Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Montreal, QC (Sept. 17, 2020) – Apollo Insurance Solutions Ltd. (“Apollo Exchange”), Canada’s largest online insurance marketplace, and the Keal System Users (KSU) have partnered to offer the Keal group immediate quote, bind and policy issuance. With this partnership, both parties are able to collaborate on technology solutions and work together to provide a streamlined experience for brokers. The Apollo broker portal features hundreds of classes of business – as well as special event and tenant insurance — eligible to quote, bind, and issue policy documents online and in real time, in line with the expectations of modern consumers. “With the changing environment it is important for brokers to have access to technology which allows them to focus on the important goals of growing a business without getting distracted with menial tasks.” said Sharon Bajwa, VP Business Development – National at Apollo. “The Apollo Exchange provides a solution to that problem.” “The KSU Board is excited to work with Apollo on this partnership. This initiative will allow our members to further their digital transformation and online offering,” said Sheldon Williams, KSU President. “Apollo continues to provide the market with great solutions and our KSU members are at the forefront of...

Staff | September 18, 2020 The Canada Climate Law Initiative is calling into question whether the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is sufficiently aligning its investments with the transition to a low-carbon economy. In a legal analysis, the organization said the pension fund’s current allocations to high-carbon assets reveal a “troubling incrementalism” within its efforts to mitigate Canadians’ exposure to material financial risks relating to climate change. “Climate change poses systemic risks, impacting supply chains, future cash flows and disrupting business models across industries,” said Nick Silver, managing director of Callund Consulting, in a press release from the CCLI. “CPP Investments would best fulfill its investment mandate and serve the best interests of Canadians by transitioning out of declining fossil fuel assets and into industries of the future which will create the jobs, infrastructure and growth today that Canada will need to become a thriving economy in the 21st century.” Read: Bâtirente sets new climate commitment for 2025 The analysis also suggested that exposure to these assets may be inconsistent with the CPPIB’s fiduciary duty. It highlighted the duty corporate directors have to clearly communicate the impacts, current and future, of climate change on the company to their investors. “Like other fiduciaries, pension fund administrators have a...

Staff | September 18, 2020 U.S. employers are planning to maintain core health benefits but are exploring other changes to preserve jobs and manage expenses, according to new a new survey by Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. The survey, which looked at data from nearly 4,000 employers over several months, found close to half have planned salary freezes for management and executives (43 per cent) and non-management personnel (42 per cent) in order to preserve jobs in 2021. Following the outbreak of the coronavirus, 83 per cent of employers said they strongly emphasized specific benefits within their total well-being package, including emotional well-being supports (65 per cent), leave policies (47 per cent), medical benefits (39 per cent) and physical well-being benefits (36 per cent). Read: Employers concerned about retaining valued staff amid salary cuts, freezes: survey However, the pandemic hasn’t forced employers to make mid-year adjustments to coverage, with 86 per cent of employers saying they hadn’t reduced health benefits and didn’t plan to during the crisis. More than two-thirds (79 per cent) said they expect to continue the same health coverage into 2021. “Over the last decade, a tightening labour market led employers to offer a robust holistic rewards strategy to win the war for talent, but the pandemic...

Jennifer Paterson | September 18, 2020 I’m about to embark on the most exciting and terrifying chapter of my life — by the time you read this, I’ll be more than six months pregnant with my first child. With a decade in the industry, writing and editing stories about work-life balance, it’s now time to face the reality myself and try to answer the question: Can I have it all? Certain realities of our new normal will definitely lower some of the barriers. While Benefits Canada and our parent company Contex Group Inc. may have a brick-and-mortar office when I return from maternity leave, at the moment, like many other companies and industries, we’re all working from home. That’s allowed me the opportunity to finally give up my tiny apartment in Toronto and move full time to my big house — and five acres — in Prince Edward County, the gorgeous wine region nestled on Lake Ontario. Read: Women in Canada’s benefits, pension industries talk gender diversity and beyond All of these changes coincide with our third annual Women’s Issue. For the Cover Story, I spoke with nine senior women in the human resources, benefits, pension and investment industries. In discussing career...

Insurers’ apparent unease on providing coverage to tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic could be on its way to dissipating as Manulife announces a new specialized travel insurance plan. The Manulife COVID-19 Pandemic Travel Plan, to be launched in October, will be available to Canadians travelling both domestically and internationally, including to countries with a Level 3 Travel Advisory in place. Aside from emergency medical coverage that includes additional coverage specific to COVID-19 and related conditions, the new Manulife travel policy will also provide for trip interruption benefits in the event of quarantine. “The pandemic has had extraordinary impacts on the day-to-day lives of Canadians, and at Manulife, our top priority remains the health and safety of our customers, employees, partners and communities,” Alex Lucas, head of Insurance at Manulife, said in a statement. “This specialized travel insurance is aimed at helping protect what matters most.” The policy comes with the following types of coverage, provisions, and coverage limits: Canadians will be able to avail of the Manulife COVID-19 Pandemic Travel Plan through Manulife’s distribution channels including travel agents, brokers, advisors, and sponsors, as well as for direct purchase through Manulife CoverMe. Read the original article at https://www.lifehealthpro.ca/rss/

Adopting a new mindset, leveraging intelligent processes and collaborating with ecosystem partners will be crucial to meet rising business and customer need Paris (Sept. 15, 2020) – Insurers must explore new ways to build capabilities to meet the digital needs of customers as BigTechs[1] and non-traditional players enter the insurance space, according to the World InsurTech Report 2020 (WITR) published by Capgemini and Efma. With COVID-19 increasing customer engagement and expectations, the World InsurTech Report 2020 outlines a growing opportunity for InsurTechs, as insurers focus on their digitalization efforts. As BigTechs make their presence felt in insurance, the boundaries between insurance, InsurTechs, BigTechs, and tech partners are blurring. Insurers need to improve on high-impact focus areas including customer centricity, intelligent processes, product agility and an open ecosystem to remain competitive. “Insurers have to look beyond other insurance companies as their competitors, and instead include BigTechs and other new non-traditional players, which are often offering a superior customer experience,” said Anirban Bose, CEO of Capgemini’s Financial Services Strategic Business Unit and Member of the Group Executive Board. “Forming scalable relationships with InsurTechs will help insurers digitize faster and more efficiently, deepening their customer relationships and helping them to fend off these...

Blockdata’s technology synthesizes vast amounts of unstructured information about the blockchain ecosystem to enable financial institutions, governments and enterprises to confidently decide on the use cases, companies, and projects they should pursue New York, NY (Sept. 16, 2020) – CB Insights, which enables the world’s leading companies to make smarter technology decisions, has acquired Blockdata, a Netherlands-based software company that tracks the global blockchain economy. Blockdata provides differentiated data and predictive insights on the growing but increasingly complex blockchain and distributed ledger technology ecosystem. Their technology enables financial institutions, governments and enterprises to identify the most credible use cases of blockchain and pinpoint the best companies and projects to work with. Ultimately, this enables clients to drastically reduce the uncertainty, time and effort to go from technology discovery to decision. This is CB Insights’ second acquisition following soon after their July 2020 acquisition of the assets of Dow Jones VentureSource. Both M&A transactions provide CB Insights’ clients with proprietary data and intelligence that will allow them to not just understand but ultimately make decisions about technology more quickly and confidently. The conversation between the companies was kicked off by a cold email and came together fully virtually in less than...

Staff | September 17, 2020 Guardian Capital is forming a collaboration with Moshe Milevsky, a professor of finance at York University’s Schulich School of Business, that focuses on retirement finance. As an academic, Milevsky is currently working on research on the intersections of financial engineering, actuarial science, insurance contingent claims and wealth management, according to a press release. “There is an acute need for innovation to solve the growing challenges and education around how to think about retirement income, portfolio longevity and issues like sequence-of-return risk,” he said in the release. Read: Bob Baldwin appointed chair of C.D. Howe pension policy council Milevsky is the author of 15 books and managing director of PI Longevity Extension Corp., a private consultancy focused on developing concepts to enhance long-term investment strategies with the goal of improving portfolio longevity. “This will be a key area of collaboration for us and we will be working together to develop new and innovative retirement income solutions to address the particular needs of the growing proportion of Canadian investors who are increasingly focused on generating higher income and extending the life of their portfolios,” said Barry Gordon, managing director and head of Canadian retail asset management at Guardian Capital. Read the full article at BenefitsCanada.com

Board of Directors green-lights INNOTECH Committee’s proposed solutions to address industry pain points Toronto, ON (July 6, 2020) – CSIO is pleased to announce that its Board of Directors have green-lighted three digital solutions proposed by the INNOTECH Advisory Committee and Working Groups. During the September 15 meeting, the Board of Directors were presented with three business cases for proposed solutions that were collaboratively researched by Committee and Working Group members. The approved solutions will improve the claims and billing customer journeys and standardize APIs. This is a significant milestone for the INNOTECH Committee on its one-year anniversary. The INNOTECH Committee was conceived to gain broad-based representation from industry partners and discuss, analyze, research and propose digital and tech-based solutions that would solve common industry pain points. Meeting throughout the past year, the Committee and Working Groups conducted extensive research to ensure that each suggested solution chosen would have a high likelihood of success and provide broad benefits to the industry and end consumers. The research included business and use cases to test how the solution would positively impact business processes. The next steps to implement the solutions are as follows: Billing and Claims: Leveraging CSIOnet and the eDoc standard,...

Staff | September 17, 2020 The Pension Investment Association of Canada is taking issue with some of the recommendations drafted by Ontario’s capital markets modernization task force, specifically those related to proxy advisory firms. In a recent letter to Walied Soliman, the chair of the task force, the PIAC disagreed with a proposal to introduce a regulatory framework for proxy advisory firms. “It serves PIAC members well to understand the potential conflicts relating to proxy advice that they receive and pay for and are supportive of robust disclosure of relationships, transactions or other interests that might result in a conflict between the interests of a proxy advisor and those of shareholders,” read the letter. “We do not believe it is necessary to restrict proxy advisors from providing consulting services to issuers since we have found the disclosures already provided to be adequate and have not encountered significant conflict of interest problems.” Read: What’s the role of the proxy advisor as rules shift? The PIAC also said it doesn’t support the idea of providing issuers with a statutory right to rebut the advice of proxy advisory firms. More participation by issuers would detract from the objectivity that proxy advisory firms aim to supply, it said. “The ability of investment...