With a fine arts degree in offset lithography in hand, Peter Tessier (pictured), president of Taycon Risk, wasn’t planning on a career running printing presses.
It was the dawn of the digital revolution, desktop publishing, Photoshop, and creative power shifting from specialized shops to everyday professionals. The timing couldn’t have been better. Creativity met technology, and ideas turned into events, videos, and training content at scale.
Then came the dot-com boom. Experimentation. Big ideas. One venture was strikingly ahead of its time: an online art marketplace that didn’t just sell paintings, it told artists’ stories. Studio interviews. Cameras capturing works in progress.
After consulting and creative projects, stability called. A cross-country move from Vancouver to Winnipeg marked the start of an entirely new chapter: insurance.
A career built on art, technology, and storytelling now focused on risk, resilience, and relationships. Different medium. Same creative edge.
The transition was far from casual. Tessier credits a blunt piece of advice from his late stepfather: “If you’re going to do this, leave a mark, if you’re going to get into this industry. Don’t go in half-assed.”
He took that seriously. Within nine years he was president of his provincial brokers’ association, later a national board member, chair of its national tech committee and contributor to its marketing workstream, ultimately chair of Manitoba’s insurance regulator and now president of CAMGA. Those roles, combined with advisory work for carriers, gave him a panoramic view of a market struggling to modernize while wrestling with legacy systems, human change fatigue and tighter capacity cycles.
Tessier’s next pivot came only after he sold his brokerage in 2017 and began consulting for a tech sister company, now Rival Technologies, on broker management systems and customer experience.
A friend from radio, newly laid-off and an early adopter of podcasting, urged him to launch a show about insurance. Sceptical that anyone would listen, Tessier nonetheless bought some equipment, opened his contacts list and began recording conversations with friends across the property-casualty market. Within a year, the show had a sponsor, First Insurance Funding of Canada and an expanding audience of practitioners.
The decisive turn came after the microphones were switched off. A remark that the Tessier and his co-host Curt Wyatt were not “insurance media” but “insurance people,” and suggested they start an MGA.
After the call finished Wyatt said to his future partner, “I think we should start an MGA”. They formalized the deal at InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas, shaking hands on the casino floor of Mandalay Bay because every bar, restaurant, and meeting room was booked for sponsor events. That agreement made Taycon Risk real and a future Accelerant member. Wyatt had already used his relationships for the pair to become a Lloyd’s cover holder and set them on the path to building a niche MGA with additional capacity relationships.
Taycon’s founding in May 2022, fittingly on “Star Wars Day”, May the fourth, coincided with the depths of one of the hardest commercial markets Canada had seen in years.
For a start‑up MGA, that posed two critical questions: how to convince brokers that two “new kids on the block” could be trusted with complex risks, and how to persuade capital providers that the new venture could underwrite prudently in adverse conditions.
Tessier is clear about what insurance really sells. In his words, it is simply “access to capital under an agreed upon contract, triggered by specific events”, everything else is over‑complication. The psychological reality, he notes, is that insureds do not want to use the product, nor do carriers want them to. In that context, what is really being sold is trust.
Initially, Taycon leaned into specialty niches, precisely the sort of segments many policy administration platforms are designed to handle. But as markets rapidly swung from “harder than granite” to “softer than a stick of butter on a back porch in July,” the firm had to pivot toward broader underwriting strategies that could serve multiple classes.
That forced the two partners to rethink of how to gather data, price risks and support brokers without trying to build discrete intake journeys for every individual IBC or SIC code. The ambition was a more ubiquitous, class-agnostic underwriting front end, but resources and time were limited.
Compounding that was a commercial reality many new MGAs underestimate: turning long‑standing personal relationships into live submissions is far harder than expected. Knowing owners and managers across Canada, even as former association presidents and podcast hosts, did not automatically put Taycon at the top of individual brokers’ workflows. Tessier concedes that assuming those relationships would be enough was “a huge marketing misstep.”
On the technology front, Taycon’s early bet was on the burgeoning low code/no code platforms. After evaluating five or six options, Tessier chose one with a promising combination of openness and stability, seeing low-code as a way to scale quickly with lean internal resources.
They built digital products in that environment, occasionally calling on the company’s own specialists or third-party developers to overcome specific hurdles and develop API connections. But as the underwriting strategy broadened and submissions arrived in increasingly varied formats, it became clear that not everything could, or should, be pushed through a single configurable front end.
Over time, more and more of Taycon’s real underwriting work gravitated back to Excel and external data sources. Spreadsheets remained the lingua franca of actuaries and underwriters, the backbone of bordereaux reporting, and the tool of choice for carriers who still wanted data delivered in tabular form rather than via APIs. In Tessier’s view, Excel remains “the universal language of the industry,” and the “dirtiest secret” is that enormous amounts of core work still happen outside of formal systems.
By 2023, Taycon decided to change direction because the original plan and strategy had altered so much due to market conditions. Another review and of policy management software providers ensued and Taycon risk announced a partnership with Modular Solutions, a Calgary based provider whose platform is built explicitly around Excel-driven workflows.
The fit was strategic as much as technical. Modular’s core proposition is to take Excel files, complete with macros, logic and underwriting rules and convert them into scalable, cloud based product journeys. Taycon can now design funnel structures and rating paths using the tools its underwriters already live in, push those designs roughly threequarters of the way, and then hand them to Modular to “finish off” and deploy.
Tessier likens the effort required to any major SaaS implementation: the bulk of the “fuel” is burned in take-off. But he maintains that, with Modular, Taycon has reached cruising altitude faster, can now add new products at lower marginal cost, and has established a repeatable blueprint for both wide-funnel and highly specific channels.
Technology alone was not going to solve the distribution problem. Tessier, who has spent much of his career near marketing functions, invokes a line from the late digital strategist Alyson Shane: “If you build it, they will come, does not work without marketing.”
Taycon’s answer has been both targeted and notably analog. Rather than rely solely on broad advertising, the firm has focused on individual brokers, flying across Canada, visiting offices and spending long conversations in hotel bars and restaurants. The point is not merely to pitch appetite lists; it is to establish a “trust bond” that the MGA will respond in the way the broker expects when a difficult risk lands on their desk.
Frequency is the watchword: repeating the message, showing up at conferences, sponsoring panels, and staying present until the name Taycon is part of a broker’s reflex shortlist alongside incumbents. In parallel, the firm pays close attention to what it hears at events, translating recurring themes, especially around data ingestion and bordereaux, into its evolving tech roadmap.
On AI, Tessier is notably unsentimental. He sees enormous potential but also clear echoes of the dot‑com era and early InsurTech exuberance, where many firms promised to “disrupt” insurance without really understanding how it works.
He is particularly sceptical of vendors who open with, “You have this problem,” especially when they come from outside the sector. At a recent conference in Toronto, he challenged one such entrepreneur, telling him bluntly that until he understood how an MGA actually builds and services its book, he was simply projecting a generic pain point onto a very specific business model.
Still, Tessier and Wyatt are not standing still. The most immediate AI use case he is pursuing is document ingestion, accurate reading and structuring of submissions and supporting documents. Beyond that, he is exploring tools that surface real-time risk indicators, especially external data sources that can enrich underwriting without forcing underwriters to tab-switch endlessly.
His test for any new tool is straightforward: does it solve a real problem, how quickly, and with which partner? He expects the market to bifurcate between focused offerings that tackle one or two high-value use cases well, and grand, all-encompassing AI platforms that risk overpromising and underdelivering.
Looking further ahead, Tessier believes AI and automation will intensify a long overdue debate about the very definition of an insurance intermediary. He anticipates better access to unstructured data in real time, more automated underwriting within MGAs, and improved reporting and validation tools across carriers and brokers alike.
But he also argues that the sector is not paying enough attention to what this means for the traditional “broker” role. Regulators, he points out, largely avoid the term “broker”; in most frameworks, license holders are simply “agents.” If human brokers do not start thinking of themselves this way, they may find the label “agent” being applied instead to AI systems and automated distribution platforms.
Beyond that, he predicts a “regulatory showdown”, a series of “difficult, delicate and passionate” conversations about how supervisory frameworks should respond to new technology, data sources and decision-making models. In his view, those conversations are not only inevitable, they are already overdue.
If there is a unifying theme in Tessier’s story, it is scepticism towards grand narratives about transformation. He rejects the idea that there is a correct blueprint for digital change, insisting that every firm must chart its own course and answer first to its customers and capacity partners, not to consultants or vendors.
He urges leaders to be wary of solutions that begin by telling them they have a problem they have never recognized in their own operations. Echoing a famous Dr. Phil exchange “I didn’t know I had a problem until you told me I did”, he argues that insurance executives should start from the realities they live every day, not from hypothetical pain points on a pitch deck.
For Taycon, that has meant using Excel where Excel still makes sense, partnering with a platform willing to build around that reality, and traveling the country to sell a story of trust face-to-face. It has also meant accepting that strategies, systems and even vendor relationships will need to change as markets swing and as AI reshapes the boundaries of what is possible.
In an industry where “the premiums of the many pay for the losses of the few,” Tessier still sees a deeply social foundation beneath all the capital and code and believes that those who remember that, and are willing to share knowledge and capacity, will be the ones who thrive as the next phase of digital insurance unfolds.
Away from the screens and spreadsheets, Tessier’s life is notably rooted in the outdoors and in sport. If you were to look for him shortly after a morning of meetings, there is a good chance you would find him walking his dog along a frozen river near home, something he says was overdue on the day of our conversation.
In the warmer months he retreats to a cottage, where weekends are divided between maintenance projects and long hours on the lake in a small boat, a fishing line in the water, the sun overhead and music playing.
It is a portrait of a life that remains firmly social and grounded: an MGA and CAMGA President and trade body leader who, once the laptops shut, is happiest with a rod in hand, a dog at his feet and a match or game to analyze when he gets back indoors.
