The Ontario Broker - June 2018 - 27

WHAT SHOULD ONTARIO BROKERS KNOW
ABOUT YOUR EXPANSION INTO THE
ONTARIO MARKET?
SGI CANADA has a national growth strategy to
increase scale and geographic diversification. We've
focused on making substantial gains and broadening
the spread of risk in all five provinces we do business
- Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC.
We've recorded premium growth at a substantially
higher rate than the industry average (9.3% this past
fiscal year) and nationally, we're on pace to achieve
$1 billion in premium by 2020.
SGI CANADA acquired Coachman Insurance
in Ontario in 2001. We've been successful with
our non-standard auto product for high-risk and
rehabilitating drivers under Coachman, but we've
had less success with Personal & Commercial Lines
under the Coachman banner. We needed to do
something different to drive growth, so we worked
on our pricing and analytics capability, access to data,
technology and broker relationships before making a
push into Ontario under the SGI CANADA brand.
We've proceeded with a two-company model - SGI
CANADA for our standard product offerings and
Coachman for non-standard auto. While it was
important to retain our non-standard auto expertise
through Coachman, it was equally important to
provide a standard auto and property option for
customers/brokers who want insurance under
one carrier. On the auto side, there's the practical
challenge of meeting the regulatory requirements for
rates and classifications in PPV. In our experience,
having one rating model to handle standard and
non-standard isn't feasible. In the end, the two-brand
approach was the right solution for us. We launched
in July of 2017 and we're pleased with the first ten
months. We'll continue to build our underwriting,
claims and business development teams and evolve
our Personal Lines offering. Currently we're building
a Commercial Lines offering through SGI CANADA
with an underwriting team here in Toronto; we
expect it to be ready early 2019.

Our approach is to know how each of our broker
partners operates, and understand what we need to
do to be effective and supportive. We're a Canadianbased insurer with a 70-year history selling Property
& Casualty insurance. Our leadership and decisions
come from here, and our brokers have easy access to
decision-makers within the company.
We're also one of the few markets in Ontario that
offers brokers standard Personal Lines and nonstandard PPV.
WHAT CAN BROKERS EXPECT ON PRODUCT
AND TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT?
We're investing heavily in technology to help brokers
and ourselves become more efficient, providing the
technology brokers need to meet the expectations of
consumers who want the same kind of digital experience
from our industry that they currently receive elsewhere.
On efficiency, we've partnered with Custom
Software (CSSI) to develop a real-time connection
from broker management systems to SGI CANADA.
This is the Holy Grail we've been looking for in our
industry for so many years - allowing the broker to
start and end transactions in their BMS without
nightly downloads. Our goal is to have this capability
working in a pilot project capacity for our Personal
Property products in the first quarter of 2019.

On the digital front, brokers have consistently told
us they want to build out their own consumer-facing
technology, and to make that happen they need carriers
to publish their application program interfaces (APIs)
so they can connect into carriers' rating engines,
policy administration and claim systems. We've been
working on this for the past 12 months and currently
have a broker partner piloting our tenant API; we'll be
piloting our home API this summer. We'll continue to
work on developing APIs for our suite of products -
it's critically important for the future of both brokers
and broker-only insurers to be able to meet the digital
expectations of our customers.
We're also one of four insurers to sign an agreement
with the Toronto Insurance Council. The ultimate
goal of this agreement is to get carriers and BMS
providers to begin investing in real-time data
exchange for Commercial business. It's early days,
but we're fully invested in the goals of the project and
excited about moving forward.
WHY DID SGI CANADA BECOME A SPONSOR
OF IBAO?
IBAO's vision to be the voice of the Ontario
broker within the insurance industry fits with our
overall strategy and alignment with brokers. Your
commitment to ongoing education and developing
talent in our business is important work - we're
proud to be a sponsor.

HOW DOES SGI DIFFERENTIATE ITSELF
FROM OTHER CARRIERS?
Our partnership with brokers is the core of our business
model. We sell all products exclusively through brokers
- there's no direct arm for our company, and we're not
transitioning to that business model. Strong, longterm partnerships with brokers are the heart of our
longevity and success. This is reflected in the results of
our 2017 SGI CANADA Annual Broker Survey where
93% of our broker partners said they're satisfied with
SGI CANADA and proud to do business with us. We've
consistently recorded a broker satisfaction rating over
90% for several years.
Because we don't compete against the broker channel,
we have a singular focus on supporting broker-only
distribution. This is reflected in our product, process
and technology development. Brokers are core to
everything we do.

WWW.IBAO.ORG

There's power in our partnership
Thank you to our broker partners for helping to make our first year
in Ontario a success. We appreciate your warm welcome and we're
excited to continue working with you to grow in partnership together.

Ask your Business Development Account Manager about our plans
for year two.

sgicanada.ca

JUNE 2018

http://www.sgicanada.ca http://WWW.IBAO.ORG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Ontario Broker - June 2018