To Our Brokers:

We are forwarding an Economical message below which offers various updates on Vyne implementation.
As always we invite you to contact any member of our team with questions.

Thank you for your support.

Regards, David

A Message from Tom:

Hello,

As we enter the last quarter of 2018, I want to take some time to check in with you. We’ve implemented our Vyne offering in PEI, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario, and are gearing up to launch Vyne in Alberta and Quebec this month. We have heard from many of you recently and I’m grateful for your comments, ideas, and feedback — both positive and constructive. As you know, Vyne is intended to offer a streamlined way of doing business. It’s much more than just a policy administration system. With Vyne, we’ve also re-defined our product offering, rating, and payment capabilities for personal lines and individually rated commercial auto (IRCA).

For a program of this magnitude, we have achieved many successes, but we’ve also faced some challenges. I want to thank you for being here with us as we make refinements and continue with our implementation.

Vyne is one of the largest-scale technology and business implementations in the Canadian P&C market. Throughout this process, we’ve been seeking your feedback and working hard to get this right. Here are a few examples of issues that you’ve helped us identify and resolve:

Underwriting appetite and rating

• Amended our underwriting appetite for snowmobiles and certain recreational units
• Addressed reported issues of high overland water rates in some scenarios in the Atlantic region

Integrations and workflows

• We continue to stabilize and proactively monitor eDocs and downloads
• We’ve provided our front-line systems support team with the ability to grant brokers processing access
• We’ve reduced the number of messages returned to quoting vendors and made the remaining ones easier to understand

Policy print

• We’ve clarified the replacement cost description on the declarations page — amended from 100% of actual replacement cost to unlimited replacement cost to better convey our intent
• We’ve improved the varied terms letter wordings to be more specific and focus only on material varied terms

Resources

• We’re committed to regularly updating the Vyne FAQ to reflect feedback and gaps in knowledge
• We’ve enhanced existing job aids and published new ones in the Broker Learning Centre, including IRCA type of use, down payments, and portfolio transfers
• We’re also aware of issues with multi-vehicle discounts on policies in a household with different effective dates, as well as some issues with correct application of multi-policy discounts on certain policies. We do understand the impact to your clients, and we’re currently exploring the best ways to rectify the issues. We will share more when a solution is reached.

A word about down payments
With Vyne, we require a down payment on all non-standard business on a monthly payment plan. The down payment must be successfully processed by credit card at the time of issuance, and new business must be current or future-dated. We’ve received some questions about this requirement, so I’ll take a moment to explain the business rationale behind it.

Non-standard coverage from Economical is now more widely available with Vyne. Our definition of non-standard includes clients with higher risk exposure or who have previously been cancelled for non-payment. Based on our extensive experience with non-standard risks through Perth Insurance®, and in line with industry practices, this decision to require the down payment helps protect the profitability of Economical and your brokerage. We recognize that requiring these policies be same or future-dated may cause a disruption to your workflow, but I want to reiterate that this decision was made in the interest of risk mitigation and based on solid analytics and past learnings.

Moving forward, together
I can’t stress enough how important broker feedback was in defining the Vyne offering, and will continue to be throughout the conversion year and beyond. Your input is helping us improve Vyne — and while we know that improvements, each with multiple dependencies, don’t happen overnight, we are committed to working hard to make this the best possible offering for you and your customers. We have established a broker experience working group here at Economical — this cross-functional team will work together to review the holistic broker experience and continually help drive improvements and enhancements.

An implementation of this scale has been a good test of our own resolve and responsiveness and has clearly demonstrated to us the loyalty and strong support of our broker partners. As we continue the charge forward, I’m confident that you’ll see the benefits of accurate and bindable quotes, access to an expanded and enhanced suite of products, tighter integrations with your broker systems, and highly-customized rates. With Vyne, we’re reaffirming our commitment to the broker channel by investing in our future, together.

Questions and support
I encourage you to continue sharing your feedback with us — we’re listening and want to hear from you. You’ll also have an opportunity to participate in our broker sentiment survey later this fall. In the meantime, please continue to reach out to your business development representative at any time.

We also have a number of teams who are here to help you with everything Vyne-related:

• For policy-level inquiries, contact our Broker Assist Centre
• For system-related inquiries, contact our Broker Systems Support team
• For billing inquiries, contact our Customer Accounts Centre

Regards,

Tom Reikman
SVP and Chief Distribution Officer