Headquarters: Magrath, AB
Website: surex.com
Tell us a little about your brokerage.
Surex is an online insurance marketplace. We have more than 10 of Canada’s top insurance providers all working with us to help Canadians find the best insurance coverage at the best rate. No generic call centres, just good advice when you need it. We started the company in 2012 in a small town in Alberta and bootstrapped the business from the ground up. We have over 130 employees now across Canada working with us daily to help Canadians shop, compare and buy insurance online.
What’s your competitive advantage?
Surex strives to be an innovator in the industry, using new technologies and methodologies to help us serve our customers in the best way possible. We are always leveraging technology, especially with auto-mating workflows that have traditionally been labour-intensive within our industry. The transparency we provide is enhanced compared to traditional brokers due to our technology, which allows the client to have additional insights into rates and coverage. AI is setting us apart from the competition, allowing us to create efficiencies in both the pre- and post-sale process.
We are also very proactive about getting customer feedback. We encourage our entire sale staff to reach out for a review request after every interaction, and we always follow up on those responses. These reviews are great tools for our customers to read and see that we are always responding and helping our clients, which equals more trust from new customers. It also helps us know how to better serve our customers and where to expand our development and growth efforts.
Do you have any big success stories from 2020?
[It] was an interesting year to run an insurance business – there was a lot going on, for sure. However, we felt we were ahead of the game for the most part because we were already an online business, so we easily pivoted to a completely remote workforce.
We saw lots of new growth within our teams, as well as with our client base, which enabled us to reach a large milestone this year. We made very strategic decisions on how we grew the business with some strategic partnerships, and even with the challenges of COVID, we have been able to maintain an aggressive growth strategy.
We were recognized again this year on the Growth 500 list as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies, we were featured on The Globe and Mail’s Top Growing Companies list, we won a web award for Outstanding Website Achievement, we were named a Top Insurance Workplace [by IBC] for 2020, and we were honoured to be nominated for Digital Innovator of the Year [at the Insurance Business Canada Awards].
