Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners creates model laws for states to pass. The Accelerated Underwriting Working Group got started today by rejecting a plea to speed up its schedule. The group was formed during the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ summer meeting in August. It will “Consider the use of external data and data analytics in accelerated life underwriting, including consideration of the ongoing work of the Life Actuarial (A) Task Force on the issue and, if appropriate, drafting guidance for the states.” During a get-to-know-you conference call today, the group discussed a comment letter from Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the Center for Economic Justice. In it, Birnbaum asked the group to move faster. “The regulatory and consumer protection issues arising from insurers’ use of Big Data analytics, generally, and from insurers’ use of (accelerated underwriting), specifically, are well known and have been known for several years,” he wrote. “There is no need to take 10 months to learn what is already known.” The working group plans a leisurely pace, which will start by hearing from academics, stakeholders and states “to gain a better understanding of accelerated underwriting in life insurance and the different perspectives on the pros,...

Staff | October 2, 2019 The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is launching a venture incubator called Koru, which aims to create, test and build scalable new digital businesses. “Koru is a clear demonstration of Ontario Teachers’ partnership model of investing,” said Ziad Hindo, chief investment officer at the Ontario Teachers’, in a press release. “It provides us with an entirely new way to work alongside our portfolio companies and help protect them against disruption by finding opportunities to add significant mutual value along the way.” The Toronto-based company is at work formulating ideas in sectors such as health care, utilities and transportation, noted the release. Its first project, Elovee, is a technology that digitizes the voice and likeness of family members to bring comfort to those suffering from dementia when family members can’t be present. Read: A practical look at responsible investing at Ontario Teachers’ The software, which was designed with the Ontario Teachers’ portfolio company Amica Senior Lifestyles, is currently being piloted in two of its Canadian locations. “Amica is proud to be working with Koru on Elovee,” said Douglas MacLatchy, chief executive officer of Amica Senior Lifestyles. “Drawing on innovative technologies and Amica’s in-house expertise in cognitive well-being, this venture is well-positioned to enrich the lives of people with dementia...

Staff | October 2, 2019 Hub International Ltd. is acquiring Saskatoon-based Regency Advisory Corp., an employee benefits consulting firm.  “We continue to build on our efforts to add talented organizations like Regency to boost our employee benefits and pension capabilities in Canada,” said Keith Jordan, president and chief executive officer of Hub International Manitoba Ltd., in a press release. “Regency has been involved in many facets of employee benefits, and will be a great collaborator for innovation and drive client-centric services and solutions.” Read: Hub International acquires two Canadian benefits firms Darwin Forbes, Regency’s CEO and executive benefits consultant, and Ian DeCorby, its vice-president, will join Hub Manitoba. “We are joining Hub with our client’s interests first,” said Forbes. “With Hub, we will enhance their overall experience with an expansion of our available services and resources to continue to provide best-in-class employee benefits programs.” Read the full article at BenefitsCanada.com

By Karthik Ramakrishnan, Head of Advisory and AI Enablement, Element AI — Traditionally, the world of insurance is manual and process-heavy, forcing insurance executives to seek the best solutions for improving tedious workflows, with a priority on better decision making. The challenges are significant: even today’s best-in-class software lacks the power to optimize the huge amount of data and variables originating from all the different clients, coverage plans and claims. To read the details for every case would be a near-endless task. Enter AI for the insurance industry: AI is allowing insurance firms to meet the ever-growing volume of client submissions and claims with quick response times, precision pricing and quoting, and streamlined workflows. Due to the urgency to deploy an efficient AI framework, and respecting the specific challenges of evaluating where a company is at in its AI readiness journey, insurance companies should follow the following four pillars of intelligent AI adoption: Building a strategy Assessing data and technology Training people Building a governance model These four pillars have already helped some of the world’s leading insurance companies transform their businesses and make them AI-ready. 1)  Building a Strategy AI is reshaping the competitive landscape and there are many...

Martha Porado | October 2, 2019 When investing in Brazil, what considerations should institutional investors keep in mind? And how can the market fit into a pension portfolio? One issue to watch is pension reform, said Heather Hagerty, a research analyst at Fidelity Investments, during the Canadian Investment Review‘s podcast “Pension Podcast.” “Brazil is one of only a small number of countries that allows its people to retire based on the number of years that they contribute to the system and one of the only countries in the world with no minimum retirement age. In fact, most people in Brazil retire around the age of 55. Read: Geopolitical tensions high on investors’ list when examining emerging markets “This has caused immense pressure on the federal and state budgets, with pension spending absorbing over a third of the tax revenues,” she added. “And this is only expected to continue to rise as a share of government payouts. Now some Brazilians are retiring even longer than they contributed into the system. The system is also socially unjust with over half of this pension spending being taken up by the wealthiest fifth of the population and less than three per cent by those that are worse...

The finalists for the 2019 Insurance Business Canada Awards have now been announced. Since its inception in 2016, the awards have become the pre-eminent showcase of excellence in Canadian insurance, with 21 categories including the Advocis Award for Life and Health Insurer of the Year and the Empire Life Award for Life and Health Advisor of the Year. There are 190 finalists from more than 150 companies, representing a true cross-section of the industry’s best. “We’re so thrilled with the list of finalists – we were inundated with nominations and feel this is truly a snapshot of the best and brightest in the Canadian insurance industry right now,” says Insurance Business managing editor Paul Lucas. “It’s going to be a fantastic honour to be at our gala event in November to celebrate such a deserving group. Even if you didn’t make the list of nominees I hope you will be able to join us too because such inspiring professionals really deserve celebrating.” So who made the list? See here. As the next step of the awards process, each finalist will complete a submission for the jury panel comprised of independent experts of the insurance and financial services industry. Winners will...

Great-West Life has announced the launch of Health Connected, a mobile-friendly health and wellness platform that draws on strategic features to encourage users to take charge of their health. When they do, from now until December 31, 2019, they can enter for a chance to win wellness prizes from Great-West Life. Prizes include $4,000 cash the winner can use on whatever wellness means to them. “Many of us struggle to practice self-care, be it through exercise, nutritious food, good sleep, hygiene or stress-management techniques,” says Ryan Weiss, Vice-President, Group Customer Product & Experience, Great-West Life. “Health Connected has a built-in engagement strategy – our wellness prizes – that reward taking steps to improve health and get at the heart of this challenge.” Weiss says the platform is accessible to virtually all members of Great-West Life group health and benefits plans, at no extra cost to plan sponsors. “We’re making this investment in our customers’ organizational wellness because we believe it will help improve employee morale and engagement and reduce disability claims,” he explained. Strategic features include: Digital health coaching Users complete a comprehensive, personalized health risk assessment for a scorecard outlining their risks across 15 health and wellness categories as...

Among insurance agents offering whole life insurance to clients, one popular pitch involves how policy holders can take loans against the cash value of a policy. But while it could prove to be a useful strategy for objectives like retirement planning, a critical risk can materialize from a commonly committed mistake. “Our non-scientific data … indicate that the mutual carriers’ whole life products are the most borrowed against and also the most difficult to remediate,” wrote Anthony Giannone, a partner at CPI Companies in the U.S., wrote in InsuranceNewsNet Magazine. The problem, he explained, generally begins when clients in financial stress take loans from their policies — a tempting idea during economic downturns, market declines, emergencies, or other instances that require a back-stop for cash flow. They may also do so to supplement their retirement income, or address other purposes such as deferred compensation. “[T]he reality is most mutual company salespeople encourage their clients to purchase multiple policies and repeat this process,” Giannone said. Things take a turn for the worse when clients continue to take on such loans, labouring under the mistaken notion that taking loans from their insurance policies is like drawing from a font of free cash....

The Alliance for Safe Biologic Medicines (ASBM) has shared preliminary results from a survey asking prescribers for their views on several key policy issues surrounding the treatment category. The group took responses from a population of 575 biologic prescribers split evenly among six countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The largest group of prescribers, representing 47% of respondents, said they practice in a hospital setting, with the rest in academic medical centres (23%), private/family practices (18%), multi-specialty clinics (8%), community settings (3%), and other settings (1%). When asked how much importance they place on having the sole authority to decide, along with their patients, on the most suitable biologic medicine to treat their disease, a strong 82% majority said it was “very important” or “critical.” That’s compared to 72% of respondents in a 2013 poll where ASBM asked the same thing. The survey then asked how important it was for the biologic prescribers, in a situation wherein pharmacists have the option to dispense a biosimilar substitute, to have the authority to attach a “dispense as written” or “do not substitute” instruction to a prescription. An 84% majority said it was “very important” or “critical” to...

SSQ Insurance has introduced a new option for its group insurance offering: coverage of pharmacogenetics tests, which can help attending physicians identify the most appropriate drug to treat each patient. “Since the treatment of disease is evolving toward personalized solutions for individual patients, pharmacogenetics is quickly becoming a must,” said Éric Trudel, senior vice-president of Strategy and Product Management at SSQ Insurance. Pharmacogenetic tests are designed to examine DNA markers that help determine a person’s physiological reaction to a prescription drug. With the results from such tests, physicians can determine whether a particular treatment could be effective, or whether it could cause an adverse reaction and must therefore be avoided. “SSQ Insurance is the first insurer to expand its health insurance offering by adding a clause for pharmacogenetic tests that is separate from the traditional clause for laboratory analyses,” Trudel added. Policyholders may request to add the new clause specifying pharmacogenetic tests to their health insurance coverage, in accordance with a reimbursement maximum of their choosing. To be eligible, patients must have a physician’s prescription to get a pharmacogenetic test, which must be performed in a duly authorized laboratory in Canada. The results of genetic tests are used to identify the most...