Mitch Insurance has launched Mitch Life & Benefits, a joint venture with the Darwyne Group of Companies, to grow its life insurance and employee benefits business.
The Whitby, Ontario-based brokerage has long sold life and benefits products, but the new venture gives those lines a dedicated team, specialist expertise and a wider product range. It will offer life, critical illness and disability insurance, as well as group benefits, and plans to add more services over time.
Darwyne Lang (pictured), who founded the Darwyne Group in 2023 to bring together his businesses in life insurance, employee benefits and insurance technology, will be president of the joint venture. He has nearly 50 years of industry experience.
“We want to be involved in every insurance-buying decision people make,” said Mitch Insurance CEO Adam Mitchell. He said the venture would help the brokerage offer independent advice across more client needs.
Lang said the partnership would combine complementary strengths to offer businesses and families broader protection and more choice.
Mitch has been steadily expanding beyond its personal lines roots. The family-owned brokerage, founded in 1948, has added capacity in commercial and high-net-worth insurance in recent years, and introduced a commercially focused branch model in 2024. It says it works with more than 70 insurers.
Mitchell, the third generation of his family to run the business, took over a two-person operation with $2.5 million in gross written premiums. By its 75th anniversary in 2023, the brokerage had grown to $62 million in premiums and nearly 100 employees.
The move follows several Canadian P&C brokers adding life and benefits capabilities this year. McDougall Insurance acquired group benefits broker Cassidy & Young. PLATFORM Insurance’s Platform Financial arm expanded into Alberta. Quebec’s Ellipse merged three employee benefits teams into Ellipse Collective.
For P&C brokers, the logic is to keep more of each client relationship. A brokerage that insures a family’s home and car, or a business’s property and liability, is well placed to sell life, disability and group benefits as well. Clients who hold several products with one broker are also less likely to switch.
The joint venture structure lets Mitch bring in specialist life and benefits expertise quickly, rather than building it from scratch or buying a firm outright. That may suit independent brokerages without the capital of larger consolidators.
