INSURANCE INDUSTRY NEWS

CCIR Releases Position Paper On Climate Change, Natural Catastrophes, Consumer Awareness
The Canadian Council of Insurance Regulators has released a position paper containing recommendations for insurers to help Canadian homeowners better protect their personal property against the risks posed by natural catastrophes and a changing climate. Read more.

Belairdirect Launches First Fuel Efficiency Feature
To help cost-conscious drivers make informed decisions, belairdirect has launched a new app feature that's the first of its kind in the Canadian insurance market by showing drivers just how much they can save on fuel based on their driving behaviour. Read more.

The Five Forces Influencing P&C Insurance Shopping
The pace of change in the P&C industry has been increasing for years, and external factors have increased the scale and speed of change in the industry. In this report, J.D. Power explores the forces and trends that are creating a very different insurance shopping environment than what we saw just a few years ago. Read more.

BrokerLink Acquires G. Kranz Insurance, Sims Insurance
BrokerLink continues to grow in 2023 with the acquisition of G. Kranz Insurance & Real Estate Limited and Sims & Associates Insurance Services, effective April 1, expanding the company's services to additional customers in Eastern Ontario and Central Alberta. Read more.

Guidewire Welcomes AWS, Celonis, Google Cloud, Hubio
Guidewire is pleased to announce that Google Cloud, Celonis, Hubio, and Amazon Web Services have joined the Guidewire PartnerConnect Solution Alliance Program as new data partners. These partners leverage Guidewire Cloud Data Access to help insurers accelerate enterprise-wide data integration use cases for reporting, data warehousing, process mining, and analytics. Read more.

Majesco Core Suite Named Dominant Provider in Aite-Novarica Report
Majesco, a global leader of cloud insurance platform software for insurance business transformation, is pleased to announce that the Majesco L&AH Core Suite is recognized as a Dominant Provider in an Aite-Novarica Life/Annuity/Benefits policy administration report. Read more.

Atomic Named To Guidewire InsurTech Vanguards Program
Atomic, a market-leading provider for payroll connectivity, is pleased to announce the company has joined Guidewire's InsurTech Vanguards program, an initiative led by property & casualty cloud platform provider Guidewire to help insurers learn about the newest InsurTech firms and how to best leverage them. Read more.

Travel Insurance Not On Most Canadians’ Packing Lists
Whether it's a family vacation or sightseeing with friends, almost two-thirds of Canadians plan on taking a trip in the near future. But only about one-third of those planning to travel intend to purchase both medical and cancellation travel insurance, according to a new TD Insurance survey. Read more.

Arthur J. Gallagher Completes Acquisition Of Buck
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. is pleased to announce it has completed the previously disclosed acquisition of the partnership interests of BCHR Holdings, L.P., dba Buck. Read more.

Irish InsurTech Kayna Wins InsurTech NY Award
Kayna, an Irish InsurTech outfit that developed a unique embedded insurance infrastructure, enabling distribution through vertical SaaS, has won the Carrier/Broker Competition for Global Early-Stage InsurTech at InsurTech NY's Spring Conference in New York. Read more.

Protecting Project Margins with Construction IoT Technology
Webinar – Wednesday, Apr. 19

The list of risks associated with construction is extensive – and insurers are faced with increasing underwriting risk while trying to maintain a healthy loss ratio. Brickeye works with insureds and insurers to reduce risk and protect margins by enabling technology-driven risk mitigation on high-rise and multi-family building construction projects. The company's platform provides advanced IoT job site monitoring across an array of construction risk areas.

Register now or learn more about the webinar.

From Doug Artificial intelligence is already in use throughout insurance, from marketing through reinsurance. As expected in a period of such rapid technology innovation, the underlying components that make up and support the components of AI are in continuous flux. I was surprised when ChatGPT took the world by storm – it turns out many people and businesses have been working on generative AI. My hobby is rooted in the 18th century. I sent a request to someone, who used ChatGPT to convert his message into the English of that time period. I was impressed that an automated tool could do that, triggered by a natural language request. But how big is the challenge of applying Generative AI not only to insurance terminology, but to a given insurance business's acceptable wordings? Will Generative AI live up to the recent hype? I think not, in the short term – but in the long run, it might even exceed the initial euphoria. Doug Grant, CIP Partner Insurance-Canada.ca