BMO chief executive Darryl White told an industry audience last month that predictive AI modelling now allows the bank’s insurance arm to deliver underwriting decisions in as little as 10 seconds, compared with an industry standard turnaround of at least 28 business days.
White’s comment referenced SmartDecision, an underwriting platform that BMO Insurance launched in July. The figure he cited was actually a rounded-down version of what the company disclosed at the time of launch, when BMO Insurance said the platform could return decisions in as little as 14 seconds on eligible applications worth up to $5 million, spanning term life, universal life and whole life products. Qualifying applicants can bypass the tele-interview and medical evidence steps typically required in traditional underwriting. The full electronic application itself takes an average of 20 minutes to complete, and any application that comes back rated or declined is still passed along to a human underwriter for review.
Katarina Nikolic, BMO Insurance’s vice-president and chief corporate underwriter, has said the company’s confidence in offering instant decisions at the $5-million threshold is grounded in its own actual-to-expected mortality ratios and what it calls mortality slippage data — essentially, comparisons between outcomes from accelerated decisions and the outcomes that full underwriting would have produced. The predictive model draws on BMO Insurance’s internal data covering policyholders’ medical history, lifestyle, occupation and financial background, which is built directly into the electronic application alongside the company’s underwriting rules engine.
BMO’s entry into automated underwriting comes well after Manulife, which has roughly an eight-year head start in accelerated underwriting. Even so, the $5-million ceiling on instant decisions and the mortality slippage validation behind it give SmartDecision notable technical weight rather than simply matching an existing competitive baseline.
White’s remarks came at the Scotiabank Financials Summit, an event where Canada’s major bank chief executives shared a series of AI-related claims. Scotiabank’s Scott Thomson said AI tools have saved his bank roughly 24,000 days of work over four and a half months, while TD’s Raymond Chun said AI has cut mortgage pre-processing time from 15 hours down to three minutes.
The push toward AI adoption in financial services is backed by broader data on workforce exposure. A study from Toronto Metropolitan University found that 98% of financial sector workers are highly exposed to AI technologies, compared with 56% across the Canadian workforce as a whole. Separately, the Bank of Canada has estimated that about a third of jobs nationally could see substantial change from AI integration, specifically naming banking, insurance and financial clerks among the roles most exposed.
For the insurance sector, the employment implications may look different than for retail banking. Jefferies analyst John Aiken noted that banks have not reduced headcount despite substantial AI investment so far, though he expects demand for lower-skilled, front-line roles to decline over time. Within underwriting specifically, BMO’s own design — which routes any rated or declined application to a human underwriter — suggests the near-term effect is to compress processing of straightforward, low-risk cases rather than to remove underwriting judgment from the process altogether. Whether that pattern continues as accelerated underwriting programs raise their eligibility limits and risk tolerance remains a more significant question for industry employment than the early rollout numbers suggest on their own.
Tools such as SmartDecision are also expected to reshape the sales process more than the advisor’s core role. Removing a multi-week underwriting wait eliminates a common point where clients drop out of the process, but it also shifts the advisor’s focus away from managing expectations during a long approval period and toward the initial sales conversation. As more insurers extend these tools to cover larger policy amounts, competitive pressure around speed-to-decision is expected to grow as a factor clients weigh alongside price and coverage terms.
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