As PPI President and CEO, what is Cathy Hiscott’s vision for the future of PPI? Below, read the latest C-Suite interview in the July edition of Insurance Journal (you can also see the PDF HERE) where Cathy discusses strategic growth, what an MGA requires to be successful and what it means for PPI to be “indispensable” to Advisors.
Be sure to follow PPI on LinkedIn to explore a series of posts related to the goal of becoming indispensable and contact your local PPI Collaboration Centre if you have any questions.
Cathy Hiscott became President and CEO of PPI in March 2024. This announcement followed Jim Virtue’s retirement from the CEO role in December 2023. Hiscott had been President of PPI since February 2023.
After joining the MGA in January 2021 as Executive Vice President, Innovation & Strategy, Hiscott saw her position expanded to include Finance in July 2022. She has 33 years’ experience in the insurance and investment industry. Prior to PPI, she was Senior Vice President of Executive Distribution at Financial Horizons and President of Excel Private Management, which belonged to Financial Horizons before being merged with Quadrus Investment Services on January 1, 2022.
From the moment she joined PPI, Hiscott played an active role in the organization’s strategic review. “We called that strategic review ‘Blue Ocean’, based on the book Blue Ocean Strategy (1). We had 60 employees from across the whole company and we asked them the question: ‘If we were building a brand-new MGA today, what would we do?’ We looked to all our business areas, whether it was the mid-market or high net-worth market, investments, operations, IT,” she recalls.
PPI created small working groups of four to six people each. “Over 12 weeks, we asked them: What do we do well? What do we need to do differently for the future? We came up with our 6 strategic imperatives and our vision. We based them all on drivers of change that are happening within our industry.”
PPI, itself owned by iA Financial Group, looked at manufacturers owning distribution. “We looked at how carriers are now owning MGAs. We looked at how carriers have gotten out of recruitment, training, and development of new advisors. We looked at the impact of technology and what the advisors need to serve their clients.”
Hiscott explains that getting input from the people “who do the job” is how PPI developed its vision of becoming indispensable to its advisors. “Being indispensable means to us that advisors just can’t imagine working with any other MGA”, says Hiscott.
In her appointment announcement, PPI said that understanding advisors is critical to its success. “Over the past year, we have engaged a number of you across Canada to deepen our understanding of your needs and have aligned our core business areas and service offerings to reflect our goal of being indispensable,” says the announcement.
Crucial skills
Hiscott stresses the importance of having people in every community to support advisors. She applauds the evolution of digital technologies. They now make it possible to recruit and attract the best talent without those individuals having to sit in the same office, she points out. “At the same time, we’re preserving the regional teams. We make sure that we have business development teams locally,” she adds.
Why would an advisor deal with PPI rather than another MGA? She says the MGA believes in providing “really knowledgeable people to the advisors”. As an example, she mentions the large case market aimed at high-net-worth Canadians, which is the niche occupied by PPI Advisory’s side of the MGA. “We’ve invested in tax and estate planning experts, in our advanced underwriting and advanced case specialists that can help advisors when they get into more complex insurance requirements.”
Among PPI’s recent hires, Jim Brownlee has, like Hiscott, worked for Canada Life in the past. When Hiscott was appointed President and CEO of PPI in March 2024, Brownlee was named Executive Vice President, Distribution. Brownlee joined PPI in January 2023 as leader of strategic growth initiatives.
“Jim is responsible for the development and execution of strategic plans across all sales areas to ensure growth, working closely with PPI sales leaders to coordinate efforts, leverage PPI’s collective expertise and meet the needs of you, our independent Advisors,” Hiscott posted on LinkedIn, at the time of Brownlee appointment.
Declining number of policies
Figures from 2023 provided to the Insurance Journal by LIMRA reveal that the number of policies sold in Canada has been on a downward trend since 2010, while premium amounts and the average premium per policy have been steadily increasing (see the feature on term insurance in this issue, pages 10 to 21). Hiscott is aware of this trend, and that many advisors have moved into the high-net-worth market. “We refer to our high-net-worth large case insurance market as the wants’ market. They want to leave a legacy; they want tax efficiency; they want their assets to transfer as smoothly as possible.”
“Then we have our needs market, which is the middle market,” she continues. They need protection to pay off debts like mortgages, replace income during working years, and protect dependents.
Hiscott reveals that the company’s large case business grew significantly in 2023. “We have a lot of advisors doing an amazing amount of work in the high net-worth insurance market,” she says. Of the 5,300 advisors active with PPI, Hiscott estimates that the top 500 are more focused on insurance solutions for high net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients. To be considered part of this segment at PPI, an insurance case must represent at least $75,000 in annual premiums or $5 million in death benefit coverage.
Most PPI advisors, however, serve the family midmarket, she adds. “It’s more like $2,000 in annual premiums. It’s still a lot of money for the average Canadian family. We’re seeing that the number of Canadians in the family market buying life insurance is not going up,” she underlines.
Hiscott recalls that in 2023, 31% of Canadians told LIMRA in its 2024 Insurance Barometer Study that they had no insurance or were underinsured. “Part of the challenge is making it easy for them to buy insurance and making it easy for the advisor to offer them insurance”.
Supporting prospecting
At the time of the interview, PPI had just held its annual symposium. The event brings together growth-focused advisors together to talk about concepts and opportunities in different markets. “We also introduced AmpLiFi,” she says.
AmpLiFi is a policy management system that helps advisors identify sales opportunities within their existing policies, such as term policy conversions, rewrites and switches, as well as policy anniversaries and client birthdays. PPI launched this proprietary tool in November 2022, in partnership with Life Design Analysis, a software developer headed by Charlie Conron.
“Advisors that qualify have all their opportunities within this platform,” says Hiscott. She explains they can market to their clients, who can then click a button to say they want to buy. “As an example, we can help advisors set up their marketing to a client that has a term insurance policy that’s going to renew in the next 12 months, way before the term renews. Maybe the client wants to convert it, re-write it or change it. Hiscott says that the advisor thus avoids reacting at the last minute, and can give the customer time to think and respond to a new needs analysis.
The process works by sending the customer communications via AmpLiFi’s secure messaging, including an updated needs analysis “that even the client play around with…We know that the more involved the prospect or client is in the process, the more they take ownership about doing something,” notes Hiscott.
“It’s a beautiful way of prospecting because, as we saw in the LIMRA research, 21% of Canadians don’t have insurance and 10% want more. Part of it is for advisors to go back to their existing clients and market to them. They can reach out to their clients to say: ‘Hey, maybe it’s time to do a check-up!’”
Isn’t that the very essence of the profession? “It is, but it can become tedious,” observes Hiscott. “We’re all busy,” she points out. She says PPI has been looking at how to make it easier for advisors with, say, 500 or more customers to call back.
No fees
Hiscott says of AmpLiFi that active insurance advisors with PPI are eligible. “They need to do a certain amount of new life insurance premiums first-year commissions per year,” says Hiscott, who declines to disclose the exact level. “It’s a realistic amount. Somebody active in the life industry will qualify for it.”
However, an advisor focused on investment business with no more than 100 insurance policies in force could also qualify. “We would look to their overall business with us. We take a holistic approach. They might still want it because it would help them to manage their in-force policies.”
Eligible advisors get the full platform at no cost to them, including the lead generation tool for their website, adds Hiscott. “We provide training and support from our team of digital enablement specialists. “That’s why we have a minimum amount of production.”
She says that data feeds flow freely in AmpLiFi between most insurers and advisors. “There’s only two or three very small companies that don’t pop the feeds into AmpLiFi, but all the major insurance companies in Canada do.” Life Design Analysis can take insurer data and allow the advisor to see that the customer has insurance with iA Financial Group, Canada Life, Manulife and Sun Life, for example.
Another way to grow
With a strong presence in the insurance market, PPI also has a few investment-focused advisors. “They do a lot more of the segregated fund and annuity business. They are not as much into insurance actual planning,” explains Hiscott. She believes they can fuel PPI’s growth.
Hiscott says that mutual fund and securities broker reps don’t generally focus on insurance. To reverse this trend, PPI has created a team that works with investment advisors to help them integrate insurance solutions into their practices.
PPI has a number of brokers “that do their insurance business through us, because we match them up with an independent PPI insurance advisor,” says Hiscott. iA Private Wealth Management is one of them. “The investment advisor enters into an agreement with the insurance advisor. They are partnering so that they can holistically take care of the client.
Protection gap and new markets
PPI says it has acquisition opportunities that would enable it to enter some new markets. “We need to pay more attention to new markets in Canada that we may not be in today,” she says. To demonstrate this, she cites one of Statistics Canada’s demographic projections for Canada from 2021 to 2068. Among the figures published in August 2022, Hiscott mentions that Canada’s population is expected to reach nearly 48 million by 2043. This is one of the medium growth scenarios projected by Statistics Canada.
Much of this growth will be fuelled by immigration, if the trend continues. On January 1, 2024, Canada’s population reached 40.8 million, an increase of 1,271,872 compared to January 1, 2023. This increase was reported by Statistics Canada in its March 27 edition of The Daily. It represents an annual population growth rate of 3.2%, the highest since 1957. According to Statistics Canada, temporary immigration in 2023 accounts for most of this growth.
“We’re expected to be 48 million Canadians by 2043. If we apply that same 31% protection gap, there will be close to 15 million Canadians needing life insurance.” Hiscott says PPI’s working on “new innovative approaches so that we might be able to have a new marketplace for mid and mass-market Canadians.” She would not elaborate, but says she expects PPI to work on it behind the scenes for a period of time. “We are hoping it can help close that gap.
- In this book published in 2005, authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest that a company will achieve lasting success by creating new, untapped market spaces ripe for growth (blue oceans), rather than by fighting competitors.