Helping brokers make sense of the crowded digital marketplace

Canada’s national broker association has launched a newly redesigned, interactive tech website intended to provide brokers with up-to-date information on tech providers and solutions, digital initiatives, case studies, benchmark assessments of brokerages’ tech stacks, and honest appraisals of new technologies, among other things.

Mathieu Brunet, president of the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada, tells Canadian Underwriter the decision to proceed with certain technologies in a brokerage, such as a new broker management system (BMS), is an important one, and can require investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a brokerage’s first year.

“So you have to be confident in your choice,” Brunet says, citing the reasoning behind the launch of the IBAC’s new Tech website. “I get calls from colleagues, from other brokers, saying, ‘Hey, how’s your experience [with this specific tech]? What do you think?’ It’s important this is happening, that we are sharing our experiences.

“Yes, we’re competitors. But the end goal is that the broker channel is successful.”

Modelled on brokers’ value propositions to consumers, IBAC Tech is designed to offer brokers choice, advocacy, and advice on available digital solutions for their brokerages.

“We demystify all the technologies,” Brunet says of the principle guiding the site. For example, “we separate them between the vendors that offer a BMS, a CRM (Customer Relations Manager), InsurTechs, and API connectors. “There are so many types of [tech] companies that can intervene in our business model nowadays. We have a space for each of them in the new platform.”

Brunet makes clear that IBAC Tech is intended to be neutral; it does not build, sell, or endorse specific tech products or vendors. Rather, it is a place where brokers can explore the applications of particular business technologies to solve a particular brokerage’s issues. To this end, the site has published several use cases.

“We publish use cases in which real brokerages use one of the solutions, or implement a technology or a new workflow that uses one of those technologies,” says Brunet, who is also vice president of MP2B Assurance in Laval, Quebec. “Brokers can then show their experiences to other brokers so you can learn and relate to that [use case], depending on your business model… The use cases are there to help every kind of brokerage, whether it’s personal or commercial lines. You just need to know where your brokerage fits and find the right information.”

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The website also allows brokers to assess their tech stacks against industry benchmarks. A downloadable PDF gives brokers a chance to rate their tech stacks in six different segments:

• Website hosting, lead generation, and lead management
• CRMs and quoting/rating
• Policy management, renewal, and customer self-service
• Customer self-serve quoting/binding, and issuing, as well as re-keying required
• Data analytics and email marketing
• IT, telephony, and premium financing

The brokerage can then compare their self-assessments in these areas to industry benchmarks.

The redesigned website will be regularly updated with news and industry insights relevant to brokers, insurers, and tech partners, Brunet says. It will contain resources for brokers looking to adopt and implement emerging technologies. And it provides a space for tech vendors to provide information about their broker-relevant solutions.

Brunet also expects the site to present similar information and insights about artificial intelligence’s use in brokerages sometime in the future.

“We have started an AI working group,” Brunet says. “It’s not there yet on the IBAC Tech site, but it will be something we will publish there. The AI working group will have brokers, carriers and also vendors represented, and will bring some best practices for a broker. It will have AI use cases to help support brokers who are using AI.

“We don’t want brokers behind [in the use of AI] and trying to catch the train. We want them to be on the train.”

What’s more, the site offers a podcast, ‘Tech Trek,’ hosted by Tom Reid, IBAC’s broker lead on broker connectivity. In it, Reid talks to several guests from various segments of broker tech.

David Gambrill

David has twice served as Canadian Underwriter’s senior editor, both from 2005 to 2012, and again from 2017 to the present.