David Levinson has been at the helm of
Zurich Canada for 10 months. The New York-native moved from the US operations and its Chicago office to the insurer’s Toronto headquarters in January. He’s already overseen a restructure of staffing and business direction at the Canadian arm of the global carrier.
Way up on the 55th floor of the King St offices, overlooking Lake Ontario, Levinson sat down with Insurance Business to discuss his move north, the similarities and differences between the United States and Canadian markets, and the direction of the company here.
Browse specialty insurance product listings from Zurich Canada here
“It’s a lot of fun, it’s been a great experience,” the Zurich Canada president and chief agent said of the move across the border. “I’ve been to all the regions a bunch of times. We have offices in Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. I spend a lot of time out in the field, closer to the brokers and customers. We’ve got a lot of opportunity in the regions. We’ve got to see everybody – and they’re not bad places to visit.”
So what has Levinson noticed about the Canadian insurance market during his journeys into the provinces?
“A lot of it is pretty similar [to the US] when it comes to competitors, the fact that it’s a broker market, particularly in the space that we play in,” he said.
“What I find is a little different is the regulatory environment is definitely a little more insurance-friendly here – except for auto. It’s more of a principles-based regulatory environment than a hard and fast you-will-never-do-this … it actually makes it much easier to understand and to do business with.”
In May, the company decided to change its strategy a little, choosing to focus the business on what Levinson said they do best.
That decision led to a staffing restructure – some redundancies – and a renewed strategy to go after the “upper end of the middle market,” he said.
“We looked at the competition in the low-end middle market where we issued a package policy, [and] we said: we can’t compete in the low-end package business,” he explained. “These are $50,000 accounts, $70,000 accounts. We just had thousands of submissions. And we just said, wow, we are just throwing bodies at it. Basically what we’re saying is, we need to have more automation, and we don’t. We have competitors that have much more automation than us. So we said, let them have that, we’re going to get out of the middle market package business, and start focussing on the upper end where customers value what we’re really good at. So that’s why we made the change and I think people are much more excited about it.
“In Canada, we’ve finished our transition. So we said we wanted to get out of the middle market package business, so we had to take some sort of a staffing action to align ourselves with our transaction count. The low end middle market package business represented 40% of our transaction count, but a very little bit of our volume. We said we can’t afford to stay in that space. So when we started exiting that space, we had to do a staff adjustment. We did that in May and we’re done. We realigned, and now we’re also sourcing for [new] talent. We’re starting to hire at the upper end now.”
So now that the restructure is complete, it’s onwards and upwards for the company, as they look to refocus attention on the market segments where they see the greatest insurance fit, Levinson said, including manufacturing, telecommunications, real estate, forestry, cyber, and construction.
“We’re targeting a multitude of segments. We have a pretty broad appetite of what we like,” he said.
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