Dear Business Partners,
September 30, 2019 marks the 6th anniversary of the acquisition of AGA Financial Group Inc. by my partners and myself. The first three years of our mandate were devoted to turning the business around with massive investments in IT and infrastructure, a move of our head office, strategic hires, and finally a comprehensive review of our service offering to both small businesses and large corporations. A fruitful effort, indeed!
This major undertaking paved the way for the three following years: our distinctive service offering and a high degree of customer satisfaction led to continuous onboarding of new clients and strong retention of existing clients. This enabled us to increase our revenues by 45% in three years!
The healthy growth of AGA is built on three strong pillars:
- A highly skilled advisory team of more than 30 professionals, including more than 10 actuaries;
- A network of independent brokers selected for their expertise and integrity;
- Expanded presence among associations and industrial clusters.
Strategic Direction
In May, the management team held a retreat to take stock of progress and identify the steps to be taken to maintain our strategic direction. We left with a new mission statement, supported by three defining corporate values:
AGA’S MISSION
FACILITATE ACCESS TO GROUP INSURANCE AND PENSION PLANS AND TO STREAMLINE THEIR ADMINISTRATION
AGA’S VALUES
INNOVATION + PASSION = OVERACHIEVEMENT
At a time when most of our competitors are still content with deriving short-term savings from low added-value RFPs, AGA stands out by:
- Maintaining a stringent claims management process, particularly for healthcare;
- Offering innovative services for disability management, such as pharmacogenetics and virtual cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT);
- Improving technological tools to reduce the administrative burden of plan sponsors.
With respect to healthcare, plan sustainability depends more than ever on member education. We pursued the development of our communication materials and developed performance indicators that enable our clients to track closely the improvement of their members’ utilization profile, especially for prescription drugs. Results to date are very encouraging, as our clients are witnessing material and recurring savings without having to make cuts to their member coverage.
On the technology front, the following initiatives are being deployed with our clients:
- Version 2 of our online enrolment/reenrolment tool for modular plan members;
- Automated exchange process of employee data between the HR and payroll systems of our clients and AGA’s insurance software;
- Continuous enhancement of the Members Portal and Administrators Portal in view of optimizing user experience.
Our sustained growth now allows us to increase the amounts devoted to these innovations and speed up their deployment, with the support of our technology partners Telus Health and Alithya.
Finally, this review would not be complete without mentioning the ongoing commitment of AGA towards youth education and health. Once again this year, the following organizations were able to count on our support:
In closing, I want to congratulate our 90 employees for their outstanding commitment and express my appreciation to all our clients, insurers and other business partners for their abiding trust.
I am truly honoured to work with you!
Martin Papillon is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and holds an MBA from HEC Montréal. Throughout his career, he has been working in the group insurance and retirement sector. Before joining AGA in 2013, he held advisory and senior management positions with world-class consulting actuarial firms.