Momentum is on our side

In 2024, our executive leadership team was at the centre-point of collaboration between the industry, law enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), government, and industry partners. On behalf of our members, we saw tremendous successes and results when it came to combatting auto theft over the last year, and expanded awareness to other forms of insurance fraud, focusing on the significant and often devastating human impact of these crimes. With the increased commitment of partnership and collaboration across all levels of government and industry organizations, Équité is actively participating in committees, joint intelligence groups, roundtables, and working groups and representing the industry as subject matter experts.

Throughout the year, I was honoured to represent the priorities of our insurer members by speaking at the National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft, testifying at the House of Commons and standing alongside government leaders announcing Canada’s National Action Plan on Combatting Auto Theft.

The government’s multi-million-dollar investment in combatting auto theft represented a commitment to combat serious and organized crime, ensuring community safety on local, national and international levels. Équité was especially pleased to see the federal government’s $28 million investment in CBSA to detect and search shipping containers for stolen vehicles and enhance collaboration, and an additional $9.1 million to increase capacity for police to take custody of detained stolen vehicles from CBSA.

The unprecedented awareness, investment and action on Canada’s auto theft crisis has built important momentum behind Équité’s mission to provide best-in-class prevention and defense against insurance crimes.

In 2025, we will be using that momentum to expand awareness and prevention efforts for insurance crime, beyond auto theft. As Canada’s national authority on insurance crime and fraud prevention, Équité will continue raising awareness about the devastating impacts of insurance crime through innovative analytics, investigative education and training, partnerships with law enforcement, collaboration with government and decision-makers, and working closely with our members.

As the economy continues to be unsettled, our investigators are seeing new and increasing trends in insurance fraud across the industry including accident benefits fraud, auto body shops and towing fraud, as well as policy fraud. As our members continue to share their fraud priorities, we remain agile to identify and disrupt fraud where it happens.

With the conversation around tariffs impacting the economic and political climate, this is an important moment for us to look at reducing trade barriers, including information sharing, across our provincial boarders. We are continuing to work with provincial decision-makers to advocate for ways to close the gaps allowing cross-provincial-boarder fraud.

Équité is uniquely positioned in the industry to combine predictive analytics and human intelligence in extremely powerful ways that will expand value for our members. We offer our members exclusive access to a ground-breaking national insurance crime detection platform, ÉQ Insights. With the power of this consortium model, each insurer no longer has to combat insurance crime alone.  Our predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities are setting the groundwork for the shift of our entire industry towards a ‘predict and prevent’ model, which will allow us to lock fraud out of the industry before it ever enters. Member investigators who currently have access to ÉQ Insights are already being notified of suspicious claims and potentially fraudulent networks. These intelligence-rich fraud alerts are expanding the industry’s knowledge base, which opens up opportunities to identify more fraud.

Additionally, our expert investigators provide fraud and organized crime insight based on decades of experience in law enforcement. Their backgrounds enable them to provide vital context to why the patterns are shifting, and what that means for members, the industry and honest Canadians. With that context, the Équité technology team can incorporate meaningful insights by coding or building new attributes as a predictor to identify fraud.  

Équité’s foundation is built on understanding the power of technology, machine learning, and analytics to move the needle in a significant way for our members when it comes to identifying and preventing insurance crime. By combining our exclusive investigative expertise with our technology foundation, we are best placed to make a meaningful difference for the insurance industry and honest, hardworking Canadians.

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