Digital transformation has long been a catchphrase in insurance, but for Sara Mazhar (pictured), chief technology officer and chief information security officer at Securian Canada, the conversation has finally shifted from promise to accountability.
“The entire industry is acknowledging, prioritizing, and accelerating a lot of the investments,” Mazhar said. “What’s changed is the intentionality around understanding different stakeholders – the end customer, the employee, and the client.”
For insurers, the current wave of transformation is no longer about speed or cost efficiency. It’s about control. As automation tools and AI capabilities multiply, so do the risks associated with them – from privacy breaches and data mismanagement to decisions made by opaque algorithms.
Mazhar warned that these pressures require a shift in perspective: digital transformation must be led by business strategy, not technology enthusiasm.
“We always say we’re solving digital transformation not as a CTO, but as a business leader enabling business strategy,” she said. “Technology is step three – it enables what you’ve already defined.”
That distinction matters. Over-automation or misapplied AI can expose insurers to operational, ethical, and reputational risks that overshadow their efficiency gains. “The biggest risk,” Mazhar said, “is losing sight of why you’re transforming – it’s not about automating your entire business.”
For all the talk of new tools, Mazhar said one thing hasn’t changed: the foundation of cybersecurity. Whether you are digitizing, automating, or bringing new tools in, that foundation – that priority – has to remain, she said.
The acceleration of digital adoption has forced insurers to re-evaluate how they protect data, especially as customer expectations evolve. Filing a claim or managing a policy increasingly happens online, and with that comes a heightened duty to safeguard personal information in real time.
Mazhar said maintaining strict cyber controls isn’t optional just because technology changes. Those minimum requirements from a data and cyber perspective can’t change, she said. “If anything, they have to strengthen.”
As insurers adopt AI for underwriting, claims triage, and customer service, Mazhar said an often-overlooked danger lies in the data used to train those systems. One of the biggest risks when you look at AI from an ethics perspective is that it’s only as good as the information that exists today, she explained.
Because historical data reflects the biases of its time, using it to guide decisions – especially in underwriting – can perpetuate inequities. Companies can use an AI tool to help generate an underwriting decision, she said, but they do that, it’s based on the data they already have, and they introduce new biases that may not have existed before.
That’s why Mazhar said the human element must remain embedded in every decision-making loop. “AI can recommend,” she said, “but humans still have to assess before making decisions on someone’s behalf.”
Mazhar’s emphasis on “intentionality” – a term she repeated throughout the conversation – reflects a growing recognition in the industry that the real differentiator in digital transformation is not technology itself but how it’s applied.
She described Securian Canada’s approach as “reimagining experiences” rather than automating processes, whether that’s in claims management or customer onboarding. “We’re not transforming by automating existing processes,” she said. “We’re zooming out and asking how to remove friction for customers and reduce burden, while still keeping access to a human if they need it.”
That human-centric view echoes a broader insurance trend: modernization that doesn’t lose touch with empathy. As Mazhar put it, technology should enable trust, not replace it.
In her dual role overseeing both technology and security, Mazhar sees the challenge not just as technical but cultural. Digital transformation, she argued, succeeds only when business leaders treat it as a strategic responsibility. “These aren’t CTO questions,” she said. “They’re really business leadership questions – about what we want to enable, what we can and cannot automate, and how we protect that.”
Across Canada’s insurance landscape, that question – what should we automate, and at what cost? – may determine who manages to modernize without losing credibility. For Mazhar, the answer isn’t in faster technology but in smarter restraint.
