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Ben Telfer:

Hello everybody. Welcome today’s ICMIF webinar. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining us today. My name’s Ben Telfer and I’m chief membership officer at ICMIF, and I have the honour of moderating today’s webinar. The title of today’s webinar is Positioning for Tomorrow – Promutuel’s transformation journey to support its ambitious profitable growth strategy.

So today we’ll be hearing from ICMIF member, Promutuel, which is one of the largest P&C insurers in Quebec and Canada. And they will be sharing how it has embraced an ambitious and profitable growth strategy as a deliberate alternative to industry consolidation.

As I said, I will be moderating today’s webinar and there’ll be opportunities for questions. Please do submit those by the chat function. We’ll have time at the end of today’s webinar to pose those to today’s speaker.

So now it’s my absolute honour to introduce a good friend of ICMIF and a good friend of the mutual sector, both in Canada and also globally, Geneviève Fortier, who is CEO of Promutuel. She’s been CEO since 2019 and the first woman to hold this position since the company was founded more than 170 years ago. Geneviève, delighted for you to join us today, and I’m very pleased to hand over to you for your presentation.

Geneviève Fortier:

Thank you, Ben. Hello everyone, Bonjour. I’m very happy to be with you this morning. I want to first start by thanking Liz and Ben for inviting us to share Promutuel’s transformation journey. Today, our story will focus on winning true challenges and resiliency. And hopefully this is going to resonate with all of you. It is a real privilege and a pleasure to be among colleagues. I’m happy that I garnered your interest to be with us this morning. Thank you for having chosen to be either here virtually or to listen to the webinar down the road.

As Ben said, Promutuel is a proud and active member of ICMIF, which we find offers a wonderful space to learn from each other and to support our collective beliefs in the mutual model. For us, it’s a model where performance is always linked to a greater than usual sense of responsibility where growth and profits are rooted in a mission that is larger than us, serving our insured members as our company shareholders.

This model works. We’ve seen it not only in the consistent performance we’ve been delivering, but in the loyalty, the trust and the retention of our insured members along the way. It is also a model that we find highly resistant to external and internal pressures. And this has been proven time and time again, and it is still the case today.

As we all know, we live in a world where the pace of change is ever accelerating where uncertainty has become now our daily life. It is a challenge we believe for everyone, whether you’re mutuals, organisations of all kinds, and each of us individually to deal with all those changes.

We all face similar pressures to adapt and to transform. And as mutuals, we must be nimble, innovative, and forward-thinking in the way we’re approaching the business. All of this so that we continue to fulfil our mission, which is to protect our insured members and ensuring their peace of mind when they need us the most, while at the same time delivering outstanding performance results.

So today I will share with you our transformation journey my team and I have been leading that over the past six years at Promutuel in order to embrace our ambitions, respond to the evolving demands arising from our insured members and partners and maintaining our competitivity in an industry that is consolidating at a very fast pace, not only in Canada, but globally.

This journey is today very much about our progress and results so far, rather than having achieved yet our final destination. Along the way, we’ve learned a great deal, we’re continuing to do so in every step that we’re taking throughout our transformation.

So let me start by providing you with a bit of context. So Promutuel, I think Ben mentioned it is one of Quebec’s largest property and casualty insurers with revenues of 1.4 billion in premium volume. In fact, we are the fourth-largest insurer in our market. And as I like to say, we are the smallest of the largest and the largest of the smallest. Simply said, we’re too big to be small and too small to be big. So it requires a lot of creativity to make the right choices given the means that the larger organisations would have, even though we’re still competing with them at the street level day in, day out.

Thanks to our network of 11 mutual companies and a federation that is focused on providing them with more hundred plus shared services, we attend together to more than 650,000 insured members across Quebec and New Brunswick within the Canadian market, including thousands of entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized businesses.

We provide insurance services for automobiles, homes, businesses, and firms, as you can see on the screens, and we are doing it through mainly two distribution channels, direct, which would be traditional and web for about 77% of our book and 23% with the broker channels.

Promutuel is deeply rooted in its communities. It goes back to our founding in 1852, believe it or not, in a tiny town of Huntingdon where a group of prominent citizens and farmers banded together to protect each other in case of fire. That’s our story. No one else back then wanted to provide insurance for their farms. 175 years later, this is going to be in 2027, that same spirit of community collaboration and mutuality continues to guide us in the way we do business. And even though Promutuel grew from those very modest routes into an inspiring success story today, we knew we could not stand that. Recognising the need to embrace the story to embrace the emerging challenges, I’m sorry, facing our industry and our organisation, when we’re looking at how things were moving, the pace at which they were moving, we recognised that we needed to do something. So that’s why in 2020, we launched one of the probably most significant transformations in our history, and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on today.

So embracing this strategic shift was not an option. It was rather an imperative for us to remain competitive, resilient, and most importantly, to ensure the sustainability of our model long-term. As we’re looking five years, 10 years ahead, we’re very much concerned about the competitivity we’d be able to maintain, given the rank and the size we were occupying in the market.

So one of the many things that we learned leading an organisation that has been around for nearly 175 years is that it did not grow and prosper for so long without being resilient. And I think I’m going to come back to that in a few times in this webinar. Resiliency is what’s going to help us and help our intern members to navigate through those accelerated changes.

So the leader who came before us, they were able to adapt through our depression and political uncertainty, coping with crisis after crisis and generation after generation. They continue to adapt to the evolving needs of the insured members, to the broker partners needs as well and our employees every step of the way. So as we looked at it as a team, we absolutely concluded that we have the responsibility to carry on. And that’s why in 2020, we therefore committed to accelerating the next wave of transformations, fully engaged to embrace our ambitious, profitable world plan. So rather than looking at it in a very linear way, we made the decision to look at it, as you will see in the next few minutes, in a very circular way.

We anchored our reflection into some of the key challenges the industry was facing. We chose five of them, which are appearing on the screens. We believe that they’re still relevant, and I would argue that they’ve accelerated making the world in which we operate today more complex than ever.

Without any surprise, I think the first one is the consolidation of the insurance industry. We knew we’d be having to face that. The climate crisis, which was already in town, the rising expectation of our members who were looking for more simple, faster, and personalised services. The changes in technology and regulation, as you probably know, we have very dynamic regulators across the country, which have put significant pressure on the business in the past. I’m going to say five years in particular, and the changes in technology is something that is global for all of us. And last but not least, when we looked at that, even in 2020, the innovation that was required around product development, the innovation that was coming from AI was something that we had on our radar. And as we were looking at our technology back then, we were like, if we’re not accelerating there, we’re going to be short from being able to take advantage of AI as it comes through.

So to guide us in this journey, we developed a clear and inspirational long-term vision providing for alignment to our strategic plans. We made the decision to take that 10 years window, 2020 to 2030 into three different steps to make sure that we would be able to bite one step at a time. We called it Destination 2030 and broke it down into those three steps that you’re seeing on the screen.

The first part was to strengthen our foundations. Between 2020, 2023, we recognised that we needed to invest in some of our basic foundations, technology as one of them to make sure that we would be prepared to accelerate after that. In our current strategic plan, so ’24, ’27, we’re focusing everything on execution. As I speak to how our transformation has evolved and a concrete example of what we’ve done, you’ll see that that’s very much what’s happening today, focusing on execution, execution, execution.

And then as we’re looking to build our next strap plan for ’28, 2030, we’re really at a place where we’re going to be able to win through diversification, diversification of geographies, diversification of business lines and diversification of channels to distribute. So we believe that breaking this 10 years window was interesting to keep the teams focused on what they could control through that transformation.

As we were looking at how we would brace those elements, we needed to bring the priorities closer to the team as well, so that in the day-to-day, they would be able to fully understand how the priorities were established, the decision were made, the investments were made within the business. So we call those our five priorities and they’re resulting from our read on the imperative that we’re touching our business in different ways.

So the five priorities we chose to keep focus on throughout the entire 10 years journey are the following. So maintaining our competitiveness through accelerated, profitable growth. You’re going to hear me speak about profitable growth all along that webinar. I’m a strong believer that profitability and growth needs to go hand in hand. We all know in insurance that we could increase our top line, if we do that without keeping in mind the importance of profitability, we’re going to find ourselves unbalanced at different stages. What we wanted from the get go was to be fast at transforming, but at the same time, not lose sight of the need to keep hand-in-hand growth and profitability. So this was the first one.

The second one was to improve our operational efficiency. Leading a group of 11 mutuals who are all independent organisations having chosen to work together makes it a bit more complex when you look at bringing efficiency into your operations, processes and technologies. So we need to make sure that through that transformation, this was also being part of the priority.

The other one was around accelerating digital transformation. I don’t think it’s a negotiable for any of us on that call. We’re all facing the acceleration of digital. Coupled now with AI, it creates a very important priority that we need to invest on a continuous basis, and I’ll come back to that.

And the other one was to adapt to a new workforce and new workplace. I’m a believer that three to five years from now, when we look at the workforce we’re leading, it’s going to be very, very different in the way we are executing work and for our leaders and the way they are leading teams between human and agentic AI. So we’ll come back to that.

And then the last priority was about modernising our governance, because the synchronicity between what management is doing and how governance is evolving and supporting that is key into any running of businesses, but even more importantly, as you are proceeding with an important transformation.

So those are the five priorities that we’ve selected back then and that we’re continuing to work around as we’re advancing our transformation.

Let’s look at each of these separately so that I can bring some concrete example of the why it’s important and how we’ve been executing against it.

So the priority number one around maintaining our competitiveness, as I said, revolves around my motto, which is to grow profitably. I firmly believe that a flourishing business must be anchored in solid business fundamentals. In our case, it meant being exceptional at underwriting, pricing, and processing claims. To me, this is the opening key to success. If you do this right, then you could do a lot of other things that will contribute to it. If you have flaws into those fundamentals, it’s going to be very difficult to be in an acceleration mode.

So we made it clear from the beginning that to remain competitive, we would need to grow profitably and never lose sight of it throughout the transformation. Our aim to double the size of the organisation by 2030 through organic and inorganic growth in Quebec and across the country was obvious for everyone. Growing profitably would then help us to accelerate our investments in product development, technology, data, analytics, and AI. It would increase the diversification of our portfolio to better cope with climate changes through the diversification of our risks. It would increase the profitability through the dilution of cost on a larger scale. When you are a mid-size organisation, it is a challenge, so this would allow us to do that and ultimately strengthen our financial resiliency.

So by establishing this straightforward, yet we find effective priority, we recognise the need to accelerate our growth. We have to get bigger, faster, to give ourselves the mean to reach our ambitions. And I’m pleased to report today that we are well on our way to achieving this one, prior to 2030, which was also a goal, being today at 55% of growth after five years and planning to have double our size by 2028. I’ll come back with some numbers in a few minutes.

Now, in terms of the second priority around improving operational efficiency, so while we recognise the myriad of our decentralised model through our 11 mutuals to differentiate through customer intimacy, we’re able to achieve that. We also acknowledge the additional cost that comes with it. We did not have a choice but to embrace this challenge dead on. Simplifying, optimising, harmonising, and automating our business processes would become a common passion and target for our 11 mutuals and the federation. It has to be done, and the only thing to have it done was to have it led by our leadership team across all the entities that we are overseeing.

So we set an ambitious target for ourselves to deliver 40 million in annual recurring savings at the latest by 2030, representing a reduction in a few basis points in our fee structure. We launched several initiatives around process improvement and technology deployment to get that done. We’re not completed yet, we’re still working very hard on it, but we’re progressing well.

So at this point, what I can say is that as you broke down the 40 million throughout the years of our plan, we are where we should be. At this point, we’re going to need to accelerate within the next five years to get the job done, and that’s the plan we have ahead of us. You’re going to see that we’ve invested in technology and now in our AI capabilities to be able to really get into renewed productivity places and a capacity to materialise our savings. So that’s the second goal, the 40 million around operational efficiency.

Priority number three in terms of transformation was to accelerate our digital transformation and use AI as a catalyst. So what I asked the team was to leapfrog. Rather than doing it through a very linear approach, what are the leapfrogs we can do? So acceleration of our technology platform combined with new capacity coming from AI and at the same time renewing our processes so that the combination of those three elements, creating the leapfrog that we have to take, again, as a medium-sized organisation, was fighting with competitors who are much bigger than what we are.

So the first thing we did was to make sure that we were working on our technology depth and on our applications depth so that we could really push a platform strategy that was going to be positioned in the cloud and allowing us to take advantage of the R&D that’s being done with the major systems that we’ve been working on. It was also a place where we had to have very important discussions with our board to make sure that investment in technology would not only be the thing of the month or the thing of that year, that it would be sustained over time. So that’s what we did. We made a clear commitment to invest steadyly in tech solutions and products and services better tailored to our entry members while equipping our teams with high-performing tools, which was also a change for them just by the virtue of having to deal with all those new tools.

Today, our technology platform is well in place, so whether it’s Guidewire or Genesys to support our customer relationship centre, Workday to support our finance HR back office functions, and we’re progressing well with the deployment of what we call our data model, our data analytics and artificial intelligence model, we’re progressing well to bring that transversally into the business. And the overarching goal above all of that is our quest to simplify our operations, to simplify the way we do business, not only with our insured members, but also with our broker partners. So that’s priority number three. And again, I’ll bring some numbers to that in a minute.

And then in terms of priority four, adapting to the future of work, if there’s one thing that I think is probably undebatable is the fact that the past five years have probably requestioned each employer on the planet on how the work would be done and where the work would be done, not only in the past five years, but moving forward. And doing that true and unprecedented and probably enduring labour work shortage was creating very important discussions in our organisation.

And in this area, we started from a point of strength with a very engaged workforce, I’ll get back in a minute with the numbers there as well, and a leadership model that is focused on a very close relationship between employees and leaders, allowing us to stay very much in tune and connected with our colleagues and partnering with them to redesign the future of the work so they’re part of it and to redesign the future of the workplace. They’ve also contributed significantly to what we’ve redesigned in the past three years around the workplace. And we thought that we should do that to maintain their commitment and maintain productivity along the way.

So we made the decision to build on that strength and we continued to push the envelope completely redesigning three things, our corporate, our team, and our individual rituals so that we work differently, we adapt to the new demands of workforce and workplace, and we do that not only thinking about each of us individually, but more importantly, thinking about, what do I need to do as a colleague to work for the greater good? So how do I contribute to my team? How do I contribute to the organisation goals and expectations? So that has been done and we also started one of the new work streams around really the future of work in a world where you still have human and agentic AI coming into the mix. What does this mean in terms of reinventing our frontline roles and what does this mean in terms of reinventing the role of leaders? Because leading a human workforce is one thing, leading an hybrid human robots workplace is something different. So we’re going to continue our work there. It’s underway in terms of transformation.

And last but not least, in terms of priority is modernising our governance to speed up decision-making. So as we were looking at the changes in every element of our business model and looking at the acceleration we’re facing, we concluded back in 2020 that our then governance model was slowing decision-making and limiting our ability to act swiftly. Modernising it was essential and it was tough with 11 mutuals, so 11 boards plus the board at the federation level, it needed a lot of dialogue amongst all ourselves to make sure that we were all embracing this opportunity, and we did.

So we took the bull by the horn and we identified 25 item plus that needed to be modernised so that the governance was in a capacity to support the acceleration that was required. So our board got engaged in this journey and took on modernising our governance rules, one element after the other, creating the right conditions to support our accelerated growth.

We’re pleased to report that later this spring, in fact, at the end of April, the few items remaining will be completed, making our governance practises much more nimble and effective.

So now where are we? Halfway through it between 2020 and 2030, I’m going to call it halftime. I’m a big football fan, so halftime seemed appropriate to speak about that. I would argue that we are well on our way to success, even though there is still a lot to be done to get to our destination. We kept our North Star, so growing profitably. We maintained this as a strong commitment and alignment from our network of mutuals and our 2,200 colleagues. And one of the things that we are really starting to see day in, day out is really our transformation efforts paying off, and we’re measuring as well the results.

So in terms of our team, I think we are more disciplined today, we are more robust in the way we’re approaching all of those opportunities. We are absolutely more aligned as a group of entities. And I think above all, we’re in a better position to grow profitably, which has been our ultimate goal from the beginning.

We’re making significant progress on our five priorities, even though they’re not progressing at the same pace. And one of the things we thought would potentially be interesting to all of you was to quickly look at the results each of those priorities have produced so far. And again, in a very humble way, because keep in mind that we still have five years to go in delivering on what’s expected.

So let’s look quickly at the numbers to support priority number one. And as a reminder, in a market shaped by volatility, inflation, rising climate claims related, that’s what we’ve been through in the past three to five years, we’ve maintained a strong performance over the year. This means that we’ve been top three. When you look at the top, I’m going to say top 10 to 12 insurers within the country, and keep in mind that we’re only operating in two provinces as of yet, so Quebec and New Brunswick, but we’re comparing ourselves to the national insurers. We’ve been amongst the top three in terms of year-over-year growth in our market for the past three years, moving our premiums volume from 900 million in 2019, so at the end of 2019, to 1.4 billion at the end of 2025.

In terms of profitability, we’ve been number one in terms of loss and combined ratio for the past three years. And we’re proud of this because having to absorb our expense base on a smaller volume than our competition makes it even more challenging. So if you go back to what I’ve said earlier around being excellent in terms of the fundamentals, underwriting pricing and managing claims, ultimately it is bringing us at a very good place. So you’re seeing our net combine ratio there, which has been good. And now in terms of financial stability, which was also one of our other goals, we’ve been able to maintain our minimal capital test ratio at 385% 2024, 184 million in terms of insurance result, and in terms of our comprehensive income for 2024, 230 million.

So you must wonder why I’m not presenting our 2025 result. Our AGM is going to take place at the end of April, and I have to keep some surprises for our people there. So I can’t bring the results today, but what I can say is that our 2025 results will be as good, if not better than what you’re seeing for 2024. So very proud of it as well.

And I would say above all, one of the things that is dear to us is the fact that we’ve strengthened our position as the most recommended consumer insurer in our market. In a world where trust is fragile, where sometimes retention can go one way or another, we feel that’s a powerful statement about our organisation. That’s the voice of the consumer that’s talking. And we’re working hard to make sure that we’re maintaining that customer intimacy as a differentiator with our insured members.

As I said, we strengthened our fundamentals. So underwriting pricing and claims, we’re continuing to work on that very methodically to make sure that every single aspect is tackled to make it very efficient. And I think we are adamant on the fact that we’re going to reach a place where we’re going to be able to do good business through a very simplified operations. So it’s still underway. We still have work to do, but we’re progressing there. And finally, we’ve been working very hard at preparing the organisation for its next wave of transformation, i.e., our organic growth, not only in the markets where we are operating today, but in terms of expansion throughout the country.

So in addition to the necessary changes in legislations we needed to make to allow our federation to expand across the country, this was completed, done in June of 2025, we took the necessary steps with our 11 mutuals to deploy our new strategic growth investment fund aimed at supporting our pan-Canadian ambitions.

So imagine 11 organisations which all have their own capital now pulling together to say, “We’re going to put some capital together. This is going to allow us to act quickly and swiftly when there’s opportunities that are coming our way.” So transforming what could have been a challenge into an opportunity to be agile in the way we’re doing things. So this is going to be critical to our success and the years to come. So that’s results on the first one, maintaining our competitiveness through profitable growth. We feel that we are building on something solid and we’re going to continue to accelerate.

What about results in terms of priority number two, which was to deliver our 400 million efficiency plan. So in terms of this plan, it is continuing to go well. We’ve created the transformation office to make sure that we’re going to be able to look systematically at those initiatives that are identified to help us deliver the 40 million annual recurring savings.

Several initiatives have been identified. Some of them have started to deliver results. It has been pretty effective in our claims management function where we’ve been able to continue to identify opportunities to streamline. And we’re also working on other functions to get that job done. Through the deployment of technology as well, in particular with our customer relationship management centres, we’ve been able to bring some AI capabilities to improve productivity there and to make sure that we were able to do more with same amount of people. There’s no doubt that within an organisation where you have so many different entities, it is taking longer to align everyone on what needs to be done to really materialise those savings. But through patience, the right conversations, the right follow-ups, measurable data, we’re able to help everyone work towards the goal. So it is our belief as we continue, and if we continue the way we’ve been doing it, that we’re going to be able to achieve the 40 million plan.

Now, in terms of the third priority around the acceleration of digital transformation and the use of AI as a catalyst, I think we’ve accomplished a major technology modernization, which has now enabled us to accelerate not only in terms of deploying new capabilities, but as well, taking advantage of AI capacities as well.

So I think I’ve mentioned we’ve invested heavily in updating our systems in reducing our technology depth and our technology, our application depths as well. We have a technology platform that is well in place and that’s going to be able to continue to modernise through the new cloud-based versions that will be released. So this is removing some of the weight on our shoulders, making sure that we’re focusing on real capabilities on that front.

And it’s paying off. So I already spoke about our system, Guidewire, Workday, Genesys, and they’re boosting our performance, allowing us to leverage AI. We’ve also put in place a transversal team that is looking at all the use cases that will be helpful to really simplify our operations. And we’re working now on prioritising how many we believe our teams can absorb, so at which pace we’re going to be able to accelerate.

So it’s not a question on what do we need to do, I think the what is clear, it’s really about how we do that to keep focus on our operations, creating the right change with our people, and at the same time delivering the goals that we’ve set for us. The other place where we’re continuing to make some progress is around analytics risk models. I think the data is helping us to move into that direction.

So now on priority number four, how are we doing? So priority number four was to adapt to the future workforce. I think one of the things we never forget is that we are a human to human business, and despite all the technology that is coming as ways to improve our efficiency, we made the choice to remain a human-to-human business. So it is creating a place where we’re always very thoughtful about how we’re going to marry this customer intimacy that we’ve been able to develop with the technology that can help it to work.

So what we did is we continued to work on simplification, but we’ve significantly invested in change management and change adoption capabilities. I think sometimes we underestimate in an important transformation the effort that’s required on change management and change adoption. And we’ve overinvested there and we’re going to continue to do that because we believe that even though you have all the tools, tricks that you need, if you don’t have a strong adoption from the workforce, you are not going to get to the savings expected. And as you look at the literature around AI today, one of the reminders is that it’s not because you’re deploying the use case that you’re going to get to the saving. The only way to get there is to engage people into the adoption of it, into the execution of it, and into measuring this adoption in a meaningful way, and that’s what we’ve been looking after.

One of the things that we did along the way, it became as natural. We built our own training academy. We felt that with everything that we were bringing, it was important to us to have better control on the speed at which we would be able to train our people, so building our own training academy helped us to support the development of our agents, to support the development of our people in the other functions as well.

We also realised that the leadership model that we had in place would be under pressure in the next three to five years if we are not bringing those new capabilities that will be required to manage the new workforce that’s coming. So we’re going to be starting to deploy in 2026 a completely new revamped leadership training programme to make sure that those new capabilities are being incorporated and that our leaders are all going through that.

I mentioned it earlier around one of the important work streams of our ’28, 2030 strategic plan will be around the transformation of the workforce, leading a world where you have humans sitting side by side with robots, agentic AI, and making sure that our leaders are continuing to be able to make sense out of what we do because ultimately, if we want our insured customers to feel it, that’s how we need to look at it.

And last but not least, we believe that promoting a culture where people and performance are marching hand-in-hand has been our trick at Promutuel. That’s how we’ve maintained an 8.3 out of 10 employee engagement score every month for the past seven years in a row. And we were designated amongst the top 60 employers in terms of creating an employee experience globally by Office vibe. So that trick about combining people and performance, that trick of maintaining closeness between leaders and employees has been working very well for us.

And I should be remiss if I would not mention that we’ve been focusing on our core four values throughout the entire exercise, which is openness, solidarity, engagement, and ambition. These are the four core values that we all share at Promutuel throughout our 11 mutuals, as well as our federation. And we believe that this culture that we’ve built together is certainly a strength that we can build on.

And then in terms of the last priority in terms of the results, I think I spoke about the fact that we’ve identified our 25 plus items, we’ve executed on them, and one of the key challenges that was part of it was to maintain the integrity of our local mutual identity while achieving the coherent agility and strategic alignment necessary for efficient operations at the group board level. Striking this balance between local independency and collective effectiveness has been a core challenge and will remain a core challenge that we will always keep in mind as we continue to progress. So today our governance is stronger, more agile, and we’re very much in sync to push in the same direction.

So just to quickly speak about the fact that we’re not done, we’re going to continue with this plan for the next few years, and we’re not forgetting that even though the numbers that I’ve just shared are speaking for themselves, they’re only a part of the story. I believe that what helped us to get there is our discipline. I think we’ve been very much disciplined. We had a robust plan, which we kept flexible to adapt to the market reality. We had very, very honest conversations all along the way. It was tough. It was difficult to do that through a network of mutuals. We had very honest conversation, a lot of listening, openness and dialogue took place to make sure it was working. So I’m very proud of how everyone has got engaged along the way.

As we look forward, we’re seeing three ongoing challenges that could create some pressure on the speed at which we’re able to advance, but we’re going to try to transform those into opportunities. So the uncertain global economic environment is certainly one that is going to continue to put pressure from the cost claims to settle, from the less predictable economic cycles, from the technology investment that must be maintained. We’re going to have to continue to advance through that. And our challenge will be to balance financial rigour, affordability for our members, that’s very important, and the ability to invest for the future. It’s a delicate balance, but an essential one that we’re going to try to maintain.

The second trend that we’re keeping in mind is the industry consolidation and transformation. We’ve seen large scale consolidation, brokerage shell consolidation and vertical integration. Some of the large insurers are controlling most of the value chain, including repair services and distribution, which is making it more challenging for the midsize organisation like we are. So we’re going to have to continue to play in that field, being more faster, more agile and more disciplined than ever because this is not going to change and we have to find our place in that.

And then in terms of the last one that we’re keeping very high on our radar is the intensifying of the climate risk, and you’re seeing on the screen the different elements that we’re always keeping in mind by the increase in reinsurance cost, the pressure on premiums, the growing difficulty in modelling risk, and then the investment that will be required in prevention data and technology that we still need to do. So all of this, I think, will be putting some pressure on the plan that we’ve set for ourselves. It’s not particular to Promutuel, it’s particular to our industry, but still we have to make sure that we’re not losing sight of the destination and that we’re keeping our North Star in mind to get the job done.

So in conclusion, I think throughout our history, Promutuel has been able to transform itself, there’s no doubt about it after 175 years. Again and again with one constant, which was to put our insured members at the centre of what we do, the decision we made to remain relevant and to remain affordable to them.

It is demanding. There’s no doubt that transformation, if you would speak to any of our team members, they would tell you that we’ve been advancing at a very fast pace. It is demanding, but it is our belief that without that, it would affect our ability to compete in a meaningful way. And we don’t want to be on the menu of anyone, we want to make sure we’re creating the menu on how we’re going to grow. And I think one of the things I’ve been saying is if we do exactly the same thing that our competition is doing, we will never stand out and we will never win. So we have to build on the strength of our mutual model. We have to find the right delicate balance between ambition and proximity, the need to grow, and keep the best interest of our members together.

So it is with that conviction that we will continue on our path. There’s no doubt about it. We will continue to transform today to thrive for tomorrow, and we will be doing that on behalf of our insured members, our employees, and our partners. So I want to thank you for being so patient with me today, and I’m certainly prepared to answer any questions you may have. Thank you.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you so much, Geneviève. That was a fantastic case study you covered, lots of claps coming your way. I don’t know if you can see that on screen, but a fantastic case study of, well, some great successes you mentioned at halftime, but a very ambitious growth journey. And thank you for sharing some amazing insights, some practical experiences. I think many leaders, I know we’ve got a number of CEOs on the call, some of the things you’ve said would really resonate with them. A lot of challenges, a lot of issues that are not just isolated to the Canadian market, but also globally. So some real insights for people there and hopefully some learnings and takeaways from many of the attendees.

As Geneviève said then, please do, if you’ve got any questions, please do type them in. We’ve got a couple of questions already to go, but this is your opportunity for the next five or six minutes to type any questions in and hopefully we can pose them. And if not, those people watching the recording, please do send those questions in because hopefully that we can pose them to the Promutuel team after this webinar.

But I’ll start off just with just one question for you, Geneviève. Could you touch on some of the emerging risks relating to AI and technology you are witnessing at the moment at Promutuel?

Geneviève Fortier:

Mm-hmm. So there’s no doubt that in terms of emerging risk, one of the things that I find is making sure that as we are investing in AI, we’re doing it, striking the right balance between protecting the data and making sure that at the same time we can accelerate some improvements in our business that will make a difference.

So as an example, one of the first cases that we delivered is our customer relationship management centre, where we have AI producing a summary of the conversation that’s happening between our agents and our intern members. So there needs to be the right balance between what the technology can provide, which is increased efficiency, while at the same time making sure that as the next opportunity to speak with the customer comes, that we’ve not lost the value of the conversation that needs to happen. So we need to make sure that our employees are really mastering well, this balance between what we need to maintain with our employees with our insured members versus what the technology’s bringing. So that’s one element out of it.

The second one would be, as you look at dealing with massive data, how do you make sure that you’re creating the right algorithm to avoid any bias, any distortion that could happen. So that’s why we made the decision to say the cases that we’re going to develop by ourselves will be the ones that have not been R&D-ed with the big provider we have been working with. So in other words, let’s use the advantage of working with a state-of-the-art system, use the R&D that’s behind it, which has already been proven, and then only work on our cases that cannot be done by anyone else. So we’re putting in place the right framework to make sure that we’re going to be able to protect the data while at the same time advancing productivity and efficiency in what we do.

Ben Telfer:

Fantastic. Thank you. Oh, there’s a question that’s just come in. The question relates to the climate component that you mentioned. You covered some of the cost pressures internally and the impact of premiums, but how are you thinking about the growing protection gap and affordability for your clients and communities?

Geneviève Fortier:

Yeah. So there’s no doubt that has a mutual insurer who has been there and who has been founded, as you now know, out of an opportunity where some farms were not able to get insurance, so it was not afforded to them. We have in our roots to maintain affordability as we advance. So when we think about climate changes and how it’s affecting, in particular our farmer’s business, but as well, others that are in flooding zones and all of that, we’ve been focusing a lot of energy on reflecting on our product, reflecting on different guarantees that we could put in place that are servicing those members who are in more risky zones, who are willing to pay for it. So rather than retract from those zones, finding a way to be able to bring the add-ons that are necessary to make it happen. So that’s the philosophy we’ve been working out.

The other thing that I think we’ve been taking advantage of is Promutuel is one of the only few, the only one in Quebec was its own reinsurance company within our own organisation. This is allowing us to really grow with our insured members, their appetite. And this is also allowing us to have a better control, at least on the first layer that our mutuals are referring to reinsurance.

And one of the goals we’re focusing on through the diversification across the country is to make sure that, again, from a risk portfolio perspective, we’re going to just spread our risk differently, again, to help eventually reduce costs. And the way we’ve been looking at the business is everything is in everything. So if you do a good job at underwriting your risk, if you do a good job at evolving your products so that you can take care of those situations, if you are doing a very, very solid job, which we’ve been recognised for, to help insured members’ businesses to protect themselves, to prevent risk from happening because they’re doing the proper work on their house, on their business, on their home, it is helping. So we’ve been using a combination of tactics and strategies to help increase resiliency everywhere we can do it. It’s not going to be a solution for everything, but it’s a minimum that we need to do if we want to be able to keep affordability to our members.

Ben Telfer:

There’s more questions coming in. I don’t think we’re going to have time for all of them. Everybody’s commenting on what a fantastic presentation, so thank you so much for sharing. I’ve got time for one more thing, and I like this one just to end, but if you could share one key lesson from your experience to help others on a similar journey, what would it be?

Geneviève Fortier:

So I think the first one that comes to mind is alignment. I think alignment on the destination, alignment on the key performance indicators, alignment on how much changes it represents is something that should never be underestimated. And sometimes it’s boring. It means that you need to go back to the drawing board, reexplain, realign, do one to three steps, going back to this. And it takes a tonne of patience, which I don’t have in stock that much, but it takes a lot of patience to make sure that you’re not going to lose some key players along the way. So alignment, I think, is probably the name of the game.

And in our cases with 11 mutuals, one federation, getting everyone on board, all the board directors on board as well to say, we’re going to double the size of this organisation over a 10 years window. We’re going to do it through geographic diversification and we’re going to do it while continuing to grow profitably was a big act to follow. But through 24 months, it took 24 months of alignments at the very beginning, then it served us as an accelerator because everyone was now pushing in the same direction. So that’s probably what I would put on the table as the first one.

Ben Telfer:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Geneviève, for that. We could stay here all afternoon, all morning, answering questions, I’m sure, but unfortunately I’m going to have to close the webinar today. And I’m sure I’ll speak with all the attendees to thank you so much for all the insights that you’ve shared with us today. And thank you to your team for contributing today’s ICMIF webinar.

We have upcoming ICMIF webinars as well. So those that are watching today and also those that are watching the recording, please do sign up for those. There’s lots of opportunity. Today’s presentation, we’ve covered a range of topics that are top of mind for leaders across our sector around competitive, profitable growth, digital transformation, human first AI, and cultural transformation. And these are all themes that we’ll see above coming ICMIF webinars as well as the ICMIF Biennial Conference in Toronto that will be later this year.

So just a final thank you to Geneviève for today’s presentation. Again, an absolute pleasure to moderate today. Thank you everybody for joining. Thank you everybody who’s watching today’s recording as well. Please get in touch if anything further we can help with it, ICMIF. Enjoy the rest of your day and hope to see you on a future ICMIF virtual event, webinar, in person event soon. Have a good day, everybody.

Geneviève Fortier:

Thank you everyone. Have a good day.