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[music] Hello everybody. Welcome to Insurance Business TV. We are here at Insurance Fest 2026 for our peer-to-peer interviews. And today I'm meeting Austin Kennedy. He is the head of transformation and innovation at Intact. Uh so Austin, let's talk about innovation. And what does innovation actually mean inside a large carrier or a brokerage perhaps >> how the public perceives it to be? >> I think the headline of innovation is very ambitious. It's the big ticket new technologies. AI is obviously at the

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forefront of that conversation. 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. Speed is just becoming ever more important in the marketplace and for customers, for our broker partners around the world. And so the focus of our innovation efforts right now is really just on that

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foundational element trying to leverage data better, improving our risk selection and doing all this thing as quickly as possible really with the target of achieving you know some of those big ticket growth items like a $10 billion you know premium goal that we've set for ourselves by 2030. >> Yeah. And of course the other part of your job title is transformation as well. I'm going to ask you a cheeky question if I can. >> Sure. Absolutely. Give me an example of perhaps one transformation initiative

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that that you've pushed for that's perhaps met some internal resistance and how you got it over the line. >> Yeah. I think often times there's a misnomer that the hard part about transformation and new technology is the technology itself. >> Yeah. >> And I feel strongly it's the human element that's challenging and getting your change management in place helping people to understand the value of the change and the new technology and why we're doing the transformation we're

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doing. 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 that we have. So, that resistance is not so much about I'm afraid of change or I'm resistant to the transformation. More about I just don't see how this tool can help me my day-to-day basis. So our strategy to really approach that, it's just spending time with people that do the work that

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they do, understanding how these tools can add value and then showing them to help build that trust and confidence. So resistance certainly just probably from a lack of awareness. Yeah. >> 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. >> Yeah. And let's talk a little bit wider about that transformation if we

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can. 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 that risk. The difference today is that the pace of change with a lot of these new concepts, new technology, fintex, um, digital assets, crypto, even in the physical world,

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things like data centers, is that they're changing and evolving more quickly than we can come up with as a legacy insurer. >> So, we see a growing demand for these things. 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. crypto is a great example of this. So we really have to focus on developing our products underwriting for legacy you know insurance coverages technology

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is a great example professional liability and again in the physical space with data centers and other things like that we're trying to stay on the cutting edge and keep that underwriting as tight as we've done and that's where we think we win is we've built that operational muscle over years right we've 10xed our premium since 2016 at intact and we're a global carrier that services a lot of the markets and the industry in general so that's how we're trying to adapt to the

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everchanging world around us. >> Yeah. And you mentioned that word legacy. So, um, >> if you could just wipe out perhaps one legacy system or process, you could just eliminate one, what would it be? >> Yeah. You know, I think all of our employees at Intact are knowledge workers and they're specialists and we have a lot of specialties. We have underwriting and actuarial, finance, risk management. It spans a, you know, a wide range of specializations as a carrier. And I think part of the problem

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in today's world is that there's technology out there and process out there that can limit the amount of manual data entry work or review work or moving things from one system to another and allow those knowledge workers to focus on knowledge work on understanding making decisions evaluating risk. And so if I could make one change, if I had a magic wand, it would really address that and just accelerate getting to a place where the majority of our people's time is spent on what we paid them to do and

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not, you know, the manual in between work. And I think we're well on that path today. As I said though, in a perfect world, we accelerate to get to the finish line as fast as we can. [music]