Martha Turner Osborne’s (pictured) route into insurance was shaped less by the traditional mechanics of the market than by the broader challenge of organizational change. She says her career has spanned several decades and that for the past two decades she has focused closely on digital transformation, often stepping into businesses to assess where they are, where they want to be and what is required over the next one to three years to reach the next stage of growth. Her work has been concentrated largely in financial services, and she says she has spent more than a decade in insurance.
One early milestone came in 2007, when she worked on a strategic project for a large Canadian carrier at a time when firms were only beginning to grapple seriously with digital transformation. She describes that assignment as formative, and it helps explain why she now speaks about insurance through the lens of customer journeys, operating models and digital capability rather than technology for its own sake.
Today she serves as chief sales and marketing officer at HUB Customer Central (HCC), HUB International’s digital-first division across Canada.
That background informs a view of digital insurance that is notably more measured than some of the industry’s rhetoric. Osborne says digital transformation in insurance is not principally about shifting transactions online. Instead, she says, it is about understanding how to meet customers where they are in their journey and identifying what they want from the buying experience. In home and auto, she suggests, the answer is often reassurance rather than speed alone.
HCC’s own data appears to support that conclusion. Osborne says the business has access to extensive insight through large-scale partnerships and customer interactions, and that while consumers can quote and bind online end to end if they wish, 85% of Canadians still prefer to speak to a licensed broker before purchasing. The reason, she says, is not simply habit. Insurance remains complex, and customers want confidence that they are buying the right cover at the right price.
“Digital transformation for us is about the human factor,” she said.
If the customer begins online but often wants human input before completing the purchase, distribution strategy has to adapt accordingly. Osborne says one of HCC’s flagship initiatives is
embedded insurance, which she defines as placing insurance offers or quote journeys within partner ecosystems at points in the customer journey where the proposition is relevant and timely. It is not a new concept for HCC: the business has been delivering embedded solutions in the automotive space for more than 20 years, giving it a depth of experience that few can match.
HCC, she says, has developed a flexible embedded insurance proposition for partners, including API-led integrations designed to work with different technology stacks. The strategic logic is straightforward: if customers are researching and shopping digitally, insurers and brokers need to place themselves where those customers already are. Osborne says experts expect embedded insurance to become one of the most important growth areas in personal lines over the next five years.
Her emphasis, however, is not on novelty for its own sake. She says partner organizations can sometimes be drawn to the latest digital features without properly testing whether those features add real value for customers. HCC’s approach, she says, is to combine its own research with a close understanding of the partner environment, then design around the points where the journeys meet.
The other major initiative she identifies is the enterprise-wide rollout of Claude across HUB’s operations in Canada and the United States. All staff, she says, now have access to the AI-supported tool, and the immediate opportunity lies in operational improvement, particularly in work carried out by brokers.
Her framing of AI is cautious and deliberate. Osborne says the purpose is not to replace people but to support human judgment. In practical terms, that means using AI to help process applications, improve data handling and identify possible gaps in cover, thereby reducing manual work and allowing brokers to spend more time advising customers.
That distinction matters in a market where digital convenience is often assumed to diminish the broker’s role. Osborne’s position is almost the reverse: if technology can clear away lower-value administration, it can make more space for the advisory work customers continue to value.
“It’s not about replacing humans, it’s about helping to support human judgment,” she said.
Osborne says HCC continuously monitors behavioural data, recorded customer interactions and broader market research in order to identify pain points and refine its customer journeys. She says the business is in a position to observe not only what customers do online, but also what they say when they speak to staff, allowing it to combine quantitative and qualitative insight.
In her account, the discipline of measuring success remains both commercial and experiential. Projects are evaluated against KPIs, scenario testing and original business objectives, but she also stresses the importance of whether customers feel the experience has met their needs. That, she suggests, is the real test of whether a digital platform is doing its job.
Her broader lesson from nearly 20 years in transformation is that methodology matters. Looking back to earlier projects, she says human-centred design and agile, MVP-style delivery have made a
dramatic difference to outcomes because digital environments evolve too quickly for rigid, heavily front-loaded implementation models.
Looking ahead, Osborne expects embedded insurance to grow, AI to become more deeply embedded across the insurance value chain, and climate volatility to exert greater pressure on pricing and risk management. She also points to the likely expansion of live sensor data in homes and cars, which she says could move premiums away from annual pooled assessments and towards more behaviour-based, preventative models.
She is careful to note that HUB is a brokerage rather than a carrier and therefore does not itself perform actuarial modelling or pricing. Even so, her comments reflect a wider industry direction of travel: more contextual distribution, more operational automation and more real-time data shaping both product delivery and customer expectations.
For insurance professionals, Osborne’s argument is not that digital channels have failed, nor that AI will be marginal. It is that the next phase of transformation will favour firms able to combine technology, context and human advice rather than assuming one will replace the other. If her reading of customer behaviour is right, the winning model in personal lines may not be the most frictionless one, but the one that leaves policyholders most confident they have made the right choice.
Away from insurance, Osborne brings the same breadth to her personal life. She is a devoted animal lover and activist, she has two golden retrievers and has served on the Jane Goodall Foundation board, and a collector of fine art and crafts, with previous board involvement at the Ontario Craft Council. Her board work has extended to Breast Cancer Canada, following the loss of two colleagues to the disease, and EcoSchools Canada, which promotes environmental principals in schools. She is a mother of two daughters and lives in Toronto where she and her husband are, by her own description, accidental do-it-yourselfers: during COVID, with trades unavailable, they built their cottage in Algonquin Park themselves.
