Presentation Topics
8:30am — Welcome and Introduction
Keeping Up With The Times: Understanding Our Customers' Needs, Wants & Desires
Alex Watson
– Alex Watson, Associate Partner, IBM Consulting
The consumer landscape in Canada continues to evolve as Canadians' preferences and choices are influenced by the ecosystem around them.
In this session, we will discuss “what the Canadian customer looks like” – reflecting their needs and segments based on recent research of their behaviours and sentiments towards Insurance.
The Future of Insurance: How AI Will Transform the Industry in 2024 and Beyond
Martina Conlon
– Martina Conlon, Head of Insurance Insights, Datos Insights
“AI is the fastest-adopted technology in history, and it is here to stay.” — Forbes, 2023
The insurance industry is on the brink of a technology revolution. With catastrophe losses, reinsurance costs and complexity of risk skyrocketing, efficiency and innovation are imperative in 2024 and beyond. AI and emerging technologies are poised to increase general efficiencies, underwriting precision, accelerated claims and improved customer experiences.
Join Martina Conlon of Datos Insights (formerly Novarica) for an inside look at the opportunities, technology, adoption rates, and challenges of AI and Large Language Models and how they will impact the future of insurance.
Innovation Minute: The Smart Way to Summarize Medical Records
Michelle Nokes
– Michelle Nokes, Customer Success Manager, Wisedocs
Wisedocs is the medical record review and summary machine learning software for insurance carriers, healthcare providers, laws firms, and TPAs making waves in the claims industry. Leveraging AI and ML to process unstructured medical documents, Wisedocs provides an easy-to-integrate solution for improved accuracy and speed to deliver improved outcomes in the medical claims process.
Wisedocs' newly launched AI Medical Record Summaries platform summarizes thousands of pages in a medical record in a fraction of the time. Utilizing proprietary technology to pull objective information from medical records, we create a narrative summary from unstructured medical data to streamline health claim reviews.
The Intersection of Claims Adjustment and Generative AI Technology
Michelle Nokes
– Michelle Nokes, Customer Success Manager, Wisedocs
In this session, Michelle will discuss the transformative impact of technology, particularly generative AI, on traditional claims adjusting processes, with real-world insights from her experience as a claims adjuster and working with Wisedocs clients.
10:20am — Coffee Break
Innovation Minute: Being a Digital-first Commercial Broker
Kevin Lea
– Kevin Lea, President, Fuse Insurance
Fuse Insurance is an independent commercial brokerage that is paving the way for innovation - digitization is their founding principal and driving force. Fuse combines data-driven partnerships with proprietary software integrations to transform their broker daily workflow. By automating several steps in the brokerage workflow, their brokers can build more meaningful client relationships.
These digital operations completely transform the overall experience for brokers, insurers, partners, and clients.
Innovation Minute: Commercial Quoting with Quotey
Nick Kidd
– Nick Kidd, CEO, Quotey
Selling commercial insurance is an extremely painful process for brokers – finding the right application, submitting to multiple markets, follow-ups, analyzing the responses, preparing a customer proposal.
Quotey was developed to make the process easy, helping brokers gather the right information from their clients, find multiple quotes, compare them and make client proposals in seconds, rather than days or weeks.
Innovation Minute: Transforming Commercial Business Connectivity
Andrea Bucek
– Andrea Bucek, Vice President - Distribution, Northbridge Insurance
Broker Connectivity – our largest Northbridge digital investment. In partnership with Applied Systems Canada, Northbridge was the first insurer to enable real-time quoting built on data standards for Contractors, Retail, and Business Professional Services. Brokers can quickly, accurately, and efficiently exchange submission and quote data for small business.
Broker Connectivity supports our goal of small business market leadership at Northbridge.
Innovation in Commercial Lines
Andrea Bucek
– Andrea Bucek, Vice President - Distribution, Northbridge Insurance
– Nick Kidd, CEO, Quotey
– Kevin Lea, President, Fuse Insurance
With representation from a commercial lines broker, carrier and technology intermediary, the discussion will centre around changes in this business segment from a commercial business client's perspective and getting to know them better:
- An innovation trend that has made a difference in the last two years
- A trend that is underway today
- Something new on the near horizon that could be significant tomorrow.
Innovation Minute: Saving Trees, Reducing Expenses
Gregory Cifelli
– Gregory Cifelli, Sr. Manager - Customer Strategy, TD Insurance
TD Insurance, in partnership with Symcor, has conceptualized, built, and launched Policy Assist Central in August 2023 to digitize the delivery of insurance industry-regulated communications (specifically letters to 3rd party financial institutions, & auto finance companies), reduce costs associated with printing & postage, help streamline insurance policy processes, and contribute to reducing the insurance industry's environmental footprint. By delivering these 'Additional Interest' letters electronically, TD Insurance cost to deliver these letters to 3rd parties is less than half of the cost to print & mail them. To boost adoption, Policy Assist Central is available for all Canadian insurance companies to use, and recipient lenders are able to use the service completely free of charge!
Innovation in Insurance: Strategies that Accelerate Transformation
Sagar Gill
– Sagar Gill, Sr. Director - New Products & Innovation, Symcor
– Gregory Cifelli, Sr. Manager - Customer Strategy, TD Insurance
– Sanket Sutaria, Sr. Manager - Digitization, Automation & Workflow, TD Insurance
This session will delve into the innovation mindset at Symcor, a leading Canadian business solutions provider supporting clients across Canada's largest organizations. Sagar Gill, Senior Director of New Products & Innovation, will discuss Symcor's innovation process, which retains an ongoing focus on service excellence and trust while effectively accelerating new product initiatives.
Joined by Gregory Cifelli, Senior Manager of Customer Strategy at TDI, and Sanket Sutaria, TDI's Senior Manager of Digitization, Automation and Workflow, Sagar will share Symcor's success story – Policy Assist Central, a data exchange platform developed in collaboration with TDI to digitize the delivery of regulatory communications within the Insurance ecosystem. Discover valuable strategies for advancing innovation to propel your business to new heights.
12:00pm — Lunch
How Embedded Insurance Enables Customer-Centricity
Renée Walkom
– Renée Walkom, Chief Operating Officer, Foxquilt
Embedded insurance is revolutionizing the insurance industry by integrating insurance seamlessly into the customer journey of other products and services. Embracing this technology is not only a strategic imperative for insurers but also a key enabler of customer-centricity in the digital age.
How do we maximize technological innovation while ensuring customer needs are at the forefront of the experience?
Innovation Minute: Finding the ‘Needle in the Haystack’
Kari Stiles
– Kari Stiles, Enterprise Client Partner, ProNavigator
ProNavigator, the “Google for insurance,” is a knowledge management platform that combines a powerful insurance-focused search, organization controls and a suite of knowledge management capabilities to address critical information management challenges.
For operations leaders, ProNavigator significantly cuts average handling time and boosts staff productivity. Thousands of insurance professionals use the platform daily to find information to better serve customers.
Innovation Minute: Cyber Risk and “Defending the Fort”
Miki Ho
– Miki Ho, Head of Underwriting (Canada), Resilience
To succeed in today's digital economy, every organization must be cyber resilient. That means balancing cyber risk tolerance with risk mitigation and risk transfer.
The Resilience Solution delivers five integrated benefits: a financially proven AI platform for cybersecurity visibility, a quantified action plan, a responsive insurance policy, a human-in-the-loop partnership to augment the client's team, and extensive cyber advocacy resources.
Data: The Foundation For Everything
Steve Livingstone
– Steve Livingstone, President & CEO, aha insurance
– Zac Sutherland, President, Sutherland Insurance
The human touch – empathetic, personal, and real – can help to make the difference in many insurance situations. But most innovations today are digital, and at their core is data.
Whether human or automated, any transaction depends on good data to be appropriate and correct. This is equally true for customer marketing or servicing all the way through business measurements or reporting.
Zac and Steve will discuss how data (usage, collection, analysis, management) is reflected in their businesses today. However the evolution of insurance unfolds, data – today's gold – will be an essential ingredient.
Riding the Waves of Change: Navigating Innovation in the Insurance Industry
David Arbuthnot
– David Arbuthnot, Director, DBTS Enterprise Innovation Lab, Sun Life
In times of rapid change and innovation, how do insurance professionals stay focused, learn quickly, and separate the signal from the noise? This engaging session will provide insights and techniques to test assumptions, learn through rapid iterations, and focus on feasibility, desirability and viability to develop truly innovative solutions for the insurance industry. Attendees will leave with an actionable framework to drive innovation and avoid FOMO even amidst great change.
2:20pm — Coffee Break
The Innovation Gamut: Ideation, Refinement, Success
Sachin Rustagi
– Sachin Rustagi, Head of Digital, Markel International (Canada)
– David Arbuthnot, Director, DBTS Enterprise Innovation Lab, Sun Life
Innovation can be incremental or radical, architectural or disruptive. In one sense, any change is an innovation to the person or process involved, to the department or company, to the industry in a geography such as Canadian insurance.
In this mix of presentation, case studies and discussion, the participants will consider different aspects of innovation, from ideation through implementation and ongoing refinement, success factors, culture and more.
Technology Enabling The Future
Doug Grant
– Doug Grant, Founding Partner, Insurance-Canada.ca
Technology has been a common thread for most innovations in insurance in this century. Many of the changes have improved processes; others the user – especially customer – experience.
At the same time we have seen some developments in the nature of the product, the service and the delivery.
This discussion – with guests from the day's presentations – will consider some trends such as embedded, parametric, IoT, telematics, and more, with an eye to the fundamental shift from “replace and repair” to “predict and prevent.”
Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Awards ceremony — 4:00pm
Networking Reception — 4:20pm
