As Canadian brokers race to modernize their operations, carriers are being dragged into an increasingly crowded – and risky – technology ecosystem. For Unica Insurance and L’Unique COO Guy Lecours (pictured), one of the main challenges today is figuring out where to place bets in a market full of vendors that may not be around in three years.
“Technology is always a big topic and an interesting one in the broker ecosystem,” he said. “We see brokers that are buying new technologies and implementing them at a faster pace than ever before.”
Brokers are experimenting with AI, automation and a growing array of fintech and insurtech tools that promise better workflows and richer data. That’s exciting, Lecours said, but it creates a second‑order problem for carriers.
“They want to see as much connectivity as we can [provide] between their systems and ours,” he noted. “For years, we’ve also been saying that we need to have more connectivity. It’s not always easy to do, but I think we’re making good progress on that as an industry – even if there’s still a lot of things to be done.”
The real challenge, he warned, isn’t just building one connection; it’s managing dozens.
“What could become difficult is when we have to adapt and connect and transact with multiple different vendors and different solutions.”
Some of those vendors will prove durable and become de facto standards. “Others will just die out,” he said bluntly. That’s not a criticism; it’s, as he put it, just “the nature of some fintechs and insurtechs.” The problem is that both brokers and carriers have to make investment decisions now, without knowing which way the market will shake out.
“Where do we want to invest? Where do we want to put our money with these vendors? It’s not easy to choose,” Lecours said. “And that’s not easy for brokers either – just to make sure, when they’re investing money, that they’re investing in technologies that will last.”
Even within a major platform’s ecosystem, the choice set is daunting. “You just look at the marketplace that Guidewire has on their ecosystem of partners,” Lecours said. “There’are hundreds of companies in there. So that’s a very diverse landscape.”
And sometimes, even what looks like a sure bet turns out to be a false start. For Lecours, the lesson isn’t to stop investing; it’s to accept that even good decisions are partly bets in a fast‑moving market. Carriers and brokers are going to get some of them wrong.
If choosing the right systems is one kind of gamble, choosing how far to automate is another – especially when it comes to entry‑level roles.
“A lot of the entry‑level jobs consist of things that we could potentially automate,” Lecours said. “If you automate that, where will these people learn the trade? That could become difficult.”
He doesn’t think the industry is at that cliff edge yet – “there’s still a human component that is important in the job we do” – but he’s clear there is a real risk around knowledge transfer.
“If we push that to the extreme, and we just get rid of all these entry‑levels jobs, then we have a problem,” he said. “What’s our pipeline to get senior experts in the industry?”
The question isn’t just whether AI and automation can technically handle certain tasks, but what happens to the learning pathways if they do.
Lecours is cautiously optimistic that AI could eventually be part of the solution as well as the problem. “Maybe we could use AI as a training tool in the future. That might help,” he suggested. Rather than “completely automate some tasks,” insurers could design workflows where junior staff still have to review and validate AI‑generated work. “At least they will learn as they go,” he said.
On the broker side, he noted, even junior employees still have a strong relationship component in their work.
“Even a junior person can still probably talk to clients and get to understand that relationship,” he said.
On the carrier side, the same holds: junior underwriters need to build both technical and soft skills.
“Our junior underwriters… don’t just learn the technical skills. They also have to learn the soft skills and the people skills as well,” Lecours said. He doesn’t see one side – broker or company – as inherently more at risk than the other. “It’s probably something we need to… figure out all together.”
