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The pandemic has changed many things, including the relationship between brokers and aggregators

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated trends that even just a few months ago we thought were still years away. These changes are fundamentally altering the relationship between insurance brokers and aggregators like LowestRates.ca.

Consumers are increasingly going online to get financial products such as home insurance and car insurance. This trend has been playing out for decades, but it’s been slow to take root in Canada prior to the pandemic.

Data show that Canadians tend to be conservative when it comes to getting financial products like insurance online. The EY Global FinTech Adoption Index shows Canada near the bottom of 27 countries when it comes to the percentage of consumers who use online financial tools. While the global average adoption is 64% (China is highest at 87%), only 50% of Canadians get financial products online.

That is changing. During the pandemic, the type of user coming to our site to compare insurance has shifted. When we started in 2012, our user base was primarily young, male, and tended to have a traffic infraction or two on their record. They likely got an expensive quote from an insurance company and sought more affordable options.

That’s no longer the case. Today, users are evenly split between men and women, and now skew middle-aged. Many have pristine driving records without any tickets or accidents.

This trend of older drivers coming to our site has accelerated during the pandemic: Fewer people are comfortable visiting brokers in person. Customers who might never have considered going online to get insurance before are coming online and finding aggregator sites like ours.

That presents a major opportunity for brokers.

Brokers must capitalize on this trend if they are to succeed. To do so, they could choose to create their own marketing and content divisions to try and get ranked in search engines and outbid other companies in online advertising. But this is an expensive option, and it doesn’t guarantee success.

Another option is to work with aggregators — and many brokers are now choosing to do so. Brokers who choose this route can offer the most competitive rate for an insurance product and then choose how many new customers they want to get every day. Some brokers buy 10 leads a day from us, others buy 100. In the end, they control the flow of business.

That makes staffing and costs more predictable. Brokers don’t have to scramble to “staff up” because an advertising campaign brought in far more customers than predicted; or worse, eat the costs of being overstaffed based on rosy predictions.

Of course, as insurance rapidly moves online and aggregator sites continue to grow, some brokers view us as competitors to their business. That’s just not the case. We need brokers to be successful in order for our business to succeed.

We don’t envision any future where we’re not working alongside brokers in Canada. We can’t succeed if they don’t succeed.

The full experience of LowestRates.ca doesn’t happen without brokers. We need brokers to provide expertise and peace of mind to anyone looking to buy insurance products on our site — and peace of mind usually comes from getting on the phone with a broker, asking questions and having a human presence to guide the person through the process of getting insurance.

In the past five years, we’ve seen an 8,022% increase in leads processed, the majority of which were in auto insurance. We expect this trend to accelerate as the pandemic continues to bring new customers online that would not have previously considered our site.

The success of aggregator sites doesn’t have to come at the expense of brokers. In fact, we view it as a symbiotic relationship. We can’t succeed without brokers succeeding. And as we grow, we want to help brokers grow with us.

BY JUSTIN THOUIN, CEO, LowestRates.ca