Executive Corner

What’s on Dec? the Canadian Underwriter podcast. We’re talking about fraud today, and we have Terri O’Brien from Équité Association, who is partnering and, well, basically, not just partnering, but totally integrated with the best insurers in the country to deal with fraud.

On this episode of the Driving Podcast, host Lorraine Sommerfeld is joined by security expert Bryan Gast, vice president of investigations with Équité Association. As car theft in Canada explodes, we discuss the role that Canada is playing in supplying vehicles to dangerous global organization that involves drugs, organized crime, and trafficking activities.

The momentum on combatting auto theft in 2024 has already exceeded my expectations. In February, I was honoured to represent Équité Association and the insurance industry twice in Ottawa to speak about the impacts of auto theft on Canadians and the solutions to keep our communities safe. The February 8 National Summit on Combatting Auto Theft was an important step forward to finding collaborative solutions.

Équité Association’s VP, Member and Employee Engagement & Chief Marketing Officer, Karrina Dusablon, has been recognized by Insurance Business Canada as a winner of ‘Elite Women 2024’. It’s fitting that this was announced on, International Women’s Day, as this award recognizes women in insurance leadership who have made a meaningful contribution to the industry.

In 2023, Équité Association launched the first of its kind for the industry – a national insurance crime detection platform, ÉQ Insights. We know fraud is hidden in insurance claims and can be hard to detect as each individual insurance company can only see the insurance fraud happening within their organization. ÉQ Insights is a tool that brings together industry-wide information in one place for effective fraud detection.

Équité Association specializes in uncovering fraudulent patterns within claims and our investigators guide our insurance industry members to identify, predict and prevent continuing fraud. With the introduction of ÉQ Insights, Équité has built a foundation to detect and prevent insurance crime using predictive analytics and machine learning.

Angel Yau-Vandenburg, VP, Chief Data & Technology Officer at Équité Association, leads the data and technology team which developed the ÉQ Insights platform. The ÉQ Insights platform was developed to move the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry to a ‘predict and prevent’ model. The platform offers our members the advantages of predictive analytics and enhanced reporting, complemented by hands-on expertise of seasoned investigators. ÉQ Insights was launched in Q3 to a select group of pilot members, with additional members onboarding in early 2024.

In today’s landscape, where insurance crime has never been more complex, Canadian property and casualty (P&C) insurers are doing more than ever to protect consumers through their strategic partnership with Équité. Criminals are using increasingly sophisticated technologies to commit crimes, making their activity harder to detect and prevent. To stay ahead of this, the industry is working with Équité, who is investing in leading-edge technology to deliver data-driven insights through the first consortium-based intelligence platform, ÉQ Insights.

When we began building our organization in 2021, our team was small and has since grown with an unwavering focus on building a single, unified, not-for-profit organization to proactively tackle insurance crime on behalf of our members. We prioritized building the foundation of what our organization would grow to become, establishing our workplace culture as an essential component of who we are, along with the products and services we offer to members.

At Équité Association, our cyber security strategy underpins our mission to provide best-in-class prevention and defense against insurance crimes through advanced analytics, intelligence and coordinated investigations.