Designing insurance for the real advisor
IN Partnership with
BMO Insurance’s Rav Bharania and Nicole Kennedy on rebuilding platforms around how advisors actually work, why governance accelerates innovation, and what the next few years look like for carriers and advisors
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Real life, Nicole Kennedy points out, comes with real constraints. In the context of insurance, an advisor sitting across from a client is juggling more than the product discussion in front of them. “Advisors are navigating complexity such as client uncertainty, regulatory requirements, and time pressure,” she explains, “and all those things are happening at the same time.”
Any carrier serious about supporting that advisor, she says, has to start by not just acknowledging but also understanding the constraints that advisors are facing and the system under which they’re operating today. “Then, design experiences that ease those pressures instead of adding to them.”
As part of BMO Financial Group since 2009, BMO Insurance carries forward a legacy that began in 1817. The BMO Insurance purpose is simple: we evolve insurance in business and in life. For us, evolution is not about chasing trends; it’s about staying aligned with the people and businesses we serve, anticipating their needs, adapting to their realities, and improving every step of the way. At BMO Insurance, we design insurance for real life.
“We don’t try to design from a distance. We are focused on ensuring we spend time with advisors, closely enough to understand where things break down in the real flow of their day”
Rav Bharania,
BMO Insurance
Published June 15, 2026
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“Carriers that delay investment may find it increasingly challenging to remain relevant in the coming years”
Nicole Kennedy,
BMO Insurance
That premise is the spine of how BMO Insurance is approaching its modernization work. Kennedy leads the advisory business, focusing on building solutions for advisors by translating their day to day challenges into actionable requirements that guide the team’s work.
Working alongside her is Rav Bharania, chief, digital transformation, who owns the modernization agenda and the company’s expanding use of AI. Together they describe a renewed purpose of evolving insurance in business and in life. What comes through quickly is that this is not a technology program but an operating discipline.
Any carrier serious about supporting advisors has to design from those constraints, not work around them after the fact.
Meeting a bar that has already moved Advisor expectations, Kennedy says, have shifted materially. The benchmark is no longer set by other insurers. It is set by the digital experiences advisors have everywhere else in their lives − the ones that are seamless, intuitive, responsive, and quick. Tolerance for processes that feel outdated or avoidable has thinned out. “There’s just a different bar now,” she says, “and insurers have to rise to meet it.”
The harder admission underneath is structural. For years, insurers built their workflows around their own internal needs and asked advisors to adapt. BMO Insurance’s intent is to flip that around and design for how advisors actually work, not how the carrier prefers to operate.
“We don’t try to design from a distance,” Bharania says. “We are focused on ensuring we spend time with advisors, closely enough to understand where things break down in the real flow of their day. Once we see that clearly, the question stops being what should we build and becomes what friction are we removing next.”
The shift shows up most visibly in how the company thinks about platform modernization. The era of quick fixes onto existing infrastructure, Kennedy notes, is over. The current approach is rebuilding from the ground up, rather than patching what already exists. Layering fixes onto old legacy systems, she adds, “doesn’t actually modernize anything at the end of the day.”
Bharania points to speed as the most tangible outcome. Historically, identifying a bottleneck in new business, developing a fix, testing it, and deploying it could take months. Today, the focus is on platforms that are configurable enough to address those issues while they still matter. “If you can’t respond while advisors are feeling the pain,” he says, “you’re already too late.”
That responsiveness is what allows the business to scale, and it is what advisors actually feel. Modernization, Kennedy says, is no longer a technology project but a strategic one. “Carriers that delay investment may find it increasingly challenging to remain relevant in the coming years,” she notes.
How AI earns its keep The same logic carries into how BMO Insurance thinks about AI. Bharania is clear about AI’s role. It’s not there to replace advisors. The value of the advisor is judgment, context, and trust, elements technology doesn’t replicate. AI earns its place by removing friction, clarifying complexity, and helping advisors speak with confidence when it matters most: in front of the client.
Advisors typically sell BMO Insurance’s products alongside the products of other carriers. If a carrier’s tools make a complex product easier to understand, easier to explain, and easier to submit, the advisor will reach for that carrier first. Confidence, in other words, is a distribution strategy.
The expertise remains human, while the technology helps bridge distance and deliver answers more quickly. BMO Insurance’s Rovr AI is designed to do exactly that for advisors. “These are sophisticated products with nuanced underwriting and eligibility criteria,” Bharania says. “Without the right support, the moment breaks, an advisor has to pause, follow up later, or guess.” Rovr AI is designed to keep that moment intact. It gives advisors clear, reliable answers while they’re sitting with the client, reducing delay, uncertainty, and rework.
“Our job is to make it feel simple, even when the work behind it isn’t,” Bharania says. “Modernization succeeds when complexity disappears from the advisor’s view.” The downstream effect
matters just as much. Higher-quality submissions at intake mean fewer back-end inquiries and less rework returning to the advisor later.
Bharania points to straight through processing as the next unlock. Intake, underwriting, issuance, and digital delivery have traditionally stretched across days or weeks. “We’re working toward a flow where that can happen almost in real time,” he says, “with strong rules guiding decisions and clear thresholds that bring a human in when judgment is needed.”
How trust is actually built None of this works without trust, and Kennedy is careful about how that word gets used. Carriers earn the trust of advisors by consistently delivering outcomes that match expectations. The advisor walks away feeling that the tool did what it said it would do, the answer was right, and the need was met.
This is where governance enters the picture, and where the standard framing tends to mislead. In regulated industries, governance is often seen as a brake on innovation. In practice, it’s what makes speed possible. BMO Insurance has a more progressive approach: governance sits inside the innovation cycle from the start, defining the sandbox, the data parameters, and the target audience before any capability ships.
As Kennedy puts it, strong governance should not be seen as putting on the brakes; it makes acceleration possible, in a controlled and safe way. Advisor confidence in a tool is built by understanding what sits behind it, and governance is what makes that understanding credible. And no matter how advanced the tools become, accountability stays with people.
Looking forward Kennedy’s read on the next few years centres on cadence. Carriers, she says, are increasingly being judged on how quickly they sense a change in the market or in client behaviour and adjust to it. That puts a premium on two things working in parallel: quick wins an advisor can feel in the near term, and the longer-term foundational work that keeps those wins coming. One without the other is not a strategy.
Her first piece of advice to advisors is about where to spend their time and energy. Let technology handle the parts of the job that do not require expert judgement, which frees up time to deepen client relationships, share expertise, and focus on the decisions that require a human touch.
The second piece is about the carrier relationship itself. The advisors who will get the most out of the next phase are the ones who treat the carrier as a partner they are actively shaping, not a vendor they are waiting on.
“Be a demanding user of technology,” Kennedy says. “When you communicate with your carriers, give them feedback, because the advisor experience is so essential.”
Bharania closes on what has fundamentally changed. There was a time, he notes, when raising an issue felt useless, fixes took years, and advisors adjusted their expectations accordingly. That gap is collapsing. Platforms are more flexible, feedback loops are shorter, and action can follow quickly. “The industry doesn’t have the luxury of slow learning anymore,” he says. “The carriers that are listening and responding are the ones shaping what comes next.”
Disclaimer: This article is sponsored content and is provided for informational purposes only. The views expressed in this article are those of the individuals quoted as of the publication date and are subject to change without notice. Information contained in this article is general in nature and should not be construed as legal, tax, professional, underwriting or other advice. References to advisors are general in nature and subject to applicable licensing and regulatory requirements, which may vary by jurisdiction. Rovr AI is an automated system powered by Microsoft Azure AI and is intended to provide access to BMO Insurance underwriting documentation, product information, and advisor resources. Do not use any client personal information in any queries. The results are for reference purposes only and are not a substitute for specific advice. They should be used as a starting point, and all information should be verified through the linked sources. Please consult the appropriate policy contract for details on the terms, conditions, benefits, guarantees, exclusions, and limitations. The actual policy issued governs. Insurer: BMO Life Assurance Company