By Dave Brooks, Director of Marketing, Billyard Insurance Group —

While much of the insurance industry’s public discourse has centred on rate pressure, capacity constraints, and the growing complexity of personal lines risk management, some of the most consequential innovation has been happening quietly, far from conference stages and headline announcements.

Over the past two years, MyChoice and Billyard Insurance Group (BIG) have been working in close partnership on a practical response to the underwriting challenges facing brokers and carriers alike. That collaboration led to PrecisionX, an underwriting and pre-risk assessment platform built to improve accuracy, reduce loss-ratio volatility, and increase operational efficiency at scale.

Rather than positioning artificial intelligence as a future-state ambition, the collaboration has remained grounded in solving real-world problems underwriting teams and brokerages are confronting today. That practical focus was shaped early on by MyChoice’s participation in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Canada, where access to cloud infrastructure and early AI tooling helped form the foundation of what would later become its submission validation and evidence intelligence engine.

From Growth to Underwriting Precision

For fast-growing brokerages, scale can be a double-edged sword. Increased submission volume can introduce underwriting risk, manual bottlenecks, and subtle premium leakage. These issues may not surface immediately, but they quietly erode portfolio performance over time.

PrecisionX emerged directly from this challenge. As Billyard Insurance Group expanded nationally, brokerage leadership set out to strengthen pre-underwriting controls and establish faster, more consistent risk triage before submissions reached carrier partners. What began as internal infrastructure to support growth evolved into a broader submission trust framework once its impact became measurable at scale.

“The goal was to improve how risk is assessed before it ever reaches binding,” said Stephen Billyard, CEO of Billyard Insurance Group. “If you can standardize, validate, and enrich submissions upstream, you reduce friction across the entire value chain. What we’ve seen so far is a measurable improvement in speed, efficiency and accuracy, with early indicators pointing to stronger risk assessment and reduced downstream underwriting friction.”

Importantly, the platform was designed to support growth rather than constrain it, ensuring increased volume did not come at the expense of underwriting discipline or data quality.

Solving Problems Before They Reach the Carrier

Unlike many technology initiatives that prioritize automation for its own sake, PrecisionX was built around three core underwriting objectives: reducing loss-ratio volatility through improved risk assessment prior to bind; improving underwriting accuracy by standardizing and validating data inputs in real time during underwriting and binding; and increasing operational efficiency by minimizing manual reviews, rework, and exception handling.

By embedding underwriting intelligence directly into the broker workflow, PrecisionX identifies underwriting deficiencies and mispriced risks earlier in the process, before they become costly exceptions for carrier underwriting teams or downstream claims activity.

Industry observers note that this type of pre-emptive underwriting support is becoming increasingly critical as insurers tighten guidelines and place greater emphasis on submission quality, consistency, and predictability from distribution partners. That shift has increasingly drawn carrier attention upstream, toward how risk is prepared and validated before it enters core underwriting systems.

Embedded Intelligence, Not Black-Box Automation

From MyChoice’s perspective, the collaboration reflects a broader shift toward embedding intelligence directly into operational workflows rather than layering technology onto existing processes.

“AI doesn’t create value simply by existing,” said Aren Mirzaian, CEO of MyChoice. “It creates value when it quietly removes friction, improves decision-making, and allows underwriting teams to focus on the risks that genuinely require human judgment. That’s what we’ve been building with BIG—something practical, measurable, and already in use at scale.”

Rather than replacing underwriting expertise, PrecisionX is designed to support it, providing consistent, real-time, data-driven signals that enhance judgment rather than override it.

A Blueprint for Broker-Led Innovation

As insurers continue to push for cleaner data, tighter underwriting discipline, and more predictable portfolio performance, collaborations like the one between MyChoice and Billyard Insurance Group offer a blueprint for how broker-led innovation can evolve. Rather than displacing broker workflows, this approach creates shared confidence earlier in the submission lifecycle.

Instead of waiting for carrier-side solutions, PrecisionX demonstrates how distribution partners can proactively address underwriting challenges, creating value not only within their own operations but across the broader insurance ecosystem.

Much of this work remains behind the scenes. As personal lines underwriting increasingly rewards precision, efficiency, and risk discipline, projects like PrecisionX suggest that the most influential innovations may be those quietly improving outcomes long before they reach the headlines. More recently, this work has extended into direct collaboration with carriers, including MyChoice’s recent selection into Guidewire’s InsurTech Vanguard program, as insurers explore ways to bring greater transparency and predictability to the broker channel without adding friction.

A Partnership Built on Innovation and Collaboration

PrecisionX is not simply a technology build. It is the product of a deeply integrated partnership between Billyard Insurance Group and MyChoice. Through a substantial strategic investment, the two organizations aligned their long-term interests around a shared objective: building underwriting intelligence that is practical, scalable, and grounded in real-world broker and carrier workflows.

By bringing together the underwriting expertise of one of Canada’s fastest-growing brokerages with MyChoice’s technical and development capabilities, the collaboration allowed both teams to work in lockstep, iterating, testing, and refining the platform in live environments rather than theoretical ones. The result is a solution shaped as much by underwriting judgment and broker experience as by technology.

“This wasn’t about investing in technology for technology’s sake,” said Billyard. “It was about combining deep underwriting discipline with exceptional technical talent to build something meaningful. When experienced brokers and underwriters work shoulder-to-shoulder with skilled engineers and data scientists, you get solutions that genuinely change outcomes.”

This level of integration, where brokerage leadership, underwriting practitioners, and technologists build together, remains relatively rare in Canadian personal lines. It is also what has allowed PrecisionX to move beyond experimentation and into sustained operational impact.

About MyChoice

MyChoice is a Toronto-based Insurtech company that equips brokers and insurance companies with tools they need to excel in operations and client acquisition. Their rate comparison site MyChoice.ca, gives Canadians access to competitive auto, home, and life insurance rates. MyChoice blends their industry knowledge with cutting-edge technologies to build solutions that significantly enhance brokerage and insurance company processes and workflows. For more information, visit www.mychoice.ca.

About the Billyard Insurance Group

Billyard Insurance Group (BIG) is a rapidly growing, award-winning insurance brokerage headquartered in Welland, Ontario, with 87 branches across four provinces. Partnering with over 30 leading insurance providers, BIG is recognized as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies and a top employer. The company is committed to empowering brokers through innovation and technology to deliver exceptional service and solutions to clients. To learn more about BIG and the services it offers, visit www.thebig.ca.

Source: Billyard Insurance Group (BIG)

Tags: Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, Billyard Insurance Group (BIG), MyChoice, partnership, personal lines, platform, Transformation, Underwriting