Ben Telfer:

Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s ICMIF webinar, the second episode in our “The Digital Mutual” webinar series. Delighted to be joined by The Co-operators from Canada today. I’m pleased to introduce today’s speaker, Tony D’Alessandro, who is vice president of architecture, IT strategy and applied innovation at The Co-operators. Tony, welcome and over to you.

Tony D’Alessandro:

Well, good morning everyone, or perhaps good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you’re joining from. As Ben mentioned, I’m Tony D’Alessandro. I’ve been with The Co-operators exactly seven years this coming week. And I’ve had several roles within The Co-operators, most recently I’m serving a hybrid within IT and within our operating units.

One thing that has been constant, however, is my role as chief architect and I’ll be presenting through that lens today. Just to switch over to the agenda in terms of what I’ll cover, I’ll cover five items today. I’ll give you an overview of The Co-operators. I’ll provide you a brief view of our new four-year strategy. I’ll discuss a few digital foundation items that are important for us to achieve our goals in terms of digital transformation.

I’ll show you a few examples of digital transformation. And I’ll preface this agenda item by saying that I’ll show you a few samples of what digital transformation looks like for us, rather than showing you many samples of us applying digital to existing business models. I think we are all doing the latter and it’s mainly to keep up with client expectations. And we’ll cover a hybrid of both, but very much focusing on transformation initiatives.

And then finally, I’ll talk about what we aspire to do to become better in integrating digital transformation into our core going forward. Beginning with who we are. We are a diversified cooperative with operations spanning P&C, life, wealth and investment management. And we have a number of diverse, adjacent businesses ranging from MGAs, software companies and two new brands we have built through platform and digital partnerships that I will show you later in the presentation, and those are Duuo and Home to Be that are reflected on the right hand side of the slide.

But our diversity goes beyond product and is also reflected within our distribution, which ranges from having the largest captive advisor model in Canada. We have direct distribution, we have broker based distribution, we have group, affinity and of course, a very large and important credit union distribution network within Canada.

With respect to our strategy, we’ve recently refreshed our strategy. This is new beginning in 2019, and we have a focus on five main pillars. I’ll briefly explain each. Starting with client engagement, we have a goal to continue to be the leader with client experience within the financial services industry. And we are on a multi-year journey to significantly grow our digital channel development across our lines of business to achieve this leadership with client engagement.

In terms of cooperative identity, I believe it goes without saying that we are a visible and vocal champion of the cooperative system. We lead by example and we will continue to be stewards of sustainability and building resilience within the communities we serve. And finally, a significant mandate of ours with respect to cooperative identity is to accelerate our effectiveness with addressing unmet needs for Canadians.

With competitiveness, our CEO themed our new strategy with the analogy of building a bridge to the future with the notion that insurance companies could be headed for a cliff if they do not pivot with areas of focus and practice. That being said, we have a desire to significantly grow our life, wealth and commercial lines of business over the next few years and going forward as we continue to experience changes with personal lines and especially automobile insurance.

Create the future is a new pillar for us and it demonstrates our commitment to transformation, which is our subject today. We have accelerated our efforts to drive large innovation efforts within our organization. We have created an Emerging Business Models unit. This is a formal business unit within our organization.

We’ve assigned a group of very talented individuals within this unit with the intent of exploring and developing new ways to connect with clients and developing new business models, products, and services. We have recently also announced the formation of an InsureTech venture fund that we will use mainly for this purpose. And I’ll show you an example later on in the presentation of a new venture in business that we’ve created as a result of this venture fund.

And finally, workforce capability. We have a strong belief that our people are our greatest strength. Retooling, retraining, supporting a healthy work-life balance and understanding and removing barriers for people to be productive within their whole life are an equal consideration and motivation for the strategy and is an underlying pillar for our success and the four items above it that I just spoke about.

I’ll just touch on some strategic themes that are important for the conversation that we’re having today with respect to digital transformation. But like any other problems we are trying to solve, it’s important to have a compass that guides our digital transformation, specifically what problems are important for us to solve and why they are important for us to solve.

We developed strategic themes that will drive our focus on transformation and specifically the challenges and opportunities that present themselves associated to autonomous vehicles, climate change, bioengineering and genetic mapping and changing client expectations. As we go through the themes of digital transformation and what problems we’re trying to solve, these themes help guide our energy in terms of what we’ll do and how we’ll transform within our core business over the coming years.

These are important themes for us to set some boundaries around where our energy will be placed. Now that I’ve given you a brief understanding of who cooperators are and our strategy and some of our strategic themes, I want to dig right into our execution themes associated to digital transformation and I’ll review five items. And so what I’ll do is I’ve chosen five items that have been important for us and are important going forward for us in terms of some pillars that we use for execution to help us drive success with digital transformation.

The first one, it goes without saying that you need to know your client. You need to understand your client, their journey with you and the journey with the broader ecosystem. And I’ve highlighted ecosystem as an example of something that’s also evolving quickly within our organization, is our coexistence with a much broader landscape and how we drive partnerships within that broader landscape to be successful.

The next item is with omni-channel, and more specifically making sure that we evolve an understanding of what is omni-channel. We all like to use the word, but I think as we gain a better understanding for the word, needing to also set an understanding of what is the scope of omni-channel and we’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

Number three is what does a client consider a good digital experience? And we’ll talk about some of the complexities that we have mainly with process and systems and heritage that we’ve built over the years and now how we have to draw a connection within all of those systems to deliver a good experience for our client. Item number four is all about velocity and velocity is crucial here.

Digital is not a traditional execution model, and we’ll talk about some of the things that have been important for us with evolving to help us with velocity. And finally, we’ll discuss the important distinction of adding digital to something you are already doing, as opposed to building digital businesses and digital culture. And quite frankly, that’s what transformation is all about, it’s driving digital businesses as opposed to adding digital to an existing business model.

On the topic of know your client, the most important aspect of driving value is clarity on the problem we are trying to solve. I think that our largest temptation and failures are attributed to starting a discussion with a solution and not debating the course of action we are taking and why. Well, we’ve learned that over and over within our organization.

I think too many digital projects are applied to existing analog business models without consideration as to what the client values as important or valuable. As a result, I think that not only the cooperators, but I would say that most insurers in Canada and North America for that matter are struggling to get clients to subscribe to traditional digital or online services without providing numerous incentives.

And we’ll talk about a few techniques that drive better understanding of clients’ unemotional and functional needs, which we’re gaining a really deep understanding with, it’s this understanding of our client, the problems that they’re trying to solve, the jobs that they’re trying to doing is critical with driving digital transformation and the digital transformations that the clients value.

And going through one technique that we’ve used quite successfully driven from our marketing function within our organization is building persona profiles and catalogs of client journeys. And we found them to be invaluable to get a better understanding of functional gaps and friction points for a specific persona. Now, these are done with input from clients that resemble the persona and journey mapping does address aspects of client empathy.

The biggest strength of journey mapping is with driving more precision on where to focus energy with improvements and having a better conversation on where digital could be helpful. Having said that, journey mapping works well when you are dealing with well-established and understood processes.

I think this is the point that you want to emphasize and perhaps emphasize for you to take back and even sort of introduce some questions from the audience in terms of what you found with your journey mapping in terms of dealing with well-established processes, because that’s the key here. And these are mainly used, I would say that journey mapping right now are mainly used within our core established business processes.

And I would say that they do not work as well when we’re trying to drive digital or business model transformation, because journey mapping has a bias towards improving an established knowledge base and a set of processes. And so within our core, they’re an invaluable tool set for us to drive improvements. Thinking about some other techniques we’ve used when we brace out of the scope of driving improvements with established processes, we’ve introduced two new frameworks within the cooperators.

And when you’re dealing with less known circumstances for example like driving innovation initiatives and true digital transformation, we’ve adopted these creative processes. Usually these processes are used as complements. I would say that we’re looking at jobs to be done right now in design thinking as two frameworks. And we’ve used them as substitutes.

These frameworks that we use to move… and these are frameworks that we use to move beyond the norm of only improving current solutions. And these are used more to create new things within our organizations, which I’ll show you an example of how we’ve applied them to those new things. So focusing on jobs to be done for a moment, jobs to be done helps us understand with much greater clarity what a client motivation is beyond the engagement with our organization.

And this is really the secret sauce that jobs to be done brings with us. It identifies the highest possible purpose for which clients buy specific products, services, and solutions. I was listening to one of my colleagues from John Deere a few weeks ago and he gives this analogy and I think this is a popular analogy that Clayton Christensen uses as well that you may have heard.

The perception is that, the analogy goes like this. I mean, one of the best used analogy is the perception that people will buy lawnmowers to cut grass. However, when you do a jobs to be done analysis, the reality shows us that most people will buy lawn mowers to keep the grass low and beautiful. And so if that’s the case, and I’m sure many of you will not debate that that’s the case, it may make more sense for lawn mower manufacturers to develop a genetically engineered grass seed that never needs to be cut, right?

And the point is that clients don’t buy products and services, they hire various solutions at various times to get a wide variety of jobs done. And jobs to be done gives you a laser focus view on the client motivation. Design thinking, subsequently, and we’ve used design thinking as a compliment to jobs to be done in a couple of cases already at Co-operators, design thinking subsequently provides us a solution based approach to solve complex problems.

But the secret sauce with design thinking is it encourages a cross functional team and clients, and I’ll emphasize the word clients because in a number of cases, we have actually included clients within our design thinking sessions. And what that’s helped us do is diverge on a number of possibilities to transform on a product experience.

It’s worked well for us in these situations, and I’ll show you a couple of examples where it’s worked well in the past. And I would love to hear some of your experience with these two frameworks if you’ve adopted them within your organization as well. In terms of the omni-channel, I think this has become quite a popular word. Everybody loves to talk about the omni-channel, it’s a popular topic.

When it initially evolved, I think most people evolved in opinion that it was everything through every channel with a seamless experience. And I think that’s a very ambitious goal. I also believe that most of us have reached a consensus, and not just within the insurance industry but a number of different industries, that you can’t build everything in every channel and offer a good, cost effective experience.

It’s just too complex to try to achieve this and you just can’t build your way out of this, right? Omni-channel is really about emphasizing the need to do the right things, in the right channels, based on client preferences, based on efficiency and market needs. And subsequently, it’s also about building context between channels rather than trying to build everything in every channel.

Having the context, and we’ll talk about context, this is really the glue that holds the client interaction through the different channels and it’s the magic that creates the exceptional client experience, is really that context. More importantly, however, is a deliberate understanding of the scope of your omni-channel experience. Namely, is it building context with a transaction experience specifically within your own company or our own company?

I mean, this is one of the questions we’ve asked ourselves quite a bit when we’re evolving our digital transformation. Or is it with building context or is your omni-channel expanding within an extended ecosystem of partners within a platform? Right? And I will show you an example of a platform that we’ve developed a couple of years ago with a number of partners, or I will say the conversation that’s happening right now is omni-channel about extending it even further by offering customized value offerings based on the interaction of a number of partners, either within an ecosystem or a platform.

And that’s the real conversation that we’re having now as it relates to omni-channel, that we believe will drive the differentiation within digital transformation. Moving to the next topic of client identity. This is a very busy, but not intended to be symptomatic in any means. I mean, just showing the complexity that most of us deal with when we’re trying to build context within our omni-channel or within the scope of the omni-channel.

This is really representative of one of our most significant challenges, I would say, as an organization. And once we formed a view of an omni-channel, we needed to build a solid foundation for how to connect our disparate lines of business, our distribution channel. And most importantly, one of the most complex things to do is tie systems together to offer a good experience digitally.

Within our core business areas, we have digital channels and offerings associated to many of our lines of business. Many of those have existed for years. The reality, however, and this is quite common and symptomatic, is that they are not connected together. They represent individual target sites for each offering. We invested with building an online services portal in 2017. We began our development with personal lines of P&C and expanded that to life.

We made a few key investments with the portal, vendor connectors and accelerators and an integration fabric. More recently, we’ve started to invest in a lot of training and tooling with an integration fabric and to learn how to tie all of this together in a productive way. And we are in the process of expanding that further to our advisor based wealth lines.

And it could likely grow beyond this scope in the next year or two, but this is sort of our mandate right now, is saying that if you want to deliver a good experience, if you want an omni-channel, regardless of what you believe your omni-channel is or what the scope of that omni-channel is, tying it together is so important. And what’s equally important is picking your battles as you’re tying this together, right? And deciding what that scope is.

Moving on in that same context, what’s equally important is with building a context across the organization for the client. And so associating a single client identity across all of our different products and systems is an equal challenge. Our back office, quite frankly, I will speak on our behalf, our back office, which I’m sure is very similar in most of your organizations was not built this way.

We have recently invested, not quite so recently, but a couple of years ago, we have invested with a client access and identity management system to help us in this journey. It’s a critical part of the fabric. I mean, without it, it’s nearly impossible to give the client a good experience and associate a single client identity with all the products and services they have subscribed to.

And this is very much associated with an enabling the scope of what you believe omni-channel is, is when a client does come to your digital product, that they are able to easily navigate across their different products and services without having to re log in and resubscribe and rejoin a different emphasis. Now, the reality is perhaps we won’t do this for everything, but we will do it to enable a client experience that our client expects.

The next topic is about partnerships and culture. And this is perhaps the most complicated aspects of a transformation to achieve. I always say that requirements and technology are simple, but mobilizing velocity and inertia in an organization is difficult. And I would also say that the tendency initially is to build long, detailed roadmaps and features and functionality that we aspire to, these roadmaps look brilliant when you create them and they’re full of detail.

Project teams are formed and features are tackled in a very linear and waterfall approach. It mirrors a similar process that we would otherwise use for typical products or projects. However, as an organization, we are quickly adapting to a more agile approaches and technology delivery. We are becoming more familiar with how to adapt DevOps, which is critical for digital transformation, and we are building microservices components to accelerate our time to market.

I know that a lot of these are technical terms, but no doubt that you’ve encountered them in your past with your own transformations. And I’m happy to dig into more detail if anybody’s interested in these. One of the other topics in this section that I’d like to emphasize is that platforms and cloud computing are becoming increasingly important.

And we like to call those load code environments that help us assemble capabilities quickly, rather than with us having to build things from scratch. We’ve scratched the surface in this area. I’ve used the word scratch two times, but we scratched the surface in this area, really important for us to continue on this path of leveraging platforms as often as we can, and cloud computing as often as we can to drive our velocity in this area.

And then finally, of paramount importance is building partnerships that help compliment your internal teams with critical expertise. This has been so important for us and has given us success in a number of areas. In our case, we have partnerships for client experience and creative. We have partnerships for mobile, and we have recently assembled of valuable partnerships with helping us evolve our microservices development platform as well.

On the same topic of partnerships and culture, one of the things that we’re getting better at is in terms of the topic of digital transformation. I wanted to offer this analogy that we have been using at The Co-operators and a popular mantra that we’ve been using between launching speed boats and having our cruise ship, which is our large organization.

The whole emphasis on this is that we are consistently having a debate on what is the right machine to compete in different circumstances. And so I’ll start with this popular mantra that folks like to use about corporate entities, that we need to turn our corporate entities into speed boats to survive this digital revolution.

And I’m not a big fan of that mantra because I would question whether you can actually turn a large corporate environment or a cruise vessel for that matter into a speed boat. You can neither chop a cruise vessel or shrink it in size to create a velocity because a broken ship no longer serves its purpose of a large scale stable environment.

Conversely, I know I would say that speed boats aren’t perfect either, right? And in organizations when we say we want to do something radical and different and drive transformation, we launch these little speed boats, but the reality is these speed boats aren’t perfect either. Yes, they are fast, they are agile, but they also have a small fuel tank and they have limited reach.

And the reality is they need a stable partner for more impact and scale. If we look at the world this way, an opportunity starts to show up in all of our organizations, right? Our cruise ship is our home. It’s our core, it’s our business. It’s a nurture and it’s a dock for our speed boat. It has the fuel that’s invaluable to every innovation in order to survive and thrive.

What the cruise ship gets in return is access to solutions that will make their ship better over time, and this is what the speed boats bring back to our cruise ship. The piece that’s missing often at the start is people who know and who have an appreciation for both worlds. I mean, when we’re driving transformation and we want to drive velocity and we have an ambition to drive a lot of different things, we’re so eager to get in these speed boats and go off on our own and explore.

But I will emphasize to you one of the things that The Co-operators has learned very quickly and we’ve all learned very quickly is that we need to create a world where we can have the large corporate cruise ship co-exist with smaller speed boats that we are launching to create new, innovative business models. And at this point, what I’ll do is I’ll share a few examples of the speed boats that we have launched in the recent past that have given us a lot of success and most importantly, a lot of experience for how to deal with this coexistence of cruise ships with speed boats.

And I’ll just move on to the next slide. The first item I like to talk about is what I believe is the most significant achievement for us in terms of launching a speed boat, and it’s fueled by a partnership that we did in 2018 with a global InsureTech called Slice.

This partnership with Slice enabled the launch of our first episodic insurance product last year. And I have a video explaining this product rather than me talking about it for a few minutes. And so we’ll go to the, well, next slide. And I’ll ask Ben to launch this video to explain our new product called Duuo.

[VIDEO]

Matt: Hi, my name is Matt.
Gwen: And I am Gwen.
Matt: And this is Neko. And welcome to our pet friendly Airbnb. It’s fantastic being able to share our home with so many people from all around the world. The area in Toronto that we live in is bordering on Moss Park and the Distillery District.
Gwen: There’s actually a lot of fun in having so many people come over, you name it, these spaces have seen it. When we began we actually had no idea that we needed additional insurance to cover home sharing.
Matt: When you go onto a lot of these home share platforms, they give all sorts of great numbers about millions of dollars in liability insurance, but they don’t really explain what that means.
Gwen: There’s going to be a lot of people in your space and you can’t keep an eye on things all the time.
Matt: That on-demand aspect I think was a really big thing that we were looking for. It’s really simple to log in, so easy to pick the nights that we want covered.
Gwen: Duuo is actually a very affordable system because it’s pay as you go. Not only are you protected, but if accidents happen within your space, you’re actually covered.
Matt: One thing that I love is that because we have instant bookings on, we can also have instant coverage on.
Gwen: I happen to surprise Matt with tickets all the time. We can just go and travel. We actually have peace of mind, whether we’re here or if we’re away.
Matt: Our favorite part of hosting is having people enjoy our home and now we can also enjoy the experience. Sharing our home, and because of Duuo, we feel protected.

Tony D’Alessandro:

We launched Duuo within weeks of our partnership with Slice mainly by leveraging the accelerators that were provided by Slice and the selective skills that were established within our large business. So when we talk about this analogy of a speed boat and the cruise ship and the coexistence between the two, this is a perfect example of how we were able to leverage off of both components to create something that was groundbreaking for us and transformative within our markets, offering something that was an unmet need for Canadians.

This is a one of a kind that will evolve over the coming years into different products and complementary products. The key here is we pulled what was required from the large cruise ship, from our core, without sacrificing the velocity of Slice and Duuo speed boat. And this is a model that we’ve learned works well for us, and we’ll continue on that.

Moving on to our next example, I want to give you an example of one of our early adoption of digital transformation within our organization. We launched a product called Home to Be in 2016. It was our first digital concept and learning experience with developing a value proposition based on data from a number of partners. You’ll recall this discussion that we had earlier about platforms and ecosystems and going beyond what an organization could offer to a client to deliver value.

The value proposition here was to help first time home buyers assess the quality and value of a potential home that they are interested in. Our objective was to lead more clients to our credit unions for mortgages, which would ultimately lead to the purchase of risk assurance products, such as creditor insurance and home insurance, which The Co-operators partners with our credit union partners for.

I’m just going to flip to the next slide here. And the initiative helped us… I mean, aside from the value proposition that we’ve built with credit unions that was really important, I would say this initiative helped us build a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge with building ecosystems. And this was our first foray in there and we learned a lot.

Our objective was a tight partnership with credit union partners, data providers. And our technology and design thinking partner, IBM was also instrumental here to develop a value proposition that we could not otherwise provide individually. We connected data from seven partners. Relative to an individual property to develop this value proposition, we won numerous local and international awards for this app. And you could download it if you’re interested, you could download it for free on the Apple or Google App Stores, both are available.

Another example that I want to share with you is something that we created last year called Advisor Assist. And Advisor Assist is an example of an internal digital transformation. It’s not client facing. And it relates to the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots. These are popular concepts in the current day.

We all love to talk about chatbots and artificial intelligence, but I will say to you, in our experience finding the right use case is extremely important for success. We do have an ambition to use chatbots with client facing use cases, but we consciously started with our advisors, mainly so we could learn how to adapt them, understanding their value and usefulness, and most importantly, how to apply them.

Our use case was helping our captive advisor base with answering commonly asked questions to our support staff. In assessing this use case, I mean, one of the interesting things about this use case is that we quickly discovered that the most frequent calls to our support desk consisted of 200 most commonly asked questions and all were highly successful use cases to apply to chatbots, meaning that they were predictive, short-tailed questions.

For those of you who have tried to leverage chatbots and artificial intelligence, you know that trying to do long-tailed conversations in the chatbot are still difficult to handle. Just going to the next slide here. We partnered with IBM and Watson. The end result of Advisor Assist is we partnered with IBM and Watson to deliver a very successful implementation and we started within our life company.

The benefit here was astounding success, I would say, reducing our call center agent time over the phone dramatically. And so this is an area that we will continue to explore. And a good example of when we talk about digital transformation, it’s also leading by example inside and setting that precedent for what digital could do inside your organization and not just what it could do for our clients in terms of driving new market transformation and innovation as well.

The next example I want to show you, oops, or just go up one more slide, is I want to show you a video of what I’ve considered to be our first digital transformation initiative within our organization. This is what I would say is our first real digital transformation initiative in the last few years. It was our very first foray into mobile. I would say we started to have this conversation in 2014 leading into 2015.

We did this app and I would say that it was the most advanced real-time transaction processing insurance app at the time. And we did this quickly by leveraging a slimmed down version of design thinking, agile development and extreme programming, microservices, and a slimmed down version of DevOps as well. And so all the things that we talked about earlier in the presentation, it was, I would say, our first success with building…

It was also our first success with building a successful long-standing partnership with a mobile inclined experience organization that we’re still working with today. I consider this to be our first and likely, still most successful application of digital transformation inside of our core business. We did this for our core to leverage our core and more successfully for our clients. And so I’ll ask Ben to play a short video for you to explain what we did with Benefits Now and how it is used by our clients.

Just in the interest of time here, I’m going to flip through some closing thoughts as soon as I… there we go. I’m just going to skip to a couple of slides here. Just in the interest of time, I’ll end this webinar by emphasizing two final thoughts. The first is related to a concept that we’ve been adopting at The Co-operators called the three box approach. It’s a great framework.

I would say it’s been a great framework for us, and it’s a great framework for you to consider in your organization to help you assess whether you have the right balance of activities in your organization. And so this is really about understanding how you could drive transformation specifically digital transformation. Let’s say the reality is that it is impossible to drive transformation in an organization unless there is a conscious effort to let go of some other things.

What I mean by that is that we will all find it difficult to build for renewal and new markets without stopping some things within our organizations that don’t add value any longer. And we can’t just continue to add capacity and budget to do all the same things while we’re creating new things. It’s just economically it’s a challenge and not sure it’s sustainable quite frankly.

This is no different to managing a balanced portfolio, I would say. And what we have found is that it encourages a healthy debate and discussion on whether we have our sights set on the right priorities within the organization in terms of the balance between these boxes. The other point that I will touch on, just to flip to the final slide here. Oops, one too many.

The other point that I will touch on, another discussion that we’ve been having, a healthy discussion is that as we’ve been learning about digital transformation now for at least a few years, and I believe that as an organization, we have made a significant amount of progress in this area, yet we have just scratched the surface and there’s so much more that we want to do and have to do.

One of the subjects that we have started having a healthy discussion on is the concept of having a landing dock. And so the analogy I use here is all of these little speed boats that we’re launching to create these digital transformation initiatives will eventually get back to the dock and be faced with this receptacle that has no plug, right? And you’re rewiring for everything.

And the reality is organizations can not rewire for all of these speed boats racing in individually, otherwise, you leave them out at sea to drown. And so if you want to launch speed boats within your company and to build new brands, concepts, and explore new markets, you need to think about how you will dock those boats back at the corporate ship when you are ready to bring them back and scale the business.

We call this the landing dock. I know a lot of other folks have been using the analogy of the landing dock as well. I will say to you we have just started this. It’s more difficult than it sounds. And you can imagine the excitement that happens within a corporate environment when you are introducing something for and into an established organization.

Just to give you a flavor of some of the questions we’re asking ourselves is how do you dock a speed boat at the cruise ship dock when it’s time to scale? How do we behave when we’re launching one of these digital transformation initiatives? What are the corporate guidelines for launching and docking a new transformation? What digital adapters do we need within our technology organization to be successful, to plug these transformations back into our environment when we’re done?

And how do we become better at managing the coexistence between these boxes and making it a common and a seamless process in terms of the interchange and interaction between them? With that, I will leave you with that final thought and I will hand it back over to Ben for questions that you may have.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you so much, Tony. That was a great overview of your digital strategy with some really interesting practical examples of digital innovations and platforms that I think everybody was very interested in here. We do have quite a few questions, so if you can bear with us and I’ll try and get through these as many as possible. First question for you here, Tony, do you have an area of innovation or digital transformation? How is it composed and how many people work there? I guess they mean a sort of function within The Co-operators, specifically for innovation or digital transformation.

Tony D’Alessandro:

I will answer that question in two parts. I will say, I mentioned earlier in the presentation that we have recently created an organization called Emerging Business Models. And we have assigned a number of people to work in that area full time and we have also seconded other individuals to participate within that Emerging Business Models area.

Emerging Business Model is not just about creating digital transformation. I would say, however, the reality is that a lot of those Emerging Business Models do have strong components of digital embedded within them, it’s a natural synergy. And so answering your question, yes, we do have now a dedicated team that drives these types of transformations and we also have created an InsurTech fund that will support investment in these Emerging Business Models.

But to the second portion of your question, I would say that innovation is not just the job of Emerging Business Models team or an innovation team. Innovation is everyone’s job within the organization. It’s big I innovation and what we call small I innovation. And when we think about our core business and what we refer to as box one, it’s really about strengthening our core, making ourselves more competitive, making ourselves more productive.

And we do that by introducing innovation with everything that we do and every day that we do it. And so our desire is to have innovation happen everywhere within the organization and different levels of innovation within there as well. I hope that addresses your question.

Ben Telfer:

Another question related to sort of cultural change here, Tony, and agility, how agile methodology is implemented at The Co-operators. And I think you even answered this question, but are they key to digital transformation?

Tony D’Alessandro:

I would say that they are key and they’ve made a significant difference. And so I will also offer that I’m not the most qualified individual to talk about what steps we’ve taken to implement that within our core digital areas, but there is always the opportunity to connect you to those teams where they could talk about it in detail. But I will say on behalf of those teams that they will agree with is it is making a significant difference when we are applying digital to our core business and they are going through this very quickly because they do see the improvement that it brings.

Having said that, when we are working on our speedboat initiatives within the Emerging Business Models area, it’s always agile, it’s always extreme. It is always using the frameworks that we’ve adopted with jobs to be done and design thinking and other creative processes, right? I would say right now that they look like two different extremes but they’re coming together quite nicely, regardless of whether we’re working within our core area or we’re working within our true transformation areas as well. They will likely resemble each other quite a bit, I would predict within the next four years.

Ben Telfer:

Another question here for you, Tony, do you have any plans to offer any other on-demand insurance products, particularly motor insurance?

Tony D’Alessandro:

Yeah. So what I could say at this point in time is yes, we do have a lot of ambitions and desires to offer many different types of episodic insurance to our markets and those will be forthcoming this year. You will see a number of different releases through our partnership with Slice.

Ben Telfer:

Most likely what we look forward to hearing more about that. Another slightly different question here, Tony, how does The Co-operators’ identity come through in the new digital platforms that you’ve launched?

Tony D’Alessandro:

That’s a very good question. One of the things that you will hear our executives refer to quite often is that we have a very strong mandate for providing for unmet needs or underserved markets within the communities that we serve. And so Duuo is very much a reflection of that. It’s an underserved market. And so the sharing economy is an underserved market. It’s an unmet need of many of the communities that we serve and we’ve gone to market specifically based on that premise.

I would say the other reflection on this is clearly regarded within the type partnerships that we have with our credit unions. And quite frankly, when we created the problem to solve with our Home to Be app, it was because of that strong collaboration with our cooperative partners, specifically the credit unions in that our interest was driving more traffic to the credit unions.

And ultimately driving more traffic to the credit unions makes our cooperative system much stronger as a result. You will undoubtedly notice that within each of the problem statements that we come up with, that there is an element of cooperative identity, a strong element of cooperative identity in there, and that we have a huge focus right now on committing to unmet needs within the communities that we serve.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you very much Tony. I think we’ll hold it there. Thank you again, Tony, for an excellent presentation and some brilliant answers to some very good questions from the audience.

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