Billyard Insurance Group (BIG) has experienced significant expansion across Canada, growing from just a few locations five years ago to a substantial national presence. Speaking to IB, Stephen Billyard (pictured), CEO and principal broker, said that it was all strategic decisions that propelled this quick-time growth.
“Five years ago, we had three or four locations and around 30 employees. Now, we're nearly 1,200 employees across the country — in Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. It’s been a rapid scaling of the business, and we've learned a lot along the way."
One of the key drivers of this growth has been a significant investment in leadership.
“The first big investment we made was in our executive leadership team,” said Billyard. He emphasized the importance of bringing in experienced executives, particularly those with a background in the carrier side of the industry.
“We've had a lot of key executives join us from the carrier side, like Daniel Ignoto, our chief insurance officer, a 20-year veteran of the industry, and Cody Douma, who had experience in the Allstate and Pembridge channels. As I’ve grown and learned as an executive, I realized I can’t do it all. I could when the business was small, but I’m not equipped to as the business has grown.”
Technology has become a cornerstone of BIG’s growth strategy, aligning with its mission to lead a digital insurance revolution.
“Our mission is to be a leading national insurance brokerage brand that empowers brokers by leading the digital insurance revolution. That’s what we do,” Billyard said. The company has invested heavily in building a technology platform designed to enhance efficiency and accuracy across its operations.
“For us, necessity was the mother of invention. And, as the company expanded, it became clear that traditional processes could not keep pace with its growth.”
“We had to implement something that really hadn’t been done before,” he said. This led BIG to develop an AI-driven platform tailored to support brokers in their daily workflows. BIG’s innovative platform acts as an AI-powered assistant, streamlining the underwriting process and reducing the time required for complex tasks.
“What we’ve created is a platform that almost acts like a human underwriter sitting over the shoulder of a broker as they’re doing their job,” Billyard said. This AI-driven tool reviews documents in real time as the broker compiles them, ensuring compliance with the underwriting rules of multiple carriers.
“The job of a broker is actually quite difficult,” Billyard said. “We need to understand a very broad base of insurance and underwriting knowledge, understand our customers and the risk we’re insuring, and then align with the underwriting appetites of a dozen different carriers or more. It used to take 30 minutes to underwrite a policy, and now we do it in 30 seconds using AI.”
“Not only does it save time for the broker, but it also ensures the broker’s job is done perfectly and accurately every time. A mistake by a broker can expose a consumer to potential risk coverage that was perhaps missed. We ensure that coverage is advised, or a particular underwriting point that wasn’t reviewed is programmatically checked.”
Billyard is hardly alone in his adoption of insurtech. According to WorldMetrics, 84% of insurance executives believe that AI will revolutionize the industry in the next three years, while AI adoption in insurance has grown by 25% in the past year.
At BIG, their technology safeguards customers by eliminating gaps in the underwriting process.
“Programmatically, we’re doing all that, and that eliminates all those gaps,” said Billyard. This approach enhances trust and reliability, ensuring that clients receive comprehensive coverage without the risk of oversights. And, as insurance products become more sophisticated and layered with additional coverages, such as cyber insurance, the role of technology in simplifying complex risks becomes paramount.
“Ensuring that you capture all the necessary things you need to capture is key,” he said. “A few years ago, we all learned how to implement the accident benefit buy-ups into our workflows. That was a big transition, and if we don’t do it effectively, we’re potentially exposing our customers to a gap of coverage.”
This commitment to precision is even more critical now, as new accident benefits reforms are introduced.
“The regulator is bringing forward even more complicated accident benefits reform,” Billyard said. “We need to ensure we’re doing it right every time, or we’re going to create issues for ourselves and for our customers. In a challenging marketplace like this, with regulatory limitations on our ability to select customers and narrow our underwriting focus, the best way for us as brokers to drive profitability for our markets is by having the most effective frontline underwriting.
“It’s about ensuring that every underwriting data point is gathered, collected, and underwritten accurately, so there’s no premium leakage and no exposure for the brokerage or the carriers,” Billyard said. The AI-driven technology implemented at BIG plays a crucial role in this process.
“That AI-driven underwriting technology isn’t just about protecting the consumer. It’s also about protecting profitability and driving it for the carriers.”
