INSURANCE INDUSTRY NEWS

Mitchell's 2019 Q1 Industry Trends Report
Mitchell, a leading provider of technology, connectivity and information solutions to the property & casualty claims and collision repair industries, has released its Industry Trends Report for the first quarter of 2019. The impact of 5G wireless, automobile design changes that are good for the environment, and how technology can improve claims outcomes are among the cutting-edge topics addressed in the report. Read more.

Life/Annuity New Business & Underwriting Systems
Insurers are investing in new business and underwriting technology to meet evolving customer needs and leverage new analytics capabilities, according to research and advisory firm, Novarica. The latest Novarica Market Navigator, "Life/Health/Annuity New Business and Underwriting Systems," profiles 22 vendors offering solutions to North American insurers in this space. Read more.

Aon, Zesty Set To Revolutionize Underwriting With AI-Powered Property Data Solution
Aon plc has established a strategic alliance with Zesty.ai, an InsurTech startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Zesty's technology enhances insurers' underwriting through access to billions of data points on buildings and their surroundings which enable granular risk analysis and informed pricing. Read more.

Great-West Life Launches SimpleProtect
Great-West Life, London Life and Canada Life today announced the launch of SimpleProtect™ – a new and intuitive digital application for advisors to help Canadians get term life insurance coverage. Read more.

Kings Mutual Goes Live In The Cloud
The Kings Mutual Insurance Company is pleased to announce they have implemented a cloud-based solution for their complete business operations. Kings has successfully moved their entire technology footprint over to a private cloud solution with the assistance of their technology partners in this project, MCCG and iVedha. Working together, MCCG and iVedha relocated King’s entire IT environment onto iVedha’s cloud infrastructure platform, including King’s enterprise insurance platform, the Insurance Business Solution (IBS®). Read more.

iPipeline Acquires Solutions Provider Bluesun
iPipeline®, a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for the financial services industry, has announced the acquisition of Bluesun, a leading provider of software solutions to the life insurance and financial services industry in Canada. Read more.

Storm Insurance Group Acquires Sheppard
Storm Insurance Group is pleased to announce its acquisition of Edmonton-based Sheppard Insurance Service and Risk Management Ltd., effective May 1st, 2019. Sheppard Insurance will be the latest brokerage to join the Storm Insurance Group, which includes A.P. Reid, wholesaler Agile Underwriting Solutions, ZipSure Insurance Brokers, and MyGroup Auto and Home Insurance. Read more.

Provinces Breaching Health Act: Snowbird Report
Canadian travellers should be mindful that in most cases, their health coverage does not follow them abroad. Only the northern territories and PEI conform to the requirement of the Canada Health Act to provide portable universal health care for the 55 million trips Canadians take abroad each year, according to the latest Canadian Travellers' Report Card, released by the Canadian Snowbird Association. Read more.

Unlicensed Auto Insurance Sales, Policy Fraud
A joint investigation conducted by Desjardins Insurance and Aviva Canada has revealed that fraud artists prey on innocent and unaware drivers with the promise of cheap auto insurance, which turns out to be fraudulent. Read more.

ASSI Opens 2nd Waterloo Reporting Centre
Accident Support Services International Ltd. is proud to continue to partner with the Waterloo Regional Police Service on the implementation of the Collision Reporting Centre (CRC) program in Waterloo. The additional CRC location will open as of March 19, 2019, at 11am. Read more.

More Vehicles Have Automatic Emergency Braking
Ten automakers report equipping more than half of the vehicles they produced last year with automatic emergency braking (AEB), according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Read more.

Featured job opportunities:

Customer Service Representative
Dehart and Stauffer Insurance
Oshawa, ON

Account Manager, Insurance, Personal Lines
McFarlan Rowlands Insurance Brokers
Delhi, ON

“Insurance In The Platform Economy”

August 28, 2019, in Toronto

Our annual Executive Forum returns this August. Details will be announced over the next few months. Mark your calendar for Wednesday, Aug. 28!

Email is still the preferred channel for reaching insurance customers and prospects.

Do you have a whitepaper, case study, product or service that you would like to promote more widely to the Canadian P&C insurance industry?

Insurance-Canada.ca can assist you with dedicated eblasts to our industry audience.

To get started, or for more details, contact your sales rep or email info@insurance-canada.ca.

From Doug What is an insurance platform anyway? I struggled at first to understand what (an) “InsurTech” is, and now I am having the same challenges with “insurance platforms.” It makes sense that a platform would be digital and that it would perform a task or group of tasks, i.e. be somewhat narrow rather than all-encompassing. An article about platforms by McKinsey helped to clarify somewhat. Their example was a large bank, which might have 40-50 platforms or so. Each platform would have an executive leader with a team of people from across the business, obviously including IT. The specific example of a platform was payments. The objective is to make the platform – which handles all payment functions – agile, responsive to business needs, easily maintained and enriched, cohesive in itself but readily connected by APIs to any other of the banking platforms which need payment functions. These goals can be met when the platform is independent of any other banking platforms, except for processing the API transactions correctly. In insurance, a comparable analogy would be a billing platform. But the business of insurance involves all types of functions. If “billing” as one of those functions can be a platform, what then is an “insurance platform”? More next week. Doug Grant, CIP Partner Insurance-Canada.ca