Rapidly growing technology company, Empathy, is continuing its expansion into Canada, partnering in the last year with the likes of Sun Life, TDEstates and most recently with iA Financial Group, to provide bereavement services to beneficiaries.
When TD introduced the service back in early November, it said the service was being offered to help simplify a complicated process “while demonstrating that a bank can both be financially smart and deeply human.”
Ron Gura, Empathy’s founder and CEO puts it another way: “Carriers are seeing an opportunity to empower (their customers) and show their true colours at the moment of truth,” he says. “From a human perspective, grief doesn’t skip any of us. It’s one of the most inclusive, unfortunate experiences that all of us are going to experience.”
Emotional support
And while other service providers do offer bereavement services in the form of counselling, what is unique about the Empathy offering is that the emotional support element, provided by a dedicated human care manager, is also coupled with an app, phone service and website where clients can access practical workflows – a toolbox for managing the logistical and administrative steps that typically come after a loved one passes away.
The workflows are intended to be used both immediately (funeral planning, how to write an obituary) and into the future (shutting down phone accounts and profiles, minimizing fraud risk, taxes and estate execution). “We think about every market from scratch,” Gura says. “Who are the best grief experts in Canada? Who is the best estate lawyer? How do we go province by province? How do we make sure our Canadian French is the best and aligned with expectations?”
iA’s Philippe Cleary, vice president new business and claims for individual insurance and savings, says the offering is compelling, easy to use and very well done.
“It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while in our strategic planning. We were asking ourselves how we can be more present for our clients at the moment of claim,” he says, adding that the company considered building its own solution, but found that Empathy’s offering was perfectly aligned with what it wanted to offer clients. “When we saw their product, we felt we wouldn’t have a competitive advantage developing such a platform ourselves. We would prefer to partner with the best so that we can provide the best solution.”
Being more present for clients
The tool also fit with the company’s strategy and ambition to offer the best technological support to clients and advisors. “Having the client at the centre, it’s been in our mission statement for a few decades. But we really wanted to make it real, to live it, and for the client to feel that iA is not just there to pay after the fact, but to accompany you when you have a challenge,” Cleary says. “Delivering Empathy to all of our individual insurance clients completely aligns with one of our goals, which was to be more present for our clients and provide human care when they need it most.”
Beginning in the spring of 2026, eligible beneficiaries covered under iA’s individual life policies will receive access to Empathy’s Loss Support platform.
The company is also currently probing the operational aspects which need to be addressed to offer the program to group plan members, as well. (Sun Life, reportedly the first insurer to offer Empathy’s services in Canada, would not comment on its deployment or use of the platform.)
“We’re working on that actively,” iA’s Cleary says. “The strategy is to provide it to all of our insurance clients in Canada.”
Cross Canada expansion
Empathy says the partnership marks another important step in its expansion across Canada. Gura says a number of announcements from the company are also lined up for release in the weeks and months ahead.
“The Canadian market is an important market to them,” Cleary observes. “For us, it was important to make sure that the service would be available to our clients in both French and English,” he adds. “The French version is perfect and they’re really open to feedback, as well. If we ask for improvements or fine tuning, they’ll include it in their release. We are quite pleased with the content.”
To serve the markets Empathy is entering (today, the four-year-old company has partnerships with nine of the top ten U.S. life insurance carriers and last week announced its entry into the United Kingdom, as well) the company partners with the best practitioners, estate lawyers for example, to create its country-specific workflows. User activity then informs content development for the platform.
Logistics are made harder by grief
“When we launched Empathy, we only had a care team,” Gura says. “Everything we built from a product perspective is because we think grief is made hard by logistics and logistics are made harder by grief.”
Since its launch, the company has also expanded services to include pet loss, miscarriage, stillbirth and infant loss. What started as a loss support company has also evolved into what Gura calls a “moment of truth” company. “We’ve expanded quite meaningfully, not just into new markets but also to new moments.” Loss of a loved one is the company’s first platform. Planning your legacy is another product it offers and a third, currently being offered by MetLife in the U.S., provides support to those on disability leave.
Updates to the platform occur every two weeks. Empathy currently has more than 160 people employed with the company, half of which work on its technology team.
“Every loss looks different but the need for guidance and compassion is universal,” Empathy stated in its announcement about the recently forged relationship with iA. “We ensure people have a clear path forward, a dedicated human by their side and the tools they need to feel supported.”
The business case for human services
Gura says grief and bereavement is probably the single largest, untouched consumer sector going – for a few reasons, not the least of which is the fact that grief is a relatively taboo subject that few wish to contemplate.
With that in mind, the company’s rapid expansion would seem surprising, were it not for the fact that financial institutions, savvy to the generational wealth transfer currently underway, are looking for ways to show up for clients at key moments.
“This is a category that we’re spearheading. There are players that are focused on specific moments within the grief journey, companies trying to help with probate in a very localized fashion and companies that will do wellness,” he says, adding that offline doulas and grief experts also exist and many funeral directors will go above and beyond. “But no one is taking a full-fledged approach to the comprehensive aspects of the full grief journey.”
Not approaching grief, treating it as a taboo subject, he adds, means many people are completely unprepared for these events when they do occur. “They’re not sure what to do from an estate planning perspective but they’re also unaware of the major decisions they need to make. It’s a lot to handle. We need to help people wind down their loved one’s affairs,” he says.
“It’s complicated and it’s messy,” he adds. “But it’s very human and hopefully very empowering. It’s a classic combination of scalable technology and human touch. This is what technology was made for.”
