At today’s annual shareholder’s meeting, Yvon Charest, president and CEO of Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services, presented the development strategy he plans to put forth in order to maintain and even accelerate the firm’s growth.

“Our strategy is guided by two major objectives: one involving profitability, the other involving business growth. In terms of profitability, we are targeting a return on shareholder’s equity within the 13% to 15% range. In terms of business growth, we hope to see sales in all activity sectors go up by five percentage points more than industry sales growth,” said Charest.

The strategy to achieve the company’s growth and profitability objectives revolves around six development axes:

• strengthen the Company’s distribution capacity. The Company is looking to develop these networks in all parts of the country. Moreover, Industrial Alliance is open to signing agreements with ‘solid’ institutions. The company has already signed four administration or distribution agreements in the past few months. One is an agreement with MD Management to create a life insurance company called MD Life. Another is an agreement with National Bank Trust, a subsidiary of National Bank. It has also signed an agreement with BMO Life Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Bank of Montreal, and an agreement with La Capitale Services Conseils, the distribution network for La Capitale Assurances MFQ Inc.

• accelerate growth in the wealth management sector. Industrial Alliance already distributes a range of financial products such as segregated funds, GICs, registered retirement savings plans and registered education savings plans. The firm plans to expand this range of products over the next few years with the distribution of mutual funds and securities.

• leverage National Life brand and expertise. Industrial Alliance plans to use this profile and the products of this subsidiary to further penetrate this market segment. National Life just launched a web based sales capability for its MGAs and broker business partners, who can now obtain a personalized website as a tool to help them sell life insurance and retirement products.

• improve the product line and continually adapt it to the needs of clients. To achieve this goal, the company just launched a new version of this policy. This comes on the heels of last year’s launch of several new products, including a critical illness product, a term insurance product, and a second version of its registered education savings plan.

• improve the company’s cost structure and operating efficiency by combining the Alliance Group made up of three life and health insurance companies, Industrial Alliance, National Life, and IA “Pacific” Life. The operations of these three companies have been combined for three activity sectors, Group Insurance, Group Pensions and Investments.

• actively look for acquisitions. In particular, the company is looking to acquire mid-sized companies in the insurance sector or small companies specializing in targeted market niches. In the past few months, Industrial Alliance has acquired the mutual fund brokerage firm Concorde Financial Group, in addition to Aegis Insurance Corporation, a Saskatchewan life insurance company that works with automobile dealers in the credit insurance sector, as well as ISL-Lafferty Securities and certain assets of BNP (Canada) Securities, two full-service securities brokerage firms.

“We are determined to achieve our growth and profitability objectives,” says Charest. “Our ability to set ourselves apart in the market is achieved through the combination of several attributes: the expertise and reputation of our representatives who are spread over multiple distribution networks, our renowned regional brand names, the strong sense of entrepreneurship within each company of the Group, a well-articulated and smoothly executed growth strategy in each activity sector, the ability to keep production costs down, and the cohesion of our management team, a team that is both experienced and dedicated to the success of the
organization.”