Visit our website or get in touch on social media
CEO Report
Operating Highlights
For the second year running, working from home has not slowed down our Corporate Underwriting and Pricing teams. The last 12 months saw the completion of a myriad of major projects, including a CLEAR (Canadian Loss Experience Automobile Rating) rate auto filing and updating of all CLEAR rating tables in both personal and commercial auto, implementing phase 2 of credit scoring, a full review of our overland water product, a personal property rate review (which prompted us to begin work on a condo rate increase for 2022), improvements to our phiX portal and training manuals, development of a new commercial auto quoting tool, and the launch of a brand new personal property product, Premier Homeowners. External forces also came into play with the regulated introduction of DCPD (Direct Compensation for Property Damage) in Alberta. Due to go into full effect on January 1, 2022, this required a vast number of modifications to our operating system, pricing structure, wordings, declaration pages, IBC coding, not to mention thorough training of our staff, in preparation to meet the regulatory changes imposed by the provincial government.
Similar sentiments can be made for our Claims Department. While adhering to their service standards throughout the year, they simultaneously placed a high focus on developing and updating their core resource library, including claims manuals, process documents, workflow guidelines and internal controls. The upcoming introduction of DCPD in Alberta has been positively received from a claims perspective, as it will give Peace Hills the opportunity to deal directly with our policyholders throughout all stages of the claims process. The Claims team at Peace Hills upholds the company’s values by continuing to put our policyholders first, leveraging modern technologies such as Audatex Image Capture and edjuster Customer Portal to create a more customer-centric claims experience, and consistently seeking ways to refine their claims handling processes when facing CAT and Large Loss events, of which there were 2 this year that impacted Peace Hills: a hailstorm in Calgary and the floods across British Columbia. We were fortunate that our exposure in both events has been less than our market share of business in those regions.
All this being said, our largest project of the year kicked off in our IT Department with the upcoming replacement of our core operating system, “GIMS”. In 2021, the Replacement Project (aptly named ‘CUBS’, an abbreviation for Claims-Underwriting-Billing System) focused on developing, releasing, and evaluating Requests for Proposals for a Buy option, while concurrently considering a Build option. This foundational work has been about gaining the momentum needed to undertake one of the largest projects our company has faced, with an estimated rollout in 2-3 years from now. A new core system will provide Peace Hills with a modern digital platform to support our future growth, bring efficiencies to our work processes, and help to facilitate the achievement of our strategic objectives.
2021 Annual Report