How Intact is building a practical foundation for growth

The useful part

How to build a foundation for growth Share Intact Insurance's Austin Kennedy, head of transformation and growth, joins our Peer to Pier series to explain what innovation means at a large carrier. He explains how digital and fintech assets are starting to merge with traditional products, and what one legacy process he'd get rid of. What does innovation actually mean inside a large carrier or a brokerage perhaps >> how the public perceives it to be?

How it works

• Give me an example of perhaps one transformation initiative 01:33 that that you've pushed for that's perhaps met some internal resistance and how you got it over the line.
• So our strategy to really approach that, it's just spending time with people that do the work that 02:23 they do, understanding how these tools can add value and then showing them to help build that trust...
• >> And especially with technology being so new and the pace at which things are moving these days, we're just hyper focused on make it easier for people to understand how that transformation could benefit them.
• just tell me how those digital and fintech assets are starting to merge if you want with traditional insurance products.
• >> Yeah, the reality of the insurance industry is we've followed the risk in the economy for many years, decades if not centuries and you know we exist to help the economy by giving solutions for managing...

What to take from it

We have underwriting and actuarial, finance, risk management. The reality for us as a large company, we're really focused on the tactical, the day-to-day and building the foundation to achieve those things in the future. So, you know, we try and focus on making people more efficient, really improving the service to our customers.

Example or evidence

• I think often times there's a misnomer that the hard part about transformation and new technology is the technology itself.
• So, especially recently with the advent of all the LLM tools that are just ever present in the market, we've been really focused on finding ways of leveraging those across everything we do, all departments...
• So, that resistance is not so much about I'm afraid of change or I'm resistant to the transformation.
• We see a need for sort of staying on the cutting edge of policy, language, and wordings, which just, you know, for years gone by has not been developed to handle such new concepts.

Details worth keeping

We are here at Insurance Fest 2026 for our peer-to-peer interviews. He is the head of transformation and innovation at Intact. >> I think the headline of innovation is very ambitious.

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