INSURANCE INDUSTRY NEWS

InsurTech Startup Market Strong In North America Despite Pandemic
While the pandemic had a significant impact on InsurTech in 2020, investment rebounded in 2021 with the release of travel restrictions, reopening of conferences, and maturation of InsurTech companies to meet the needs of insurance carriers and better explain their use cases. In its fifth annual report, Aite-Novarica Group provides an overview of 300 InsurTech startups, indexing them on their lines of business and the parts of the insurance enterprise value chain they support. Read more.

The Impacts Of A Changing Climate: Canada’s Top Ten Weather Stories of 2021
This year clearly demonstrated that Canadians across the country are experiencing unprecedented extreme weather, in the form of devastating flooding, widespread wildfires, relentless heatwaves, and powerful tornadoes. Read more.

Coalition Launches Captive To Accelerate Growth In Cyber Insurance
Coalition, the world's largest commercial InsurTech provider, is pleased to announce it will launch a new captive to begin taking risk on its cyber insurance programs. With this captive, Coalition will enhance its ability to manage capacity and its long-term growth objectives while further aligning incentives with its customers. Read more.

Beneva Selects Global IQX For Group Benefits Underwriting
Beneva, the largest insurance mutual in Canada, has chosen Global IQX Sales & Underwriting Workbench as its underwriting tool for new business and renewals in order to leverage end-to-end automation, granular configurability, powerful integrative capabilities, and domain expertise in the Canadian group benefits market. Read more.

Risk Control Guidance For Places Of Worship Regarding Arson
Arson continues to be the leading cause of fires affecting Canadian places of worship. Ecclesiastical Insurance offers several resources on its website to assist places of worship in protecting against fire, vandalism and arson. Read more.

CSIO Working Groups Reach Major Milestone
CSIO's INNOTECH API Working Groups have reached a major milestone in finalizing the JSON API industry standards for personal automobile and property insurance policy inquiry. This is the first set of API Standards published for the P&C industry in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), the latest state of the art technology for real-time data interchange for APIs. Read more.

2021 Global Catastrophe Losses Fourth-Highest On Record
Extreme weather events in 2021, including a deep winter freeze, floods, severe thunderstorms, heatwaves and a major hurricane, resulted in annual insured losses from natural catastrophes estimated at USD 105 billion, the fourth highest since 1970, according to Swiss Re Institute's preliminary sigma estimates. Read more.

Andrew Agencies Acquires Kimp Services, Ducharme Agencies
Andrew Agencies is pleased to announce the acquisition of two brokerages in Manitoba – Kimp Services in Shoal Lake, effective November 1, 2021, and Ducharme Agencies in Winnipeg, effective December 1, 2021. Read more.

StoneRidge Acquires John Stark & Company
SIB Corp., operating as StoneRidge Insurance Brokers, a leading independent provider of insurance and consulting services whose platforms include an insurance brokerage, MGA/MGU, group benefits and an adjusting firm, has acquired John Stark & Company, to expand its personal, commercial and life insurance offerings. Read more.

Kayna Launches Vertical SaaS Embedded Insurance Solution
An award-winning InsurTech duo have launched their latest offering to the InsurTech market with Kayna, a Vertical SaaS Embedded Insurance solution for Small to Medium sized businesses. Read more.

Westland Insurance Acquires Reider Insurance
Westland Insurance Group Ltd., Canada's largest independent Canadian-owned brokerage, is very excited to announce the acquisition of Reider Insurance in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Read more.

Cyber Risk Scoring & Modeling Overview
Cyber insurance adoption is growing at double-digit rates, but without a history of claims experiences – especially against an emergent risk – insurers looking to invest in this growing line of business must ensure that growth is profitable. Read more.

B.C. Floods Insured Damage Total Revealed
Catastrophe Indices and Quantification Inc. has revealed its preliminary estimates of the insured damage caused by flooding in southern British Columbia in November. This will be the most costly severe weather event in the province's history, and Read more.

In the InsurTech Spotlight this week:

Global IQX
Global IQX provides a cloud-based, automated suite of digital components that help insurance companies sell more employee benefits in less time. Designed to eliminate manual touchpoints and redundant data-entry, the IQX platform is trusted by some of the largest life and health insurers in the world to quote, enrol, and renew employee benefits. Learn more.

Calling all InsurTechs! Click here to participate.

Featured job opportunities:

Underwriting Assistant – Commercial Lines
SGI CANADA
Edmonton or Calgary, AB

Commercial Lines Account Manager
Canadian Insurance Brokers
Toronto, ON

From Doug Recent commentary from our leaders about 2021 and 2022 has reiterated a number of successes, issues and challenges: our people and talent; partners, customers, technology, risk, etc. Technology in insurance is increasing in importance. Most insurance businesses are now InsurTechs – following InsurTech tenets and deploying technology where they can, from marketing to reinsurance. With technology gaining importance as a competitive tool, InsurTech and innovation have become one and the same. Two classes of InsurTechs – the practitioners who use it in the business of insurance and those who provide technology solutions to them – are just a new variation on the old scenario of user and provider. What is new – unicorns and the bets being made in InsurTechs, especially the technology providers. In 2022, I am watching: • Changing consumer/customer behaviour relative to insurance, beyond self-service and omnichannel (but in what way?); • The insurance industry ecosystem being even more digitally connected; • Improvements in insurance processes across the board – especially quoting, underwriting and claims; • The rise of embedded insurance and cross-industry ecosystems. Which of these – or what else – will have the biggest impact on you? Doug Grant, CIP Partner Insurance-Canada.ca