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Economical is one of Canada’s leading property and casualty (“P&C”) insurers. Headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, we are an insurance company that provides a wide range of personal and commercial insurance products to customers in most provinces and territories across Canada. We partner with independent insurance brokers who work with customers to assess their insurance needs. We also offer personal auto and personal property insurance through our digital direct brand, Sonnet. We are committed to providing our broker partners and policyholders with the products and services that today’s market demands.
Our financial stability is demonstrated by assets over $5.4 billion and total equity of approximately $1.8 billion as at December 31, 2016, reflecting the combined strength of our member companies.
Our strategy strives to achieve our vision — to be one of Canada’s top P&C insurers, recognized for our business innovation and how well we take care of our customers. It builds on our 145-year heritage, and is powered by two imperatives: growing our business profitability and operating effectively. Across Economical, we are focused on four core strategic thrusts which serve those imperatives:
We are building on our strong relationships with our broker partners by arming them with new tools and training — all to enhance their competitiveness in a changing marketplace, and expand our market share in the broker distribution channel. To reach customers who prefer to purchase and service insurance themselves, we have launched a new, separately-branded, digital direct company — Sonnet. Both channels are supported by ongoing investments in new technologies and advanced analytics aimed at leveraging sophisticated insights in marketing, product design, and business mix optimization. We continue to focus on enhancing our pricing sophistication to build a competitive advantage in the market and deliver appropriate returns.
We are currently pursuing demutualization under a framework established by the federal government in 2015. The culmination of that process is a planned initial public offering (“IPO”), which would open access to capital markets, providing increased financial flexibility to support our strategic initiatives, including significantly enhancing our ability to acquire other companies. In anticipation of our IPO, we have built sophisticated risk management, corporate governance, corporate development, investment management, and reporting capabilities. We recently completed the acquisition of Western Financial Insurance Company (renamed Petline Insurance Company) and its flagship brand, Petsecure, broadening our product portfolio. We continue to seek small and medium-sized acquisition opportunities and are actively expanding our strategic partnerships both with brokers and in other areas of our business.
Efficient and flexible processes and systems are essential to respond to rapidly changing industry conditions and are key to effectively managing our expenses. We are in the process of replacing the legacy policy administration system that supports our broker business with the leading technology platform implemented for Sonnet. Transforming our business processes and modernizing our technology infrastructure will significantly improve our ability to deliver products and services to market quickly and efficiently, position us to drive ongoing improvements in our operating performance and cost competitiveness, and provide a scalable platform to integrate future acquisitions.
We know there is a strong relationship between a highly engaged workforce and company performance; engaged employees produce superior quality, deliver better financial results, create better customer experiences, and drive continuous improvement and innovation. We are focused on inspiring an engaging environment that enables our people to maximize their individual and collective contribution to long-term value creation. At the same time, we are strengthening our culture of service excellence to deliver best-in-class service to our customers, our brokers, and within our organization.