Revau’s chief information officer, Frederic St-Jean Mercier (pictured), has quietly rebuilt the Canadian MGA’s technology backbone around Guidewire and an inhouse integration platform that uses AI to remove clerical drudgery for underwriters, without forcing brokers into portals or chatbots.
For Montreal-based Mercier, a 26-year veteran of financial services technology, the route into insurance was anything but planned. Early technology roles in the engineering industry were followed by a move into Canadian banking at CIBC, “many years” that he describes as his introduction to the financial sector’s complexity and potential. That, in turn, led to a senior technology role at Intact Financial Corporation, Canada’s largest insurer, where he spent almost six years focused squarely on insurance technology.
Before joining Revau Advanced Underwriting, (then operating as GroupAssur), St-Jean Mercier took a detour into high-growth fintech at Lightspeed Commerce, a listed technology company where he saw projects that would have taken years in a traditional insurer compressed into months. IPO execution, multi-continent acquisitions and “hyper growth” taught him what genuinely agile delivery looks like in practice and what incumbent financial institutions risk losing if they cannot speed up.
When a private equity owner backing Revau came calling with a mandate to pivot the MGA decisively towards technology, the pitch resonated. The CEO, he recalls, “felt strongly that the key to building a successful MGA goes through technology, and he wanted to make that as a key part of the company strategy.” St-Jean Mercier joined five years ago and has since overseen what he describes as a “massive digital transformation”, underpinned by rapid growth and a string of acquisitions.
By coincidence, his arrival in 2021 coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic but the crisis did not dictate the direction of Revau’s technology strategy. Long before remote work became compulsory, the firm already operated with a hybrid model and had the necessary systems to support staff working from home.
“Surprisingly not really,” he said when asked whether COVID was the catalyst. Because the company had already adapted to flexible work, Revau did not have to divert energy into basic connectivity and collaboration tooling. Instead, the digital agenda could focus on “meaningful system innovation that drives big process improvement for the organization”, while many peers were still scrambling to make remote work viable.
For an MGA, Revau made an unusually bold bet: rather than persisting with repurposed broker systems, the business adopted Guidewire Insurance Suite as its policy administration platform. “We were one of the very early MGA's to move towards Guidewire as a policy administration platform,” St-Jean Mercier notes.
This gave Revau carrier-level scalability and, crucially, much tighter control over rating, underwriting rules and market-imposed constraints than a typical MGA environment would allow. The decision also opened up access to a broader ecosystem of pre-integrated solutions, a more standardized integration model, and a deep talent pool of Guidewire-literate technologists across the Canadian market.
Choosing a mainstream, widely adopted core system was deliberate. In St-Jean Mercier’s view, any MGA considering its options should treat industry adoption as a strategic criterion, not just a technical nicety: it drives integration options, marketplace choice and the availability of skilled engineers. This allowed Revau to build a team of outstanding technology professionals with deep expertise into the insurance industry. People who came from large insurance companies and wanted to join a more nimble, fast paced environment with the ability to move fast and freedom to innovate.
Guidewire is only half of the story. On top of the vendor core, Revau has built its own modular integration and innovation layer, branded Ngin, short for Next Generation Integration Network.
Ngin is the orchestration platform that binds together internal systems, external data sources and a set of AI services. It was designed to give Revau freedom to innovate at its own pace without being constrained by the release cycle of a single vendor system. “It was a twofold strategy,” he explained. “The first one is getting a strong core platform that gives us strong alignment with the industry, and doing our own innovation, our own secret sauce, if you will, where we can drive efficiency and improvement through that platform, which is made internally.”
Technically, the company consumes “frontier models like Chat GPT, for example, in the back end,” but Revau’s teams never touch a generic interface. “What we developed is really the integration and the orchestration of all of the AI work that's happening,” he said. The interface for staff is Ngin itself, embedded tightly into Outlook and Guidewire.
Perhaps the most striking design choice in Revau’s transformation is what the business chose not to do. While many carriers and MGAs have spent heavily on online portals and broker self-service interfaces, St-Jean Mercier is unapologetically sceptical about expecting distribution partners to key the same data into multiple systems.
“If you put yourself in the shoes of a broker who needs to get a quote from several different carriers, they need to go on to each of those portals and enter the information, and they don't want to do that,” he said. “Everyone in the insurance business is trying to push them towards this, so what we thought is, okay, let's do it differently.”
Instead of demanding that brokers adapt to Revau’s processes, Ngin adapts to brokers’ habits. They can continue to send submissions via email using their own forms and templates. Revau’s systems then ingest those documents in whatever format they arrive, extract the relevant data fields, create or update accounts, and route the case directly to the correct underwriter.
On top of that, the platform enriches the submission automatically via APIs, calling out to external sources and internal AI services so that when the file lands on an underwriter’s screen, the contextual information is already there. “That speed, that straight through processing is the key here and it's adapted to the way that brokers like to communicate with us,” he said. For the brokers, the transformation is effectively invisible, they simply see faster turnaround and more capacity.
Revau has been equally cautious about customer-facing AI. “We don't use chatbots,” he said. “Our brokers never get to talk to a chatbot. They always talk to a human.” Internally, however, underwriters have access to a large-language-model-driven assistant that ingests hundreds of pages of underwriting manuals and other documentation to answer natural-language questions, summarise the relevant sections and point staff to the exact source.
The first flagship capability built on Ngin was an “Engine Data Extract” solution to automate account opening and data entry, an operation that had previously been both time-consuming and intensely manual. Revau receives roughly 60,000 submissions a year from brokers, with each case historically requiring around 20 to 30 minutes of clerical effort just to rekey data and gather basic supplemental information.
That work is now completed in “one second”. The email arrives, the underwriter presses a button in Outlook to send it to Engine Data Extract, the message is automatically filed, and when they open the risk in Guidewire “everything is already there for them and ready to work on it and underwrite the risk and issue the transaction.”
Across the portfolio, St-Jean Mercier said “this has more than halved the human power, the clerical resource required for account setup.” The productivity gain is then reinvested: “What do we pay the underwriters for? We pay them for their experience, for their knowledge, for their judgment. They used to spend maybe 50% of their time using those skill sets, and another 50% doing no value-added work. We're just shifting that so that they can spend the majority of their time using their great qualities to serve the brokers better.”
The second major capability, Ngin The Box, delivered more recently with the name inspired from Lloyd’s “Box”, focuses squarely on underwriting. Underwriters now work with a dual-screen setup; one screen shows the case in Guidewire, while the other provides real-time, contextual data about the risk, drawn from both internal and external sources. That same screen hosts the large-language-model assistant tied into underwriting guidelines and other documentation, giving underwriters a single place to ask questions and get synthesised answers with links back to the primary sources.
If the technology stack is sophisticated, St-Jean Mercier is clear that tools alone do not make a digital transformation succeed. “Any digital transformation is challenging,” he said, what matters is how the organisation responds when, inevitably, systems glitch or produce imperfect output.
“We tend to forgive humans a lot more than we forgive technology,” he argued, drawing an analogy with self-driving cars: statistically safer than human drivers, yet judged more harshly when something goes wrong. Inside a company, that instinct can slow adoption to a crawl if staff expect new systems to be flawless at launch.
“Our job as leaders is to get the organization to mature toward learning, to work with imperfect technology and contributing to making it better over time,” he said. That means maintaining human accountability, positioning technology as an assistant rather than a decisionmaker, and using feedback from real-world use to improve AI models rather than delaying deployment until they are “perfect”, a state they will never reach in a fast-changing environment.
Internally, much of his time is spent on communication rather than technical work. “A lot of my job is not about just making technology decisions and delivering technology projects. It's about transforming the culture of the organization,” he said. That involves spending time with business peers, building trust, understanding their pressures and constantly reframing technology initiatives in business terms.
For brokers, the cultural change is intentionally minimal “business as usual” from their perspective, albeit with dramatically improved turnaround times. For Revau staff, the shift is more profound: roles must evolve away from low-value activity towards problem-solving and decision-making.
Unsurprisingly, the introduction of AI capabilities raised fears among some employees about job security, a familiar theme across the industry. St-Jean Mercier addresses this head-on. “What you need to go back to is reassuring employees that the technology is there to enable them, to augment them, not to replace them,” he said. “We are trying to automate, not their judgment and not their decision making. We have phenomenal underwriters at Revau so we want to automate low value tasks to allow them to do what they do best – finding solutions for our brokers.
The corollary is that staff must redefine their own roles: away from seeing their job as “enter data in the system” and towards defining themselves by the decisions they take and the problems they solve. Those who embrace that shift, he believes, find the new tools “lifechanging” because AI takes care of the work “they didn't enjoy doing as part of their job.”
Revau is careful to draw a bright line between the tasks AI performs and the responsibilities that remain with human professionals. “AI is always here and implemented as an assistant to the human, not a replacement of the human,” he said. “We let the human be in control.”
If there is one overarching lesson St-Jean Mercier draws from Revau’s journey, it is the importance of modular design. “Gone are the days of one system ruling them all for 20 years in an organization,” he said. Technology and business needs are changing too quickly for monolithic platforms that cannot be easily swapped or upgraded. Strategies must therefore be “nimble and adaptable for today, but also for the future.”
Looking ahead three to five years, he has no hesitation about the scale of AI’s impact. “It's no secret. I don't think I'm going to shock anyone if I say that AI is going to transform the world. Probably more than internet and smartphone combined together over the next 10 years,” he said. What may be less widely appreciated, in his view, is how this will reshape the software landscape in insurance.
He predicts a swing back from all-encompassing SaaS solutions to a more hybrid model in which insurers and MGAs build a greater share of their own innovation layers on top of core systems that serve primarily as “systems of record”. AI and cloud services are lowering the barrier to sophisticated inhouse development, making it both feasible and attractive for businesses like Revau to differentiate through their own orchestration platforms.
Away from the screen, St-Jean Mercier is determined to avoid the trap of a purely sedentary working life. In his Montreal home, guitars line the wall, “one of my hobbies,” he said, and he trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu with his son. He also keeps a regular gym routine with his wife, typically three or four sessions a week. “We have stressful jobs so you cannot succeed if you don't find a way to let your mind relax and for me, that is sport and music.”
It is a far cry from the old pattern of commuting into an office and walking between meetings, something missing in the age of back-to-back video calls and short trips to the fridge rather than the park. “All of this energy, this stress, builds up in us. You need to blow it off somewhere,” he said.
In that sense, his off-duty regime mirrors his professional philosophy: a deliberate effort to channel energy into the activities that truly matter, whether that is underwriters focusing on judgment instead of data entry, or a CIO making time for guitars and the gym after a day spent orchestrating AI and core systems.
