Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Fully online insurer expands simplified insurance experience for professional association members from coast to coast Toronto, ON (Nov. 16, 2020) – Sonnet Insurance and specialist commercial insurance broker BMS have come together to offer a one-stop shop approach to home and auto and liability insurance. This relationship marks Sonnet’s entry into the professional association Group Insurance space, complementing the market-leading industry expertise BMS currently delivers to over 100 Canadian associations. As the first association to benefit from this partnership, Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) members and their families will now receive a discounted rate on car and home insurance when they use Sonnet’s entirely digital experience, customized in as little as five minutes. Group Insurance as part of an integrated financial wellness solution for members This relationship is the latest in Sonnet’s continuously growing roster of member organizations and companies providing a simple, 100 per cent digital platform for their home and auto insurance needs. Home and car insurance are meaningful parts of a healthy financial wellness portfolio, bringing peace of mind by protecting people from the unexpected. Individuals who identify as financially stressed take 75 per cent more absent days,[1] are five times more likely to be distracted...

Toronto, ON (Nov. 12, 2020) – Crawford Technologies, provider of innovative document solutions that streamline, improve and manage customer communications, introduces Smart MailHub, a solution to help organizations overcome one of the big challenges of the COVID-19 era by reducing the costs, compliance risks and inconvenience of work from home (WFH) and remote office business correspondence. As more businesses adapt to working remotely, many are discovering that home office environments pose a unique set of challenges for producing and delivering business correspondence. For many businesses, producing ad hoc and small batch correspondence from remote locations is time consuming, costly and error prone. The situation has become much more complex and challenging since the onset of the pandemic. Smart MailHub solves many of the major pain points businesses face when moving business processes from a centralized office to remote locations by empowering remote staff with a secure, easy-to-use interface that makes it possible to submit documents right from their desktops to a production facility for printing, inserting, archiving, tracking and delivery. Additionally, high-integrity, web-based document tracking and audit details ensure accuracy, provide proof of mailing and mitigate compliance risks. Smart MailHub also presents an opportunity for print service providers to offer...

Kitchener, ON (Nov. 12, 2020) – ProNavigator is pleased to announce that Waypoint Insurance has selected the Ask Sage platform to support and empower their personal line brokers to find information quickly. ProNavigator provides an interactive knowledge-sharing platform powered by AI that includes an intuitive search and retrieval interface designed specifically to help answer a broad range of underwriting questions, in natural language, across multiple products, regions, carriers, and documents. Built specifically for insurance, the Ask Sage platform is a single source of truth for frequently changing insurance information to help staff find what they need when they need it. “We are excited to be working with Waypoint Insurance as our newest partner of Ask Sage,” said Joseph D’Souza, CEO of ProNavigator. “Insurance is information-driven—it’s the lifeblood of the industry—and the need for dedicated tools is more vital than ever so that brokerages like Waypoint Insurance can save lots of precious productivity time.” “Providing our brokers with advanced technology fosters a more efficient, creative, and collaborative environment,” said Ho-Ming Cheng, Director Business Performance & Analytics. “Partnering with ProNavigator will give our staff access to up-to-date resources, allowing them to provide expert advice, while saving time and delivering a heightened experience...

New SMA Blog by Mark Breading, Partner, Strategy Meets Action — A great deal of activity is underway by insurers investigating or implementing new distribution channels. For every line of business across P&C, there are compelling reasons to expand distribution beyond the tried and true channels. This is not to say that agent/broker channels or the direct distribution models are less important or going away. It is more about reaching new segments, addressing new customer expectations, and meeting customers at their point of need. There are two important dimensions to the strategies for this area: (1) determining the right mix of channels for each company, and (2) managing those channels, including any related channel conflict. SMA addresses these two dimensions in a newly released research report, P&C Distribution R(evolution): Blending Old and New Models. Determining the Right Mix of Channels Depending on how you count it, there are at least eight different models for distribution in P&C, and variations within each of those. There are the models most in use today – captive agents, independent agents and brokers, MGAs, and in some segments, the direct model (call center/web). Then there are those that have been around for a while but...

Blake Wolfe | November 16, 2020 With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic raising economic concerns, the Arthritis Society is taking a responsive approach with its Financial Literacy Month initiatives during the month of November. “We’re reading the pulse,” says Cheryl McClellan, the organization’s chief operating officer. “We haven’t seen a lot of people stressed directly in our organization, but generally, we understand that there’s a lot that’s uncertain.” This year, the organization is providing employees with pandemic-themed resources through its employee assistance program as well as its consultant and pension provider, with an emphasis on retirement planning through its group registered retirement savings plan. Read: How employers are supporting employees’ financial literacy By providing the information through third-party sources, the Arthritis Society is empowering its employees to make good financial decisions without any perceived bias from the organization, says McClellan. “We’ve provided some sessions about managing the shifts in the economic market and how people saw big changes early on in their investment portfolio when COVID first hit. We wanted to make sure that people were thinking about their retirement vehicles as long-term investments and to not worry, so we did lots of context-setting about the ebb and flow of the markets at the time.” And that approach...

Staff | November 16, 2020 The Alberta Investment Management Corp. is appointing Alison Schneider as vice-president of responsible investment.  With more than nine years of experience at the AIMCo, she joined the organization as senior manager of responsible investment in 2011.  “Alison . . .  has been foundational in building our responsible investment program and team, as well as in widening and deepening the scope of [environmental, social and governance] integration across the investment process and all asset classes,” said Dénes Németh, director of corporate communications, in an email to Benefits Canada. Read: AIMCo hires first chief investment strategy officer, Rabovsky takes Fairwater CIO role “Alison is an active contributor to the global responsible investment community. She co-founded [the global real estate sustainability] infrastructure, chairs its advisory board and co-chairs the shareholder responsibility committee of international corporate governance network. She is an active member of  organizations contributing to sustainability frameworks and guidance for investors, including the G7 investor leadership network’s climate change action committee and the Canadian standards association’s transition taxonomy group.” Read the full article at BenefitsCanada.com

Philadelphia Inquirer (PA) For financial adviser Dean Vagnozzi, it’s been a tough year. Since 2016, he had urged customers to invest in funds linked to a Philadelphia firm known as Par Funding. Then, one day in early 2020, he learned that Par Funding couldn’t make payments to investors. “I was holding my breath that it wouldn’t come to that, but it did,” Vagnozzi would say later in a deposition. “It was a very — it was a very difficult day. It was … one of the most troubling days I’ve had in a long, long time …. My phone was ringing off the hook … from hundreds of people, hundreds of panicked people.” In July, federal financial regulators sued Vagnozzi, along with the owners of Par Funding and others, alleging they had defrauded 1,200 investors who put in nearly $500 million. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says Vagnozzi and Par Funding misled investors about Par’s financial soundness and the criminal past of a founder. Vagnozzi and Par say those allegations are false. The SEC and the defendants are fighting over the civil suit in federal court. In the interim, the agency and Vagnozzi have made public hundreds of pages...

A pair of new surveys have confirmed that the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, aside from weighing on Canadian workers’ mental health, is likewise testing business owners. According to a report from BDC, Canada’s bank for entrepreneurs, nearly two thirds of Canadian business owners it surveyed (64%) are coping well within the COVID-19 context, but almost a third (29%) said it differs on a daily basis. Two in five business owners (39%) reported feeling depressed at least once a week, and two thirds (64%) said they feel tired or are lacking in energy. In addition, the survey found certain specific groups of business owners appeared disproportionately impacted: Women were substantially more likely to feel depressed (51%) and admit their ability to work was hampered by mental health challenges (40%); An outsized proportion of visible minorities said they faced mental health challenges that limited their productivity (48%), with a third (33%) saying they would have liked support from a mental health professional; Owners of businesses that were still not operational were overwhelmingly likely to feel tired (87%), depressed (75%), and say mental health challenges got in the way of their ability to work (57%). Among the business owners’ worries, the most...

Kelvin Chan, The Associated Press | November 13, 2020 White-collar staff reaping the financial benefits of working from home should be taxed to help other workers who aren’t getting the same advantages, experts at Deutsche Bank said in a new report. In its report on how to rebuild the economy after the coronavirus pandemic, the bank proposed a five-per-cent daily tax on each employee that continues to work from home, which could raise tens of billions of dollars for governments. The money could be used to help lower-income workers who have taken on greater risk because their jobs can’t be done remotely, the report said. The bank noted the global pandemic has turbocharged the shift to remote work, a trend that looks set to last for the long term, with many workers expecting to spend at least a few days of their workweek at home even after the pandemic ends. Read: 85% of Canadian workers want option to keep working from home after coronavirus: survey These workers benefit from more convenience and flexibility. They also save money directly because they don’t have to pay for commuting costs, takeout lunches or buying and dry cleaning work clothes — but it means those businesses that have...

Lauren Bailey | November 13, 2020 Wellness apps are becoming an increasingly popular perk for Canadian employers to offer employees, particularly as stress continues to soar as the coronavirus pandemic drags on. CAA Club Group was ahead of the pack, launching its wellness app company-wide in 2018. However, a wide range of meditation and mindfulness apps are available, so plan sponsors have to do their due diligence when choosing, says Mara Notarfonzo, the organization’s assistant vice-president of compensation and benefits. She advises employers to set realistic, clearly defined goals and to consider the intent when diving into the sea of meditation and mindfulness apps on the market.  Read: CAA shares journey to a healthy workplace Employees at CAA’s call centre had always worked from home, so leadership knew it needed something to provide wellness services to these employees and maintain a social connection with them, she says, noting the wellness app was a way of bridging a diverse group of individuals. The tool was one of the first used at the onset of the pandemic, says Notarfonzo. The company put a lot of effort into directing people back to the app and saw adoption increase substantially within the first month of the shutdown. The app is a...