The property and casualty (P&C) insurer reported adjusted operating profit before tax attributable to shareholders of approximately $497.7 million in FY2020, up from $331.2 million the prior year. Its gross written premium (GWP) also jumped from approximately $5,556 million in 2019 to $5,672 million in 2020.
“2020 was a unique year with all sorts of challenges and volatility,” said Storah. “When I think about our performance last year, what helped us was that we started 2020 from a position of strength. Before COVID-19 hit, we’d spent quite a lot of time investing in the fundamentals of our business, and the turnaround from a couple of years before had gone well, so we had strong underlying performance of the business heading into 2020, which really helped.”
Areas of the Canada business that performed particularly well were commercial lines, in which Storah said there has been encouraging and “much-needed commercial rate hardening,” as well as the firm’s specialty business. Furthermore, the CEO described Aviva Canada’s high-net-worth leisure and lifestyle business as “a gem” within its portfolio.
“We’re now three months into 2021, and we’re squarely focused on the year ahead,” Storah told Insurance Business. “Just like the impact of COVID-19 was really uneven, I believe the recovery is going to be equally uneven. So, we’re focused on doing everything we can for our customers, our brokers, and our partners to ensure that we’re offering insurance that’s available and affordable.
“As our customers’ needs change when they adapt to the ‘new normal’ and recover from the pandemic, what does that mean for our products, our coverages, and the services that we offer? We’re focused on making our solutions as relevant as they absolutely need to be.”
One area of focus for Aviva this year will be expediting the firm’s digital and data science capabilities. Aviva is investing over $100 million in data and analytics, and is hiring hundreds of people in the space. That significant investment ties into one of the key lessons learned as a result of the pandemic, according to Storah, who said: “How do you expedite things that you were already planning to do, but COVID has made it much more important to get them done quicker? The pandemic has highlighted the importance of digitizing our business, and that continues to be an area of focus for us moving forward.”
Another focal point for Aviva Canada – and every other business across Canada – is figuring out how to navigate the ‘new normal’ and bring employees back to office-based work safely.
“We’re thinking a lot about what the future of working in an office looks like in terms of workforce agility, travel needs, health and safety, and so on,” said Storah. “I’m really keen to get back to being able to see my colleagues and my team face to face, but that’s going to look different in the future. Even when we can go back to the office, I think that balance of working from home and working in an office is going to feel quite different. At present, our priority continues to be on our employees and making sure that everybody has the support that they need.”
