Mike Ashurst:

Hello everyone, I’m Mike Ashurst from ICMIF. I’m very pleased to welcome you to today’s webinar, navigating the digital landscape, a conversation on innovation and growth strategies in insurance distribution.

And we’re very pleased to be joined today by Ray Adamson, chief customer officer Lavvi in Canada, and Pierre Martin, ADP Partnerships and chief digital officer at Assumption Life, also Canada, as they share their experiences and key learnings from their digital journey. Over to you, Ray.

Ray Adamson:

Thanks, Mike. And good morning everyone. Wonderful to be here with Pierre and we’re looking forward to sharing a bit of the story of Assumption Life and a little bit on Lavvi and how we’ve tried to support this digital journey.

I’m the Chief customer officer for Lavvi and we’re a technology company. It’s been in the business around 16 years with a key focus on financial services and insurance for the last five years.

We’ve got a digital distribution platform for life insurance that supports an agent-led sale, a direct to consumer sale, and the hybrid opportunity. And as Pierre shares his story today, I think he’ll be illustrating how Assumption is leveraging the platform in multiple ways. Pierre, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Pierre Martin:

Perfect. Thank you, Ray. So I’m Pierre Martin, AVP Partnership and chief digital officer, Assumption Life. We’re 120 year old mutual company in Canada.

My role with the company is really a two part and is business development on a lot of alternative distribution strategies and of course, on the digital strategy for the organisation.

So the opportunity to be working with the Lavvi crew for a good number of years now and hopefully some of what we’ll be talking about today will resonate with others across the forum.

Ray Adamson:

Fantastic. Let’s jump into things here. As Mike shared, we’re going to be talking about navigating the digital landscape and I think where it would be helpful to start, Pierre, is to go right into the Assumption Life story here. See if I can, there we go. There we go.

Pierre Martin:

Perfect. Thank you. For some reason, my controls aren’t working, Ray, so you’ll be my copilot in this, thank you. All right, so Assumption Life, as I mentioned, we’re 120 years old as of September last year, so celebrating that across the year for the company.

We’re based on the east coast of Canada, so in the province of New Brunswick, there are not several insurance companies in our region, so very fortunate to be here and have a great place to work.

So we’re been recognised as the best place to work in Atlantic Canada and in Canada numerous times. So great company culture. I’ve been here for 17 years so I can attest to that. We are the first B Corp certified insurance company in Canada.

B Corp is really the flagship standard for sustainability, social corporate responsibilities. And so that’s something we’re very connected in our community and proud of it. For those who submit to A.M. Best Ratings, we’ve volunteered ourselves to do that for the last 24 years.

So we’re not obligated, we’re not a publicly traded company, but we feel it’s a great exercise to ensure our risk mitigation, our sustainability, et cetera. So we’ve had a excellent rating. Keep in mind, we are a smaller carrier in the Canadian market and so that rating is extremely positive and we’re proud of it.

Our distribution is national and mostly through the independent agency model, which I’ll talk about MGA/IMO, that’s what I’m referring to in this presentation. It may be called different things across the world so keep that in mind.

And partnerships for us, that’s really anything that is alternative outside of that distribution network, which last year already represented 15% of our sales. So that’s something relatively new and under my role here but we do that in all Canadian provinces.

We’re present in four lines of business, individual life insurance, group benefits, individual investments and group savings, individual life insurance, really being the working horse and what we’re primarily known for and this and that will be my talk today is really focused on the individual insurance side of the business.

And on that note, we’re really more focused on the family market. We’re a mid-market focused company. We’re not in the high affluence. We focus on really simple products, fast, quick issue products, so they could be designed to support final expense or mortgage insurance or income replacement.

Really simple insurance needs effectively and fast, that’s been our niche. And we have a track record of being at the forefront on the distribution technology side for a number of years and I’ll be talking about that today.

Ray Adamson:

That’s fantastic. As a small and mighty organisation, you really have been digital leaders in the industry here in the Canadian market at least. It’d be interesting for you to walk through a bit about that digital journey. I’ll just go to the next slide here. There we go. And I’ll flip us through here.

And it’s interesting you guys started over 20 years ago on this digital journey, which at the time may have been bleeding edge. Do you want to just walk us through what this journey at a high levels look like and then we can drill down into some things?

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll take you on a journey of our recent history and assumption. So as you see, Ray, we have 2003 a starting point. But we go just a little further back.

So 2002, we are a regional player, so our distribution is really limited to, I’ll say Atlanta, Canada, but mostly New Brunswick, our province, mostly a French Acadian company. And at that point in its history, consumers are changing behaviours.

They’re not necessarily buying just because your local competition is increasing, finding more folks to be in the captive agency model is becoming more of a challenge. And most carriers have already moved away from that model at that point, they demutualize in the 80s, they’ve gone away from that distribution model.

And here we are in the early 2000 and we’re still there and something needs to change. So at that point, we have limited distribution, we need growth and we need to go see customers where they are. And so to that point in 2003, we decided to go from a captive agency regional model to let’s go in the independent agency model Canada wide.

So we get chartered and registered in all Canadian provinces and territories and we’re thinking to ourselves, okay, that’s great, but we don’t have offices everywhere and we’re a small company. How are we going to get these, our applications, our paper apps everywhere? How are we going to manage that? How are we going to differentiate ourselves in the market?

And that’s where our strategy was. What if we’re going to be a new player and going to change things? How about we do electronic applications? Now again, we’re 2024. This sounds like a no-brainer and most companies are there.

But in 2003 that was very different. We were only one of two companies in the whole Canadian markets to be there in that time. And so we said, perfect. We’re going to go and do electronic applications and what we call simplified issue, which are just yes, no questionnaires, no specific underwriting done. So they’re quick issue products and we’re going to go in the independent network and see how we’re going to fare.

So the idea at the time is we want to help you grow your revenue, not your overhead. So trying to make business as lean and simple as possible for our distribution partners and hopefully fill a gap on the product side.

So we started that in 2003. If we move to the next step, by 2006, the good news is in only three years, those e-apps have already surpassed our paper apps. So again, this is honestly, even though specs nowadays, even with COVID, that’s really spurred on a lot of the electronic sales, I talked to some competitors and other folks in the industry that are still just around those type of numbers.

Hyatt is really in the 70s and 80% electronic versus paper, but so in only three years we’re already there. We’re more than half of our sales are electronic and we’re on a good path. So we chug along for a good number of years with that technology and things are really picking up.

And we’ve also, in that period from 2006, 2013, we’re reviewing a lot of our product side to fit within this digital model. So when we launched 2003, not all our products were on that platform. But as we’re reviewing products in that window, okay, we’re integrating into the platform.

So the offering on the e-app is getting bigger and bigger and we’re offering more solutions to our distribution partners. And so that paid off, it went well even so that even in 2011, before we get to the next big digital jump, the independent distribution sales had really have dwarfed our captive agency, local regional model at that point.

And so we closed those shops, turning them into MGAs or agency of their own, and then we’re fully independent distribution at that point. So that’s a big milestone. So we finished migrating there. And then in 2012, you have to keep in mind you’re now at iPad three. Everyone’s talking about HTML five, everyone’s talking about responsive website design, mobile first. Things are moving on.

And as much as we were happy to brag about our 2003 technology, it’s starting to feel maybe not as new and modern with everything that’s going on. And so that’s technically when we started our journey, maybe more officially with Lavvi.

So in 2012, we get together, we perform RFP, we look at various solutions and we end up working with the Lavvi team under the name TKS at that time. And we started developing a platform app, which you can see on screen we’ve called LIA, which is Life Insurance Anywhere.

And so at that time, this thing was configured to work on PC, on Mac, iOS devices, Android devices, and for those especially in Canada or North America, but the Blackberries so was even compatible with the RIM playbook, which I don’t think anyone would know.

My kids won’t know what that was, but it was compatible with that when it came out. And the idea was we’re seeing a lot of our partners working with different devices, but at that time, at least in the Canadian market and especially in our market, that’s still fairly rural, I’d say probably 50% of that point. Internet access still wasn’t really as prominent or available.

So having an app where you could work offline was key, but people wanted more flexibility and autonomy on the devices they were using. So that was the key business driver for us there.

And so we were, at that point, the first company to really have their full app that works on tablets or whatnot, a few companies around that time or have quote tools and a few other things going on, we’ve got a fully fledged obligation that can work on several devices.

We keep moving on a journey, and I’ve mentioned it in the window between 2006 and ’13 where we’re doing product development. That is true throughout the whole story. And even after we launch the platform in 2013, we start looking at a product offering. We’re like, all right, we still have some products that we haven’t digitised even in that 10 year span.

And we’re looking at a strategy and we decide that year, so 2014 I believe we terminate, so eliminate our universal life product, our traditional whole life product and our traditional T10 product, which at the time, must have represented probably about 70% of all sales in Canada, not with Assumption but in general.

So these were workhorses of any advisors selling in the industry and we’re saying, you know what, we’re cutting that out. We’re only going anything that’s digital and simple. And even a lot of our distribution partners at the time were saying, if you don’t have these products, you’re not a serious or a real insurance company.

And it’s not that we didn’t take that to heart, but we were convinced that there’s 30 some odd carriers in Canada. We all need to play to our strengths and that’s not going to be where our core strength is going to lie. We’re going to keep focusing on this avenue with quick, easy, simple and fast and see where that takes us.

And obviously, I’m still here today, so it was obviously a good call. So we kept growing at a fast pace. So honestly, between 2003 and where we are in 2014, ’15 at this point, all I know as a newish employee is it’s double-digit growth year over year all the time.

And so luckily, that continued that trend into those years. We kept adding e-sign. As you can see in 2016. 2018, we introduced a, we call it fetch, but it’s a questionnaire first algorithm. So taking all of our product selection, plugging it into an algorithm, and so the advisor can ask question by question to his client and it will determine the best product fit based on their client’s health condition to simplify the process.

Because we do a lot in the, I don’t want to say hard to ensure, but special risk product category. So that tool really came in handy to say this is the best fit for you and your customer. And that was growing really well, again, in the independent distribution model.

But 2019 and maybe slightly before that, we’re starting to see the emergent, there’s a lot of stuff changing in Canadian market, a lot of distribution. And everyone’s thinking, consumers just want to buy online. We need to do something about that. We did understand that consumer expectations were changing, we weren’t convinced that the advisor’s role wasn’t going to be irrelevant.

So we designed a system and a tool called Marketplace Solution. So this is a D2C infrastructure or ecosystem made to be leveraged by our distribution partners. I won’t get into all the details today. We might have some examples later in the presentation.

But essentially, it allowed our partners to go in, activate a website within 15, 30 seconds that would have their domain or a link slash address too, that allowed a customer to go in and do a full application from A to Z. Everything was tracked, everything was compliant and submit to Assumption. And so we were pretty proud of that and that was all well and done.

But yeah, we learned a lot and we’ll talk about that after. So that was marketplace solution. Not only was it D2C, it was really made to be modular. So everything is API driven. We wanted this to work as a turnkey solution but also to connect, plug and play with maybe more tech-savvy distribution partners. So that was also in our mindset in 2019.

Now while we marketplace solution and we had that LIA from 2013, we’re also juggling with the fact that we have two very different infrastructures. One is web-based in 2019, the other one is Adobe Flex, which doesn’t exist technically anymore, but anyways.

So 2024, so this year, happy to launch a new web-based version of that LIA system, again, with our friends at Lavvi. And so everything is starting to come together in terms of the backend ecosystems and going, and this is still a advisor first journey, but everything, as we’ll talk about, is made to pair up and connect down the road.

And so that we are officially, we’ve launched a couple of months ago, but we are doing that official turn this weekend where the old LIA will be turned off and all sales will be on the new LIA, which we already at almost a hundred percent conversion.

But it’s been a nice transition and we have a lot more features that we’re looking-forward next steps with the Lavvi team on integrating financial needs analysis and reason why letters and agent disclosure statements.

Again, these are more maybe Canadian specific compliance regulatory steps, but I’m sure in other countries and regions, you’d have something fairly similar in there. But we’re working hard on integrating those type of features as well. And that’s a bit where we were and where we’re at now.

Ray Adamson:

Fantastic. Thanks, Pierre. It’s quite a story and one of the things that resonates for me through that story is the fact that Assumption, even though as a small carrier it was quite competitive, you guys had a clear vision on where you wanted to get to and you stuck by that even though you had some feedback from the industry that it might not be the best solution.

It’s one of the things that our Lavvi team has really appreciated about working with the Assumption team is that, and it aligns with us as an organisation, we’ve got a deep understanding working with you for as long as we have and other carriers.

We really understand the marketplace and the challenge of distribution and we’re really excited about where you are at and more importantly, where things have the opportunity to evolve. And we’re really excited to be a part of that.

Maybe from here, we can jump into some lessons learned because I’m sure over that period of time, it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. There were probably some things that when you look back, there was some tough learnings, but I think those types of examples would be really good for our audience.

So why don’t we jump into it here and you can share some food for thought as we go forward.

Pierre Martin:

Perfect. All right, well, a few things. Change management and planning. I’m fairly certain that every organisation talks about change management to either have change management training or agents or change agents in their companies and leaders and that’s great, but it is as important as we say.

And if we take the 2013 LIA launch that platform that year, technically that project was finished ahead of time, it was done in July of 2013 and by the time, we were finished doing our change management plan.

We clearly came to the realisation that we cannot launch this in July because we won’t have aligned all the stakeholders prepared, all the training, really get our distribution partners on board.

And at that point that was even more of a critical business milestone because there were absolutely no opportunities to have overlap between systems. So this was a clean cutoff.

And after we laid down that plan, I remember at the time I was the business lead on that project, but I was reporting to my VP at the time and had to say, good news, bad news. Good news, you’re on track. Bad news, you can’t launch in July.

And obviously that was not the news he was hoping to get. But once I laid out the plan, and this wasn’t just Pierre Martin’s plan, this was something we developed with several departments and looked at, especially with the sales distribution team, we came to the conclusion we had to launch this in October.

But to this date, it is probably still the smoothest rollout of anything, whether it be product, technology or whatnot that we’ve ever done. We had zero dips in production and in fact, kept increasing sales post launch of that system. But it comes back to having a realistic plan like planning ahead.

We understand we need to be agile, nimble, so do leave some room to acquire new information and make better decisions, but you do need to plan ahead for these things. And that was something that we were really grateful for and that we kept as a north star for future projects.

Ray Adamson:

It’s one of the things that we echo strongly when we’re starting work with a new client, the planning starts even before we start the implementation conversation.

You have to consider all the audiences involved, both internal and external and how the new technology is going to impact them. And you always want to frame the what’s in it for them aspect of things both internally and externally. So really wise words.

Pierre Martin:

So the famous book, Good to Greats, and we talked about some of the decisions we made have the courage to be the best at what you do now, are we perfect? We are not perfect, but we picked our core strengths and where we want to focus on and that’s really helped us double down and differentiate ourselves in the market.

And so it would’ve been tempting to keep some of our product portfolio that wasn’t digitised, it would’ve been tempting to do a bunch of other business decisions because you are getting sales, there’s revenue there, there’s consequences to cutting that out or having it or not.

But I love when we say, when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. That’s just the fact of life. And so we had the courage to say no to some staff and say yes to this type of transformation and that was key.

And maybe just to piggyback on the comment you just said about change management, I’ve been really focused on the sales side so far in the presentation, but all these applications have to go back to a backend system and an admin team and underwriting team.

And so we’ve always had that as part of our planning process. They are a stakeholder at the table and there’s a lot of stuff you can do on the front end that absolutely will speed up the process on your backend and leverage that. So keep that in mind.

Ray Adamson:

Yeah, this quote here interests me because you’ve talked to, I go to a lot of conferences, you hear speakers and it’s the next great things coming and everyone’s wondering, is that where I have to be? I’m curious what your thoughts are around what you’ve got here in this slide.

Pierre Martin:

Now again, this is going to be a Canadian perspective on things and as much as we have a really mature industry, it’s stable. There’s a lot of great benefits and I love it here. We’re not necessarily as at the forefront on the technology side in general as maybe other countries.

So I’m just going to set that expectation in that perspective offhand. But that being said, there are so many solutions out there to so many problems. And so the first thing is if we talk about say AI, everyone’s talking about AI, I absolutely prescribe to the fact that AI is a major technology leap in importance.

You could drown in adding AI tools or capabilities in your company today, but are you developing an AI strategy or is AI helping you meet your strategy? So your business objectives need to marry your business objectives, which are based on market opportunities and in problems.

And so we talk about leading edge, just make sure you don’t dip into, well, this is a nice tool and if I don’t have this tool or this technology, I’m going to miss the votes. Focus on what are the problems, what is the market telling you? And then look at these solutions and what’s out there and make sure you do your due diligence.

I know most companies will do that for sure, but especially when it’s an emergent technology, let’s face it, we’ve all worked in projects, they don’t have everything figured out yet. And so there’s a cost to being maybe too far ahead and even if you get the technology rights, there’s always the users.

So if I harken to the marketplace solution technology that we launched in 2019, that was great. I still am super excited about that technology now, five years later. Did it take a while before users really kind of understood how this goes in their business model? Yeah, it probably took two, three years.

So in the back of my mind I’m like, that’s two, three years of investments I maybe could have put elsewhere and then just come out with this a bit later. Now the learning is very rich, but timing is very key and important in this. You don’t want to be too late, but too early, not always a great thing.

Ray Adamson:

Yeah. We got a couple more slides and I want to get to the outlook, so I’ll go through these next couple of slides very quickly. They’re important, but I want to get to the outlook and talk about where you see things going.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, so we talked about marketplace solution, which again is a D2C strategy. And so the point is here just because we put something in someone’s hand, so a turnkey solution where it could buy online didn’t generate sales just because it existed.

It needs to be part of the system. You need the marketing, you need the sales funnel tracking. You need everything to the customer service and everything that goes with that. And so don’t focus too much just on the process flow in terms of tasks, focus on the process flow from an experience standpoint and make sure that the journey is well-understood and fully comprehensive seamless funnel tracking. This is big. Share because you care. Like I said, the infrastructure is really a modular API based infrastructure. So we’ve connected with various partners and it’s been really interesting seeing them really innovate their sales pitch and how they do their sales funnel management and web tools.

However, it really highlighted how important it is. So they transfer stuff to our API our systems and now I have the customer in my flow. They need visibility on that in case there’s any drop-offs so that communication and making sure that customer we’re holding that customer along for the ride is essential in any planning you do to get your full ROI on those sales initiatives.

Ray Adamson:

Perfect. You had mentioned early in our conversation about partnering and I see this quote here. Can you give us a bit more context on what you mean by partnering?

Pierre Martin:

So for us, again, we’re a small mutual insurance company. So our brand, except for locally, is not something that was really well known across Canada. And because we work through independent network, we’re always behind the curtain.

The advisor, the agency is really at the forefront of the customer relationship and we’re really the carrier in the backend. And so when looking at partnerships, and for like I said, partnerships for me is distribution partnerships.

We really looked at, if the brand isn’t our strength and the consumer trust is super important, especially if you’re going to do anything D2C, who could I partner with that has that brand affinity, that trust and work with?

And one of those examples in Canada here we have Blue Cross Life. I know in the states also has Blue Cross companies as well. They’re all segmented in Canada, but we did a partnership with all them across Canada. They leveraged our technology, our website, our product, whatnot, but we skimmed it and branded it through Blue Cross.

So they did the marketing, they went to the site, the customer knows this brand feels comfortable with the brand, but Blue Cross didn’t have to go in, build products, maintain products, do the actual exercise, have the technology, maintain the technology.

So we really played to our strength for that product category, whereas they really excel in other product categories already. So that was one example where we may not have that brand strength but we leverage someone else’s.

Ray Adamson:

Well, and that’s something, again, we’re proud of having worked on with you is to create that ability through our platform to support that type of distribution strategy. And it’s something that more and more of the prospects that we’re talking to are looking at partnering because as you said, it’s not having to be all things to all people. Everybody has strengths and if you can work together, it’s a real plus.

Let’s jump into the outlook here and what I thought is we’ve got a few different audiences when you think about our industry and it’d be interesting to just talk about where those audiences are at and what their focus is.

So when we look at consumers, obviously, consumer needs have changed and love to get your thoughts on that. I’ll just pop to the next slide here.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, so again, Canadian perspective for sure. I think a lot of it still also resonates in the states from what I can see in stats reports. But in Canada, at least policy counts have been stagnant for a good number of years.

And we say the mid-market that family markets, I define it when you’re paycheck to paycheck to pay your bills or whatnot, you’re highly dependent on that, whether it’s for a few weeks or a few months is really underserved. And this was one of the statements that was true when I entered the industry.

I remember reading all about this and we’re still saying the same thing 17 years later, but that has really big repercussions and there’s a lot of stuff that maybe explains or is changing there. So in one hand, the infrastructure to support that market is really not properly developed yet in Canada or has changed quite a bit.

So if you look at urbanisation, so we’re not unlike a lot of countries where our small villages or towns, they’re losing people out to the bigger centres. So whereas in the past, I’ll take my own example, my grandmother was a captive agent in the insurance industry, and if you happen to live in her village, guess what? You’re getting a knock at the door to buy insurance. And everyone in the village ended up having insurance with her there.

But that relationship’s there, that community’s there. Sense of community, it’s not that people don’t care about community, but the community has changed so much where if you’re in a high rise, a 40-story building, how do you build community? How do you connect with folks?

The need for insurance is still there, but that community and how you access people or connect with people has changed dramatically. And COVID has really changed, even consumer expectations or behaviours, a lot more online purchases, a lot of change in terms of how they shop, how they research.

So there’s a lot in the financial model for distributors is really tight as well. I don’t want to make excuses, but let’s face it, if a 21-year-old is looking for a term 10, you do your job as an advisor as you typically do.

By the time you spent a few hours explaining everything, going through the process, getting the app fulfilled, the follow-ups, all that, it’s not a very lucrative endeavour there. The insurance need remains.

So we need to find a more efficient way to get there because that’s a big concern. And we, as insurance companies, are part of the social net. There are repercussions if we don’t do a good job, families are not protected and it’s just because it helps. Our bottom line is this is an important product for folks.

Ray Adamson:

The LIMRA, one of the other industry associations has done a lot of research and the stat that I’ve heard recently at a couple of conferences is in North America, less than 50% of the population either has insurance or has enough insurance.

And that’s a challenge because when you talk to many advisors and distribution organisations, they talk about focusing on that high net worth market. As you’re sharing the digital approach, it doesn’t have to be just digital. It can be digital with support. That really is an opportunity to help carriers really expand into a larger market space and not compete against their distribution partners.

For us at Lavvi, one of our guiding forces, we’re a technology company, but we’re really all about expanding access for the general population to get the insurance coverage they need. We’re tired of seeing GoFundMe when unfortunately somebody has a mishap that impacts them and their family and that’s what is driving us at this stage.

We’ll just jump to the next slide here, try to… There we go. This slide I find interesting. Tell us more about fast, easy now.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, I hate to have a cliche, but we talk about Amazon. I think that’s a very appropriate company to aspire or look at regardless of labour management strategies and the warehouses, we’ll park that aside, but in terms of the consumer centric design and the overall experience, they’ve set a standard and a lot of companies are either matching or aspiring towards that.

I can’t say that in the insurance industry that we’re there yet. And I say that more in the life insurance side of things or living benefits, but in PNC, obviously way more advanced, but the consumer expectation, they have no expectation coming in. All reports are saying people overestimate the cost of insurance.

Also, probably they have no idea what underwriting is or that there might be underwriting. What does that entail? So the expectation is honestly, I make a decision that I’m willing to part with some hard-earned cash to get protection because I understand what the benefit is. Can I just make this happen quick and now please in the way I want to purchase.

So they don’t want to wait. It needs to be fast. And a lot of our distribution partners that do online, whether it’s a fully online sale or at least a digital first interaction, we’ll say that you’ve got under a minute, maybe under three minutes at the very top to engage with the customer and help them fulfil that.

Otherwise, they’re already at company B researching and doing their own stuff. And that even leads to, like we talked about consumer behaviours in Canada you have 36% of consumers that are researching financial advice on social media.

And in the states, I think it was 53%. These are all according to LIMRA stats. So they’re digging and they’re looking the stuff before they talk to us. How can we educate and help that process move along as simple as possible?

Ray Adamson:

Great. We got about 10 minutes left. I want to get through the advisor needs and wrap with the carrier needs. So let’s jump into advisor needs here.

So this is a quote from LIMRA, virtual sales tools and capabilities, digital quoting, digital application, and e-signature e-delivery were listed among the most critical journeys for advisors. What are your thoughts around that?

Pierre Martin:

I think sometimes we have this perception that advisors, because the average Asian Canada is something like 58 years old for an advisor. I haven’t checked that in say the last two years, so maybe, hopefully it’s gone down a bit, but maybe not.

But the point is, we have this idea that they’re stuck in their ways. They don’t want to evolve, but when I talk to advisors, it’s often the other way around saying, we need more data, we need connectivity, we need to meet our customer’s needs.

And they see that now how can we make this avail them in a simple format? We need just to equip these advisors or distribution partners with the tools to allow them to evolve their practise. And so I’m not surprised about these type of requests.

They’re the ones facing customers day in, day out and they’re seeing these requests. So how can we be part of that solution instead of forcing them into, here’s the one track process to submit an app. And that’s the only thing.

Ray Adamson:

Yeah, it’s interesting, this stat from investment executive, which is a media here in the Canadian market, 93.8% of advisors have embraced the e-app and obviously the pandemic had a big impact on everyone and that was a real catalyst for advisors to embrace this digital experience.

One of the things that I hear from advisors all the time though is they want to use technology that they feel confident with, especially when they’re working with a client or a prospect, they don’t want to look silly. So designing a platform that’s intuitive and easy to use for them is a very key step. They also talked about client onboarding tools. Any thoughts or comments around this?

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, I think onboarding can take different strategies or approaches, but we’re seeing a lot of development on CRM fronts or financial needs analysis tools that help build that sales funnel, educate the client.

The sale or the journey does not start with a quote in most cases. And even if it seems like the first step for us, like I said, most likely that customer has done research somewhere else. So the journey really started even before that anyways.

And so I think that’s a really critical aspect and the beauty is there are several tools out there. Now it’s how do you integrate that into a business model and as a carrier, how do we fit in this ecosystem?

Ray Adamson:

It’s interesting, the use of APIs, our platform is API driven and we like to play nicely with others. That is really where the industry is at today. Not everyone is ready to play. Obviously, we all have legacy systems at the carrier level, but it’s figuring out ways to streamline that whole experience, which takes us to how the role of carriers is changing.

And when we think about Assumption Life, you’ve shared a lot about the history and the background and the evolution, which is very impressive. When you think about your current distribution vision and strategy for growth, what can you share around that? I’ve got a slide I can move to now that maybe you can walk through and just talk to us about this.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, perfect. And again, this is more of an internal perspective. I know I’ve said that disclaimer a few times, but just so we’re clear, we’re a Canadian small tier company, operate in Canada, and so with mid-market products. But for us, we see our distribution strategies falling into three main buckets.

So continued distribution and independent advisory network, so the MGA market, the alternative distribution and partnership angle, whether it’s national accounts, digital first type of distributor partners, and sometimes those are also MGAs, right?

Everyone’s looking to evolve so they’re not necessarily all independent. And then we have multi-carrier, which we just launched early this year. So we partner up with another carrier in Canada on the Lavvi platform, whereas same login, same experience, but now we have two carriers on our platform.

Now obviously, we partner up with someone that compliments our offering on the product side quite well, but that’s another opportunity where it drives more traffic to that marketplace, if you will, and encourages that usability.

Now in terms of looking forward in this, and you’re looking at the assumption LED journey, I explained a while ago, we started with an advisor led experience with our e-app in 2003 and then modernising that in 2013.

And then we went and we did marketplace solution, which a G2C model, so that would be the next consumer led process. Yeah, it’s being leveraged by advisors, but it’s designed for this funnel. And so the idea was let’s diversify our distribution strategies or capabilities.

And if there’s one thing that we absolutely learn is these things are not exclusive to one another and the customer really has an expectation of omnichannel, really omnichannel really being like a seamless shopping experience across all channels, whether it’s in store, mobile, online or whatever.

I know it’s a catch-all phrase, but it really is. And when you start looking at from a omnichannel perspective, if you can align your product and technology strategy around that, I think it opens up opportunities for almost every possible avenue.

And then you’re leveraging your data, you’re reducing technical debts, you’re really now more nimble to work with different distribution partnerships and strategies. And so we feel that’s key. It comes back also to sharing is caring around data. Well, if you’re hosting everything in one seamless place where it can accommodate different flows, you’re by far, increasing your likelihood of success.

Ray Adamson:

Yeah, it’s interesting. As a technology platform, one of the things that we pride ourselves in is the ability to adapt and evolve based on regulatory strategic and competitive pressures that our clients are under.

And you guys have been great to work with to work through a lot of these challenges. What’s a key thing that’s comes through in what you’ve shared already today is the vision that Assumption has had and continues to have to drive things forward.

And it’s sometimes hard to have that vision and be able to stick to it when you have a lot of external and internal pressures that are trying to evolve that. So kudos to you guys for making that happen.

Pierre Martin:

And I think when in doubt, there’s a lot of stuff on the technology front, but leave the complex stuff can still be manual as your MVP.

Just make sure you focus on all the standardised automate stuff you can automate and you’ll get way more bang for your buck to start with and then address. Don’t start by tackling the most complicated issues or features there. Start by the low hanging fruit as we’ll say.

Ray Adamson:

For sure. We’ll just wrap, you’ve got this slide Stronger together partnering. Tell us what you were thinking here.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, you know what? It doesn’t matter. I think the size of your company with the speed of technology developments, tools that are coming out, expectations that are increasingly changing or increasing, I feel it fair to say that anyone gains from stop trying to build it all on your own and collaborate and partner up.

This could be distribution partners, technology partners, underwriting partners or whatnot. Working with the best of breed and allowing everyone to keep focusing is we firmly believe in that and I think is something that’s going to be key for success in the future. It’s been true for a while, but I just don’t see any possibility of really honing that.

And again, even if you’re really advanced on the technology side and you’ve got your core strength, great, keep that. But surely there’s other stuff like no one is developing their own word processing tool. We all use Microsoft Word and or whatnot. So the idea here is just use best of breed out there and collaborate. I think that’s key.

Ray Adamson:

Fantastic. Pierre, thanks for taking the time to share that with us. And maybe Mike, I’ll turn it back to you to wrap us up.

Mike Ashurst:

Yeah, great. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Pierre. That was really, really interesting engaging. So thank you for taking us through that journey and sharing your key learnings. I did have a few questions, but you did answer a couple of them just in that last part anyway, but we will have one quick one.

So for a company that has already invested in an e-app, an advisor led e-app within the past few years, what steps can they take to expand into other distribution channels such as direct to consumer.

Ray Adamson:

Great question. Pierre, do you want me to take a stab and you can add some colour? I think the reality is a lot of carriers are in that position where they’ve made an investment in technology and into an e-app.

And some could be four or five years old as Pierre shared. Some could be even older than that. Nothing wrong with that technology because if it’s working, it’s working. What you have to look at is as assumption has what the future is where you’re trying to get to, and it may not be trying to recreate your advisory e-app in a consumer setting.

It’s a very different path and context for a consumer to go through that buying process on their own, assessing how much coverage they need. So I think it’s really looking to work with a partner that understands that that has the experience there and can help you manage that buying process online.

And it’s an investment to set up even a separate platform in some situations for the D2C side of things, but often it’s a wiser move than trying to jury-rig the old tech that you might have. That would be my recommendation. Pierre, I don’t know if you have anything you’d add to that.

Pierre Martin:

Yeah, I feel like I’m going to eat my own words when I was talking about work with best of breed, but I think it’s just a clarification around you also don’t want to create a quilt in your organisation where it’s just a 50 best of breed systems that you’re constantly having to add technical debt to integrate and work together.

So I think I agree with Ray, you don’t need to change everything but your selection on your digital partners and understanding you want that flexibility. You need something that’s going to reduce technical debt, that increases capacity, that increases your investment strategies going forward in technology is key.

As the carrier, anything you can do to optimise your backend so that you’re easier to connect with. You have API driven frameworks, your rates, all that stuff will make it that if you want to change vendors or providers, you’re making that easier down the road.

But to Ray’s point, it shouldn’t stop you from at least trying things out and piling, just try to contain it as much as you can. But that would be my advice.

Mike Ashurst:

Great. Thank you for that. Just a quick reminder that the recording of today’s webinar will be sent to everyone who’s registered and it will be added to the knowledge hub and you can find the recordings and transcriptions of all the past gift webinars on the webpage shown here.

So finally, thanks again to Ray and Pierre for the fascinating discussion today. Thank you to all of you for joining us. Take care and we look forward to seeing you again at other events.

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