iA Financial Group and iA Excellence will migrate all their products to an electronic platform during the year.  

iA Financial Group will implement electronic applications with electronic signature for all its individual insurance products in the first half of 2017. The insurer is currently testing this application at a few agencies and reaping a positive response from distributors, says Pierre Vincent, vice-president, Individual Insurance and Sales. The application will be accessible to all of IA’s distribution networks.

“This new application will allow pricing decisions at the point-of-sale in many cases, if the advisor has Internet access,” Vincent says.  “What’s more, we will reduce the medical requirements for applicants under age 50. Questions will be simpler and the application will ask only what is necessary to underwrite the client’s risk. We expect this new application to reduce issue times from 30 days to less than one minute.” 

The iA Excellence president also announced that all of the subsidiary’s products will migrate to the electronic platform Assure&Go by the end of 2017. The platform’s strong results weighed heavily in this decision. Pierre Vincent describes it as a factor that spurred sales growth at Excellence by 28% between 2015 and 2016.

Since its launch on April 25, 2016, Assure&Go has garnered 5,000 sales, Pierre Vincent says. He sees the results of the past 10 months as quite impressive. For now, Assure&Go offers the products Access Life, Acci Jet and CancerGuard. “1,400 advisors made at least one sale on the platform. Sales are distributed fairly equally among the three products.”

The platform is prospering because it is intuitive and user-friendly, says Vincent. The electronic signature sent to the client by code in an electronic message is another asset, he says. “Most clients are accepted in 15 minutes or less. On average, sessions lasted eight minutes, from the start of data entry to transmission, which results in automatic acceptance by the head office. Advisors generally manage to save even more time by filling in some information before meeting with the client,” he explains.