Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

PolicyAdvisor.com survey reveals enormous life insurance shortfall among Canadians with financial dependents Toronto, ON (Nov. 6, 2019) – New research from Canadian online insurance brokerage PolicyAdvisor.com finds that an overwhelming majority of Canadians with dependents are significantly underinsured and are in denial about the severity of the situation. PolicyAdvisor.com’s inaugural State of the Nation: Canadian Life Insurance Trends 2019 report sought to determine consumer trends and attitudes about life insurance ownership, needs, knowledge, and digital appetite by polling Canadians that need life insurance. While most surveys poll all Canadians as respondents for generalised findings, PolicyAdvisor’com’s survey uniquely focused on those who most need life insurance coverage: Canadians that have family members as financial dependents. “The findings were eye-opening, to say the least,” said Jiten Puri, founder and CEO of PolicyAdvisor.com. “We had some general expectations about what we would learn, but some of the hard numbers paint a starker picture about financial unpreparedness than we had anticipated.” Life insurance ownership The most surprising result was the extent to which Canadians are underinsured. 49% of Canadians with dependents surveyed have never purchased life insurance before. Of those indicating they have a life insurance policy, 40% are only covered through a work...

24/7 service delivers real-time property alerts & verification Sunnyvale, CA (Nov. 7, 2019) – Roost®, the global leader in Property Telematics for P&C insurance carriers, today announced that it is now shipping its highly anticipated Protection360 Commercial Property Telematics Service. This turn-key white label service specifically addresses the needs of commercial carriers in a wide variety of SMB verticals including medical offices, houses of worship, restaurants, retail, as well as small multi-family-properties and hotels at an affordable price. The Roost Protection360 service delivers 24/7 real-time alerts and verifications for water leak, freezing temperature, power outage and smoke alarms, reducing annual claims costs through proactive communications that can save property owners and carriers millions of dollars each year. The customized service also includes a white label mobile app that enables an engaging branded offering for the carrier and their commercial policyholders. “We are very excited to be deploying our innovative Protection360 Service and to have Church Mutual Insurance, the largest insurer of religious institutions in the US as our strategic commercial launch partner” said Roel Peeters, co-founder and CEO of Roost. “This new solution builds upon our proven technology and insurance industry experience to deliver a new platform that has compelling...

InsuranceNewsNet By Nelson Lee Every few years, tech investors and startups will label a new industry “hot,” and insurtech is steaming. The insurtech industry is continuing to deliver record-setting funding rounds, as well as historic highs in overall venture investments into the sector. This is a big contrast from as recent as five years ago, when boring old insurance was still a market relatively untouched by tech disruptions. Insurtech wasn’t even really a phrase yet, other than being defined as a tiny niche within the larger fintech space. In the past, insurtech very much relied on the rising tides of fintech to garner attention. Unicorns such as Robinhood, Venmo, Coinbase and Stripe have been routinely dominating headlines for groundbreaking innovations and valuations. However, the hype is nudging investors to begin seeking relatively less disrupted spaces within fintech for returns in less-crowded markets. Initially, startup founders and investors turned mostly toward the health and property/casualty insurance spaces, as the more transactional nature of these sectors provide for a relatively natural path to market adoption. Numerous startups achieved outstanding valuations and market share within these sectors, such as Oscar in health insurance, and others such as Hippo and Lemonade in home insurance....

New deal will see TuGo, one of Canada’s top travel insurance providers, roll out MyFlyt™ service in order to service flight delay benefits in real-time to travellers using their mobile phones, easing the frustration of flight delays Cork, Ireland (Nov. 7, 2019) – Blink, one of the world’s fastest-growing travel InsurTechs, is pleased to announce… Read more » The post Blink Strengthens Canadian Foothold with TuGo Partnership appeared first on Insurance-Canada.ca. Read the original article at Insurance-Canada.ca

Staff | November 7, 2019 The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, through OMERS Growth Equity, is leading a $227 million Series-F funding round for intelligent and predictive search technologies provider Coveo. Founded in 2005, Coveo enables organizations to personalize digital experiences for customers, partners and employees. It combines unified search, analytics and machine learning to deliver relevant information and recommendations across websites, commerce, service and workplace applications. The new funds will be used to support further product development, expansion in existing and new markets and to further broaden the team’s capabilities over the next year, according to a press release. Read: Institutional investors turning to AI, data science to improve processes, yield alpha  “Our investment in Coveo aligns closely with our belief that growth in data along with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly important to companies, to help them increase sales and reduce costs,” said Mark Shulgan, managing director and head of growth equity at the OMERS. “The cognitive search industry is a large and growing market, and global enterprises of all sizes can create significant value throughout their organizations by empowering their customers and employees through search.” Read: AIMCo enters partnership to build AI, machine learning applications for investment management Read...

Kelsey Rolfe | November 7, 2019 As market uncertainty causes a slowdown in Europe’s economy, an accommodating central bank and negative interest rates are making its bond markets more attractive to institutional investors than those in the United States. “Europe is a very export-led economy and Germany, in particular, is driven by exports to the rest of the world,” said Rod MacPhee, vice-president and portfolio manager for Franklin Templeton Investments Corp.’s fixed income group, at an event in Toronto on Tuesday. “So uncertainty for them has a particular meaning. What they need is certainty around . . . what trading relationships are going to look like.”  He noted German manufacturers have started to pull back as a result of uncertainty from tariffs on German automobiles flowing into the U.S. and the constant delay of Brexit. “We see an economy where growth is going to be weak . . . and the inflation outlook in Europe is extremely low.”  Read: How is fixed income faring amid renewed market volatility?  Franklin Templeton is currently overweight in European bonds and expects the continent’s interest rates are “going absolutely nowhere,” or may even drop further, said MacPhee. Looking specifically at German bonds, the yield curve for 30-year bonds is still relatively high, sloping in comparison to shorter terms and allowing...

Toronto, ON (Nov. 6, 2019) – CSIO is pleased to announce that Northbridge Insurance is the first large commercial insurer to achieve a Certification of Compliance. This certification recognizes insurers that exclusively use standardized CSIO coverage codes instead of custom codes (known as Z-Codes) in their data download to brokers. CSIO congratulates Northbridge for eliminating… Read more » The post Northbridge Insurance Obtains CSIO Certification of Compliance appeared first on Insurance-Canada.ca. Read the original article at Insurance-Canada.ca

Ottawa, ON (Oct. 30, 2019) – The Traffic Injury Research Foundation (TIRF) is pleased to announce a new fact sheet that summarizes trends in attitudes about, and practices related to, distracted driving. The fact sheet is based upon data from the Road Safety Monitor (RSM), which is an annual public opinion survey conducted by TIRF… Read more » The post Concern about distracted driving in Canada rises dramatically appeared first on Insurance-Canada.ca. Read the original article at Insurance-Canada.ca

Mercer is launching an all-in-one digital platform that gives employees access to a variety of wellness vendors to support their physical, mental, financial or social well-being. Mercer 365, which will be rolled out in January 2020, allows employers to offer their staff benefits through an online, self-serve platform. It will also include access to benefits utilization and engagement reports, so they can measure the effectiveness of the benefits spend. The platform includes access to 14 service and health-care providers, including MediResource Inc., SSQ Life Insurance Co. Inc., LIFT Digital inc. and SilverCloud Health Ltd. It also includes health assessment tools and a wide range of well-being options, such as telemedicine, fitness and nutrition coaching, chronic disease management support, stress and anxiety coaching and sleep disorder solutions. Read: Canadian employers embracing customization of benefits plans Julie Duchesne, leader of Mercer Marsh Benefits for Canada, says one of the goals of the new platform is to engage more with employees so they feel more engaged with their employers.”It’s going to help them manage their costs overall because, if their employee population is more healthy, it’s going to cost less in their benefit program. It’s . . . proactive benefits management. “If you ask employers for their top priorities — and this...

With the introduction of Bill 132 in the Ontario legislature last week, pension plan sponsors should be aware of a number of amendments coming to the Pension Benefits Act. If passed, the changes will affect sections of the act that cover electronic communications, missing plan members and the conversion of single-employer pensions into a jointly sponsored plan. To further facilitate electronic communication, the amendments will require that plan members consent to receiving certain documents sent by the administrator electronically, provided certain conditions are met, including that documents are sent in another written form at any time. Read: Latest CAPSA consultation looks at electronic pension communication In terms of missing plan members, where the act currently requires plan administrators to provide former and retired members with written statements, amendments will permit the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario’s chief executive officer to waive that requirement if they’re satisfied there are “reasonable and probable grounds to believe the former member or retired member is missing.” However, the changes also set out factors that the CEO is required to consider in determining whether the plan administration made reasonable efforts to locate missing members. And, where the administrator receives the contact information of a missing member, they will be required to immediately notify the CEO. In terms...