Simon Roy has an understated quality that belies the 48-year-old’s already significant contributions to iA Financial Group and the Canadian financial services industry. Invited to be the subject of a profile, Roy not only wants to talk about his team, he’s brought one of them along. “The leader cannot work alone,” he said.
To be fair, the colleague with Roy is a former Google executive who stepped down from iA’s board of directors to work with him. More about that in a moment.
Roy is vice-president and chief technology officer, a title he is the first to hold in the company’s 130-plus-year history. He joined as an IT manager in 2012, working his way up into the C-suite in a little more than a decade. Roy is now accountable for iA’s IT architecture and innovation programs.
An AI leader
There was a conventional wisdom in the early days of the pandemic that the lockdowns would speed up the digitization of commerce. That proved true of course, particularly with the emergence of Open AI’s 2022 launch of ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
Roy was among those Canadian financial services executives prepared to make the great leap forward. “There was truly a belief that we needed to embrace AI,” he said. “You know, financial services companies are pretty much technology companies now.”
IA implemented a limited pilot with “a couple of users, as part of the very first release” of a Microsoft Chat GPT tool in February 2023, Roy said. It was rolled out across the organization a month later. The plan was to let staff experiment with the chatbot securely, and see what efficiency gains they could identify.
Around the same time, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau, an iA board member and former chief evangelist at Google decided to step down so that he could serve the company as an AI strategic advisor.
“AI is going to make the internet revolution look like nothing,” Darveau-Garneau said.
Moving so early required consultation with partners in risk management, legal and cyber security. “Everybody was at the table,” Roy said. They developed a governance framework, including a process to identify and test use cases.
The use-case approach was central to winning internal support. Rather than advocate for a broad roll-out, Roy promised to test specific opportunities with robust controls around them.
Notetaking and more
AI-powered notetaking and transcription tools are a natural starting point for organizations looking for ways to make their workforce more efficient. They’re a long way from perfect, but it takes far less time for an employee to review and correct a call transcript than it does to listen in and take notes.
Off-the-shelf options like Otter.ai, Evernote and Microsoft OneNote have been well received. IA uses a tool based on Azure OpenAI in its call centres and other parts of the organization.
“We started by deploying to two agents,” Roy said. “Then we opened it up to 25 agents. It provided good results. It’s not perfect, but we have a human in the loop.”
That human element is about more than simply reviewing the AI notes. IA works with outside consultants who keep them up to speed on legislative and regulatory developments around the world.
A more advanced use case involves life insurance underwriting, long a client-experience pain point. More than half of iA sales have been automated, and the team is pushing for 80% by 2030.
“Eight out of 10 cases will be approved automatically at the point of sale, without invasive requirements like urine or blood testing,” Roy said.
The automated process can be used for either new or existing clients who are in good health. “Imagine being able to have clients walk in and get approved right off the bat.”
AI is also well suited for the claims review process. Having invested millions of dollars in big data, financial services providers are leveraging AI to become far more sophisticated in this part of the business.
More broadly, Roy and the organization have implemented Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Vertex AI chatbots to help advisors and other professionals — including IT developers — navigate the organization’s systems, policies and procedures.
“We integrated the generative AI interface so that they can ask their questions and get answers much faster,” Roy said.
Know your client
Roy’s vision is about more than helping employees work faster, or even smarter for that matter. The technology’s capacity for processing massive amounts of data enables a more personalized client experience — an idea consistent with a fundamental rule of the business: know your client.
We’ll see major advancements on this front in the next three years, Roy said. The industry’s focus on life events as a cue for proactive client contact will grow more sophisticated. Providers like iA will get a lot better at knowing what’s going on in a client’s life, and predicting their financial needs.
“Let’s say we detect that a client has become a parent,” he said. “We can offer new life coverage or disability coverage.”
But it’s still early days, Darveau-Garneau said. At some point in the next decade the industry’s approach to product design will be transformed by the technology’s ability to develop hyper-personalized solutions.
“If you’re looking 10 years out, go beyond the barriers of each of the products and think about creating the right financial system for a customer,” he said. “So, the client walks into an advisor’s office and describes what they’re trying to do. They describe their life situation and what they care about. AI will be able to give a multi-product recommendation to the advisor.”
There is a place in all of this for the financial advisor, in the foreseeable future at least.
Roy said advisors who choose to avoid the technology will regret it.
“Be curious,” he said. “The technology will not replace humans, but humans who are not using the technology will be replaced by other humans who are able to understand and use the technology. If you haven’t started to play with it yet, start. Get familiar with it. There are a lot of opportunities.”
This article appears in the February issue of Investment Executive. Subscribe to the print edition, read the digital edition or read the articles online.