Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Start Slideshow Financial advisors often operate at a disadvantage within the high-net-worth community. They are not the first people with a similar professional background attempting to gain a foothold in the ultra-wealthy circle. Although these wealthy individuals might have met charming advisors, they remember the boorish one vividly. How can you interact in HNW circles without looking like you are trying too hard?  Here is your challenge: When you find yourself in front of someone wealthy in a social setting, a little voice inside you might say: “I may never be in front of this person again. I better make the most of it.” If you come on too strong, doing everything except saying, “I want to be your best friend,” you risk scaring off a favorite prospect. A good strategy is to realize that this could be the first of several encounters. Your objective is to learn enough in the initial meeting to identify an interest in common and hopefully run into the potential client in the future. These nine approaches can help you gain a foothold with HNW individuals, without being shunned because you remind them of a financial advisor or insurance agent who behaved badly. Start Slideshow

Belleville, ON (Feb. 1, 2024) – McDougall Insurance Brokers Ltd. (“McDougall Insurance”) announced today that they have combined with MHK Insurance Inc. (“MHK”) effective immediately and are pleased to welcome all members of the MHK team in both Edmonton and Calgary to the McDougall Insurance team. “With nearly 80 full-time employees and a history going back 110 years, MHK is a perfect fit to strengthen our Alberta presence and join with our eight Drayden Insurance offices,” said Ross McDougall, CEO of McDougall Insurance. “We continue to grow in Alberta and now have approximately 200 employees in the province, and we feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to partner with such a well-respected, customer-oriented, and community-minded brokerage.” The executive team of Jeff Homynyk, President and CEO, Jill Repchuk, COO and Jana Lumsden, CFO, along with other members of their leadership, will continue to guide MHK Insurance going forward. “In order to even consider such a deal, there were many factors that were important to me and to our team,” says Homynyk. “Our alignment in terms of values, culture, way of doing business, relationships with our staff, our clients, our insurers, and our community, and continued operational independence led...

Start Slideshow U.S. COVID-19 surge figures still look terrible. Hospital-reported COVID deaths of people of all ages increased to 935, or 30% more than the total reported the previous week, according to data reported by hospitals to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Excluding weeks when spurts of data from Iowa threw off the counts, it’s the worst figure since  early February 2023. What it means: The latest numbers are not nearly as bad as the numbers reported during the worst weeks of the COVID pandemic, but they mean “endemic COVID” is still a big problem. Working-age hospitalizations: The number of COVID hospitalizations of people ages 20 through 59 was 5,045, according to the HHS data. That was down 10% from the previous week, but it means the count has been over 5,000 for seven straight weeks, since the week ending Dec. 16, 2023. Previously, the count had been below 5,000, and usually below 3,500, every week from early March 2023. About 22% of the adults hospitalized for COVID in the latest week were ages 20 through 59. Rough 4% of all people admitted to U.S. hospitals with COVID are dying. For a look at the five states with the highest...

A 2024 ICTA nomination Toronto, ON (Feb. 2, 2024) – CloudAdvisors has built a platform for employee benefits evaluation. Employers rely on insurance brokers/advisors to advise, design and renew benefit plans annually. Yet, these professionals often lack the access to data and tools to analyse the strength, or weakness of their clients benefit plans. That’s where we come in. CloudAdvisors began its journey in 2015 with broker automation. Since then, we’ve developed and launched an entire platform in early 2021 that tracks broker clients, leads and prospects, provides an interactive benchmarking dashboard and provides employee benefit Plan Evaluations to plan sponsors for free. We continue to develop new technology and services everyday. Advisors use our platform to retain their top clients through imperative benefits insights and analysis. We also help brokers win new clients by being the ‘carrot’ needed to win over new business. For benefit providers, we provide an open marketplace for them to promote products. We also provide quoting capabilities that allow providers to get their products in front of brokers primed to sell clients on new benefits. For employers and plan sponsors we provide a central source of truth through real data that informs them on the...

A 2024 ICTA nomination Toronto, ON (Feb. 2, 2024) – B4E Insurtech provides modular, no-code user-friendly insurance infrastructure solutions for Reinsurers, Insurers, and Intermediaries, driving innovation, development and deployment of simple, affordable, digitally accessible inclusive insurance products for the mass-market segments. Our application use case depends upon the nature of the business of our client. Reinsurer: Our platform allows reinsurers to develop, deploy and offer simple rule-based insurance products along with supporting digital infrastructure to Cedents independently, without any dependance or cost impact. Insurers: Our platform allows insurers to deploy and offer simple rule-based insurance products along with supporting digital infrastructure to intermediaries independently, without any dependance or cost impact. Intermediaries: Our platform allows intermediaries such as banks, brokers etc., to source and deploy various simple rule-based insurance products from multiple insurance companies and deploy the same on a single digital platform seamlessly, and start selling within under 30 minutes, without any dependance or cost impact. Value proposition Swift Speed-to-Market: Our partners can now go from product deployment to sales within under 30 minutes, reducing the speed-to-market from anything between 3 to 6 months to within minutes. Zero Upfront Cost: Traditional product deployment costs can start from USD 100,000 and...

A 2024 ICTA nomination Toronto, ON (Feb. 2, 2024) – Wisedocs’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Medical Record Summary Platform, launched in June 2023, has implemented our state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities to enable customers who process medical records to immediately generate a summary in their medical documents. Designed with the insurance industry in mind, our platform builds off our existing medical record review software to further support stakeholders within the insurance ecosystem to conduct fast and inexpensive reviews. With this innovative technology for the insurance industry, customers can quickly summarize thousands of pages of medical records while gaining intelligent insights across documents by leveraging our generative artificial intelligence. Insurance companies, legal firms, third-party medical evaluators and clinical staff can leverage Wisedocs’ summary platform to gain concise medical summaries, extract key clinical information, and build meaningful and fully customizable medical summaries. Through the Wisedocs platform, users will have access to various features to further address and customize the medical records for review. Key features of this release include an interactive timeline view, summary templates, keyword and date filtering, and an interactive summary annotator. The use of these features further allows customers to quickly review the medical record and gain insights into the claimant’s...