Canadian Underwriter

Top Brokers on Top Issues


December 27, 2012   by Regan Reid


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On the final night of the Insurance Brokers Association of Ontario (IBAO) annual conven- tion, Ontario brokers gather to celebrate the brokers, brokerages and affiliates who are doing exceptional work in the industry and community. The IBAO Awards of Excellence are presented to the winners at the Awards Gala on Friday, October 19, 2012 at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto.

The awards are in their fifth year and Maria Roscetti, conference and publications co-ordinator at IBAO, says with each year, the awards are gaining more and more prestige. For the broker, winning an IBAO Award of Excellence can mean garnering industry, as well as community, recognition. “There’s a trickle effect after [winning],” says Roscetti. “[The winners are] recognized within their own communities that they won this prestigious award,” she says. “It is elevating the profile of brokers and brokerages and what they’re doing in the community.”

To be nominated for an award, a broker or staff member need only fill out a 200-word synopsis of why they think a particular broker, brokerage or affiliate deserves the award. The IBAO then culls the list and compiles the finalists for each category: Young Broker of the Year, Broker of the Year,

Brokerage of the Year (more than 10 brokers), Brokerage of the Year (less than 10 brokers), and Affiliate Achievement. For the second consecutive year, Canadian Insurance Top Broker has assisted the IBAO with the judging process by interviewing the top five nominees in each category, elimi- nating the need for nominees to write about themselves and making the judging process more objective. Roscetti says that this new process has drastically increased the number of participating nominees. In fact, this year they received the most ever nominations.

Once again this year, Canadian Insurance Top Broker presents exclusive profiles of the finalists, but this year we decided to approach our coverage in a new way. For each category, we spoke to the nominees and asked them about how they are confronting a particular industry challenge or management issue: effective use of social media for the Young Broker of the Year candidates; business development for Broker of the Year; community involvement for the Affili- ate Achievement; and staffing and succession planning for the Brokerage of the Year candidates in both Award catego- ries (less than 10 brokers and more than 10 brokers). Their answers on these subjects reveal how they made it into this elite group deserving of IBAO recognition.

For Brokerage of the Year  click here.

For Young Broker of the Year click here.

For Broker of the Year click here.

For Affiliate of the Year click here.

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Copyright 2012 Rogers Publishing Ltd. This article first appeared in the October 2012 edition of Canadian Insurance Top Broker magazine.

This story was originally published by Canadian Insurance Top Broker.


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