Simon LePine, Premiere Insurance Underwriting Services: Premiere is a specialty niche underwriter, so were an MGA that writes sports teams, sports venues, theatres, theatre venues, production companies and we opened a new niche product that’s adventure tourism.So that’s largely based on my background. I used to be a guide involved in search and rescue, professional climber and skier. So I really have the expertise to underwrite that new product. There’s no one out there that really understands the industry-what they need. We’recertainly offering some coverages. For example forest fire-fighting expenses. No one else is really offering that and obviously that’s fairly key for adventure tourism operators.

Dave Weinberg, TSW Management Services: My name is Dave Weinberg and this is Karen Stewart and we’re with TSW Management Services in the Vancouver office. We’re a national wholesaler servicing small to medium-sized independent brokers, helping them to place complex commercial risks. Karen and I are responsible for the Western provinces from British Columbia through to Manitoba, and then our Montreal offices and Toronto offices handle everything east of there.

Our role is to basically help brokers place complex business—complex commercial business that is currently not being serviced by their standard markets. So there could be a component of large US sales. There could be a situation where it’s a Canadian domicile company with US subsidiaries or world-wide locations, and they’d like to have all that insured on one policy with admitted paper for the various locations. We can write pretty much any aspect of commercial insurance from directors and officers, property \casualty, product recall, environmental impairment liability, construction, manufacturers, contingent contamination outbreak, any of those sorts of things.

Andre Rahal, ETFS: Our company’s name is ETFS. It stands for Expert Travel Financial Security Services. And the whole idea behind our product is to sell travel insurance and health insurance. We work with brokers, credit unions, financial institutions and MGAs, so our product can be placed at many of those locations. We’re a wholesaler and really what makes us unique is that our product is more of a specialized type of product to deal with travel insurance. It’s geared toward the snowbirds who do a lot of traveling and because of that we’re able to give the snowbirds a product that’s a good fit for them instead of a generic type of product—a more personalized type of product.

Nora E. McCreedy, Aurora Underwriting Services: We’re a wholesale broker dealing with Lloyds of London and we look after risks the domestics might not want or can’t write, or are really sort of off-the-wall.We see a lot of liability, we do cargo, we do E&O, D&O, just all kinds of risks.

Malcolm Smiley, JR Direct: I’m Malcolm Smiley. I’m the Business Development and Sales Manager with JR Direct. And we’re a direct mail marketing company. So if you’re looking to talk to a business or a consumer using direct mail we’re the people you need to talk to. We cover three main areas of business. First and foremost, what we can do for our businesses is ensure that if they’re mailing to a customer, that that mail piece gets to the right person at the right address. We have custom software that can sort out addresses, names, qualifications, national change of address, bereavement, so you don’t waste any of your marketing budget.

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