When times are bad, sometimes the only viable option is to cut all losses and start from scratch. That’s essentially what York Fire & Casualty Insurance Company, now Unica Insurance, had to do 10-years-ago after years of poor results as a non-standard automobile carrier. In 2008, York Fire & Casualty was acquired by La Capitale General Insurance, one of Canada’s largest property & casualty insurers. The struggling firm was immediately re-branded to Unica Insurance Inc. and started to reinvent itself as a niche carrier focused on commercial and VIP personal insurance solutions.
Fast-forward 10-years and Unica Insurance has just been ranked as one of Insurance Business Canada’s Five-Star Carriers 2019. To find out which Canadian carriers deserve five-star status, hundreds of brokers from across the country were asked to rate their carriers on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent) across a range of criteria, from underwriting expertise and claims service to competitive rates and product range.
“We’re so proud to be named a five-star carrier. It’s an acknowledgement of all the work we’ve put into the reinvention of Unica over the last 10-years,” said David Smiley (pictured), COO, Unica Insurance. “It’s great to have some recognition of our progression and our success, and we’re very grateful that our brokers see us as a valued partner.”
Smiley has been at the helm of Unica’s total transformation since 2009. He was brought in by new owners La Capitale to implement a new strategy that would enable the Ontario-based firm to create sustainable results and differentiate itself in the marketplace among what Smiley described as “a field of very large generalists.”
“We believe fundamentally that you can either be big or you can be specialized, and we chose the specialization route,” Smiley told Insurance Business. “We believe that even as we grow, our specialization is going to create opportunities for profitability and to really be different in the marketplace.
“Over the past 10-years, we’ve touched absolutely everything in our company and reinvented it - our culture, our staff, our appetite, our products, our distribution network, our IT system, our rates and rules and underwriting criteria. It’s a completely different organization today than it was, so it has been a long journey, and in the past four to five years, we’re seeing tremendous profitability results because of that. We’re starting to catch the attention of our competitors, our brokers, and the industry in general. It takes time as a small carrier, and it takes consistency and good communication but we’re getting to that point now where we’re starting to be noticed in the marketplace, and that’s a good thing.”
Back in 1999, at the start of Unica’s niche commercial and VIP personal insurance journey, commercial lines made up 10% of Unica’s book, whereas today, it makes up over 40% - and 97% of that commercial business is in its target segments. On the personal lines side, the firm had no VIP business 10-years-ago, and now that segment makes up nearly 40% of the insurer’s business. Smiley attributes this growth and success to Unica’s “focus on relationships and service” with the broker community.
He said: “A real lynchpin of our strategy is to deliver industry-leading service and build strong relationships with our brokers. If you go back 10-years-ago, we had contracts with 240 brokers in Ontario. Now we have 97. We’re a big proponent of ‘less is more,’ and the only way for us to build a solid, strategic relationships with our brokers and deliver real value to them is by having a limited number of relationships and making them more meaningful.
“We’re looking to do things a little bit differently in terms of helping brokers with strategic financial support. With our broker financial solutions, we want to bring something to the table compared to some of our big competitors, who are more likely wanting to control brokers and to transition business to their organizations. By offering these solutions, we’re hoping to build tighter relationships and offer value in creative ways that work for the broker. It’s not just about us; it’s about forging those relationships financially and lending support to the channel that is our sole distribution model at Unica. We need to be invested in the broker channel to really help preserve it and make it strong for us as an organization because that will help us remain viable and attract our target customer.”
The broker community will remain at the heart of Unica’s strategy moving forwards, Smiley added. He said the firm is tapping into the transformative capabilities of its parent company, La Capitale, to bring efficiencies and automation that will help distribution partners. He stressed: “We take our distribution partners very seriously. We do not take them for granted. We know we’re not perfect, but we really do value the support our brokers are giving us every day to help Unica with our reinvention.”
