Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Guidewire recognizes Solution partners’ achievements and continues to expand the breadth of integrations available in the Marketplace, benefiting its global community of P&C insurers San Mateo, CA (June 17, 2020) – Guidewire Software, Inc., provider of the industry platform Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers rely upon, is pleased to announce that six Solution partners have been promoted within the PartnerConnect Solution Alliance Program for their contributions serving mutual customers. PartnerConnect includes four relationship tiers (or levels); Access, Select, Advantage, and Premier. The PartnerConnect tiers are designed to recognize individual partners based on their achievements, and promotions are awarded as partners gain more market traction when their integrated solutions are adopted by Guidewire customers. Joining current Premier tier partners Hyland, OpenText and Smart Communications are: Enterprise Holdings drives process efficiencies with ClaimCenter integrations for ARMS® and Entegral Smart Locator customers. Quadient provides InsuranceSuite integrations for Quadient Inspire, a centralized platform for design, management, and delivery of personalized, compliant omnichannel customer communications. Partners promoted to the Advantage tier include: CoreLogic, whose integrations allow our joint customers to gain insights to make better, faster decisions through access to robust commercial and residential property data. FRISS recently released the client validated FRISS add-on for...

By Greg Boutin, CEO, Relay Platform — We are sometimes asked why the world needs a new platform for Risk Transfer. There are already so many! The Quick Answer Let us start by saying that Relay isn’t just a placement platform. Relay is a SaaS platform that helps insurance and reinsurance participants with structuring and transferring risk faster, digitizing and augmenting their dealmaking network, and taking out the pain of managing all associated communications, reminders, reporting and integrations. In a nutshell, Relay helps with the upstream data gathering, structuring and administration of risk placements. Everything that happens before any actual transaction is conducted. That is critical. Few platforms tackle those steps, which remain mostly manual, and this is why Relay is in fact fully compatible with most other placement platforms. We certainly handle the transactions themselves, and we handle them very well. But if all you need is a system to centralize risk transfer information, and then push it to third parties like brokers or a reinsurer, by email, MS Excel, XML, API or other formats, then you will find Relay to be a top choice, still. We have found in our many discussions with brokers, underwriters and ceding teams,...

Martha Porado | June 22, 2020 For many employers, the newly digital office environment necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic can be awkward, especially for recent graduates entering career-track jobs for the firm time. “Personally, I’m saddened by the situation for a number of reasons, but certainly for those students that are graduating and looking for summer internships, . . . hiring practices aren’t the same,” says Mary Ann Yule, president and chief executive officer of HP Canada. “How do you onboard individuals so they actually feel your company culture, part of the team and that they can cultivate these relationships? “Ordinarily, when you onboard someone into your company, you introduce them to people, you take them through seminars and all these different things that companies do to make sure they’re welcomes and that they find their place.” Read: Five workplace changes that should stay post-coronavirus However, it’s not a given that managers will use video technology and employers need to ensure managers are leveraging those tools effectively, she says, including ensuring new hires have the proper tools they need to function at home. “We have to take advantage of video technology, which is great because a lot of the grads probably get that...

Annuity sales in the U.S. are set to struggle in 2020, with a rebound not in the cards until at least next year. According to forecasts from the Secure Retirement Institute (SRI), total annuity sales in the U.S. will drop between 8% and 15% this year. It cited the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered ultra-low interest rates, extreme market volatility, and record-high unemployment – conditions that generally make for weak annuity sales. However, SRI sees a brighter outlook for 2021 and 2022. Aside from a slow rise in equity markets and interest rates, it expects an expansion in the number of people aged 65 and older to enable an annuity market rebound that will make up for losses in 2020. One corner of the annuity space is also expected to thrive this year. According to Todd Giesing, senior research director, SRI Annuity Research, registered index-linked annuities (RILAs) are uniquely positioned to thrive under current conditions as they “offer investment growth opportunity with limited downside risk.” The lone annuity product poised for growth in 2020, RILAs are expected to reach nearly US$20 billion as consumers seek a balance of protection, safety, and growth potential. A sub-segment of variable annuities...

Staff  | June 19, 2020 As part of a new collective agreement ratified earlier this year, employees at Hamilton, Ont.-based Vopak Terminals have joined the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology pension plan’s DBPlus arrangement, effective June 1, 2020. With the change, these employees, who are members of Unifor, move from a defined contribution plan into a defined benefit plan. Since DBPlus was launched in 2018, more than 33 employers and more than 15,000 members have joined the plan. Read: Four more employers join CAAT’s DBplus pension plan “Getting a good pension was a major priority for our members in this round of bargaining and CAAT met both our need to ensure a stable retirement income for our members while recognizing the needs of our employer,” said Phil Barbara, president of Unifor Local 2003E, in a press release. Read the full article at BenefitsCanada.com

Staff | June 19, 2020 The majority (95 per cent) of global employers said they include emotional and mental-health programs in their corporate well-being platforms, according to a new survey by Business Health Group and Fidelity Investments Inc. The survey, which was fielded last fall and prior to the coronavirus pandemic, found the most common mental-health and well-being offerings were teletherapy, which 69 per cent of employers said they’ll offer this year, followed by stress management (50 per cent), resiliency programs (49 per cent) and programs to help improve sleep (33 per cent).  Employers also said they’re increasing their emphasis on helping employees improve their work-life balance, with 78 per cent of respondents reporting they include these types of benefits in their well-being platforms. Popular work-life balance benefits included caregiver support (46 per cent), programs and tools for new parents (36 per cent) and childcare support (35 per cent). Read: Majority of Canadian employees rank work-life balance as good, excellent: survey “Employers are facing a completely different set of well-being challenges this year as they and their employees try to adapt to changes to their physical work environment or their job status,” said Shams Talib, head of Fidelity’s workplace consulting division, in a press release. “The...

Birny Birnbaum is challenging insurers and regulators to eliminate systemic racism and bias. The Center for Economic Justice today challenged insurers and insurance regulators to match their public statements condemning systemic bias and inherent racism with concrete actions to address inherent racism in insurance. “We were heartened to see insurance company CEO’s calling for changing business practices to stop the effects of systemic bias and inherent racism in society. But we now challenge the insurers and their regulators to show these statements were not mere public relations, but reflect a true commitment to stamp out discriminatory practices in insurance,” said Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the center. The May 25 murder of George Floyd has led to widespread corporate recognition of andopposition to systemic bias and inherent racism in America. Corporate CEOs have spoken out,including several major insurer CEOs. “I encourage each of us to step outside of our comfort zones, seek to understand, engage in productive conversations and hold ourselves accountable for being part of the solution,” said Kirt Walker, CEO of Nationwide. “We must forever stamp out racism and discrimination.” The center, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization, set out two concrete actions for insurers and state insurance regulators...

New pilot a “game-changer” Regina, SK (June 18, 2020) – SGI CANADA and Custom Software Solutions Inc. (CSSI) are pleased to announce they are piloting the first real-time, personal lines policy change request transaction in Canada, starting and ending in the broker management system (BMS). The process connects CSSI’s broker management system, The Broker’s Workstation, rating service IntelliQuote (IQ) and SGI CANADA’s policy management system, transferring data between the systems in real time using CSSI’s I-Company carrier integration product. It allows brokers working with SGI CANADA to underwrite, rate and submit a policy change in real time from their broker management system to the insurer. If accepted, a revised policy will be returned in real time, including the eDocs policy document. “This is a game-changer,” said SGI CANADA’s Chief Digital and Information Officer Dawn Bloom. “By giving brokers the ability to make changes to our personal property policies within their own BMS, we’re making it easier for them to do business with us and improve the customer experience overall.” “We know brokers have been asking for the ability to transact business with insurers through their own broker management systems for many years, and SGI CANADA is proud to be among...

Awareness, enforcement, legislation pushing drivers to make better choices Regina, SK (June 17, 2020) – A significant drop in the number of impaired driving fatalities last year suggests most people in Saskatchewan have decided it is simply not okay to drive impaired. Preliminary numbers indicate 21[1] people lost their lives last year as a result of impaired driving collisions, compared to an annual average of 54 between 2009-2018. Injuries resulting from impaired driving continued to trend downward, with 332 reported in 2019, compared to the annual average of 595 over the previous decade. The 2019 impaired driving fatality and the injury numbers are the lowest SGI has on record.[2] “Our government has worked with victims’ families, law enforcement, advocacy groups and other stakeholders on a number of fronts to improve safety on our roads and fight Saskatchewan’s impaired driving problem,” Minister Responsible for SGI Joe Hargrave said. “The 2019 numbers are further evidence that Saskatchewan is making major progress on the province’s historically high impaired driving rates. The result is more lives saved and fewer families having to experience the unspeakable tragedy of seeing someone they love killed or severely injured due to impaired driving.” Minister Hargrave credited the downward...

The Florida Legislature sent a bill to the governor’s desk Wednesday that would prohibit insurers from using customers’ genetic information in changing, denying or canceling policies. It is not known if Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, will sign the bill, which is generally opposed by the insurance industry. The Florida House of Representatives passed a bill Jan. 29. Sen. Kelli Stargel, R, sponsored the Senate bill and made one significant change: to allow insurers to use genetic information included in a consumer’s medical record. “Insurers may use genetic information for underwriting purposes only if (1) genetic information is contained in the medical record, (2) the use of any genetic testing results is limited to what is in the medical record, (3) the genetic information is relevant to a potential medical condition that impacts mortality or morbidity risk, and (4) the genetic information is related to expected mortality or morbidity based on sound actuarial principles or reasonably expected experience,” the law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath said in an alert. State and federal law already prevent health insurance companies from considering a person’s genetic information when deciding if and at what price to cover that consumer. The Florida legislation would extend...