BMO chief executive officer Darryl White told an industry audience last month that predictive AI modelling in the bank's insurance business can now deliver underwriting decisions in as little as 10 seconds, against an industry standard of at least 28 business days.
The comment, made amid a broader wave of AI enthusiasm from Canada's Big Five bank CEOs, pointed specifically to SmartDecision, the underwriting platform BMO Insurance launched in July.
White's figure is a modest rounding-down from what BMO itself disclosed at launch. BMO Insurance's own July announcement described SmartDecision as delivering decisions in as little as 14 seconds on eligible applications up to $5 million across term life, universal life and whole life products, with no tele-interview or medical evidence requirement for qualifying applicants. The full electronic application takes an average of 20 minutes. Applications that come back rated or declined are still routed to human underwriters.
Katarina Nikolic, BMO Insurance's vice-president and chief corporate underwriter, has said the insurer's confidence in instant decisions at the $5 million limit rests on its own actual-to-expected mortality ratios and mortality slippage data - the comparison between outcomes from accelerated decisions and what full underwriting would have produced. The predictive modelling draws on BMO Insurance's internal data on policyholders' medical history, lifestyle, occupation and financial history, embedded directly into the electronic application alongside the insurer's underwriting rules engine.
As Insurance Business reported at the time, BMO is entering this space well behind Manulife, which has an eight-year head start on accelerated underwriting, but the $5 million instant-decision ceiling and BMO's mortality slippage validation give SmartDecision real technical credibility rather than simply matching a competitive minimum.
White's remarks came at the Scotiabank Financials Summit, where bank CEOs traded increasingly bold AI claims: Scotiabank's Scott Thomson said AI has saved his bank roughly 24,000 days of work over four and a half months, and TD's Raymond Chun said AI has cut mortgage pre-processing time from 15 hours to three minutes.
A Toronto Metropolitan University study found 98% of financial sector workers are highly exposed to AI technologies, against 56% for the Canadian workforce overall, and the Bank of Canada has estimated a third of jobs nationally may undergo substantial changes from AI integration, specifically naming banking, insurance and financial clerks among the most exposed roles.
For insurance specifically, that exposure question looks different than it does for retail banking. Jefferies analyst John Aiken noted that banks are not currently reducing headcount despite heavy AI investment, though he expects reduced demand for lower-skilled, front-line roles over time. In underwriting specifically, BMO's own design - routing anything rated or declined to a human underwriter - suggests the immediate effect is compressing the straightforward, low-risk cases rather than eliminating underwriting judgment altogether. Whether that pattern holds as accelerated underwriting programmes expand their eligibility limits and risk tolerance is the more consequential question for insurance industry employment than the initial rollout figures suggest.
Tools like SmartDecision change the sales conversation more than they change the advisor's role directly. An instant underwriting decision at the point of application removes a major source of client drop-off during a multi-week underwriting wait, but it also means advisors need less reliance on managing client expectations through a long approval process and more focus on the front-end conversation. As more insurers push these tools further up the coverage-amount ladder, brokers should expect competitive pressure to intensify around speed-to-decision as a client-facing differentiator, not just price and coverage terms.
