TechCanary incorporates in Canada, eyes future expansion

Milwaukee-based insurtech company TechCanary has incorporated in Canada, with headquarters in Laval, Que. and an eye to opening another office in Toronto.

TechCanary CEO and co-founder Reid Holzworth told Canadian Underwriter Tuesday that “it’s not planned yet, but we’ll open an office in Toronto as well.” He anticipates this will happen within the next year or so. “We have three people on the ground in Toronto now,” he added.

The insurtech announced late last week that it had incorporated in Canada as TechCanary Insurance Software of Canada ULC, citing the company’s rapidly growing Canadian market share and expanding client base as key reasons. TechCanary’s new chief revenue officer, Saima Shaukat and chief technology officer, Pat Forgioine, will work from the Laval office and are currently building an expanded Canada-based team to support existing clients and engage new clients in the region.

TechCanary provides a broker management system developed from the Salesforce cloud-based software.

Holzworth said the company  worked with the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations to build the software.

Holzworth uses the analogy of Salesforce as a website. Whereas other companies may be adding a page to that website, “what we did is we built inside their website,” he explained. Rather than adding to a legacy system that’s been in place for 30 years and building around it – “it creates a silo and then everybody has to connect to that silo, if they even allow or built the functionality to connect,” Holzworth said – TechCanary’s solution could be considered a replacement.

“At our core, we’re a complete replacement of an existing agency management system or broker management system,” he said. “Our out-of-the-box functionality replaces what [customers] have and it gives them so much more.”

The solution also supports an app exchange, with “thousands” of financial and analytics apps.

Because the product doesn’t require supporting back-end infrastructure (which is already in Salesforce), “all we’re doing is building new features and functionality,” Holzworth said. For example, one Canadian marine insurance client is working with TechCanary to gather “the correct information in a systematic way to get a quote for a large vessel [or] small vessel.” Specific questions could include:

• How many motors does it have?
• What is the horsepower of that motor?
• What is the vessel hull made of? fiberglass? wood? aluminum?

Holzworth said that in the Canadian market, everybody from carriers to brokers is looking to technology to help them be more efficient. “The incumbents haven’t locked down the market yet as far as automation is concerned.”