Through 9,400 employer plan sponsors across Canada
Product colleagues
68
Product management, design, research, bilingual content and accessibility
A broader perspective.
Claims self-service with a person in reach / Co-drafted French and English wordings / Health questions members can answer / Accessibility as a product requirement / Demonstrating fair treatment across provinces
I design group benefits for the member who meets them while unwell, anxious or reading in a second language, not for the person comparing plans at enrolment.
I am chief product officer of Lacmorin Life, a policyholder-owned mutual insurer in Ottawa that provides group health, dental, disability and life benefits to 9,400 Canadian employers and their 412,000 plan members. Most of our sponsors employ fewer than two hundred people and buy through independent benefits advisers. We recorded C$1.38 billion of premium and premium equivalents in 2025. I lead 68 colleagues across product management, service design, research, bilingual content and accessibility, report to our president and present the product plan to our board each year. Pricing, underwriting and claims decisions belong to their own executives; my remit is what members and plan administrators actually meet.
I started in 1998 as a French-speaking claims examiner for a travel insurer, reading emergency medical files from Canadians who had fallen ill in Florida and Arizona. Many were declined under pre-existing condition clauses that the travellers had answered in good faith and misread. Since then I have redesigned travel medical questionnaires, managed individual health and dental plans in Quebec City and, from 2012, worked in group benefits at Lacmorin. The thread through all of it is the distance between what an insurer believes it asked and what a person believed they were answering.
This site describes three decisions from my years as CPO. We put a named case manager's telephone call behind every short-term disability claim submitted online. We wrote the French and English wordings of a small-employer health and dental plan side by side, and launched it eleven weeks late. We rebuilt the health questions members answer when they apply for additional life or disability cover. Each decision cost money, time or a measure a colleague cared about, and each is set out with what I would now change.
A named person behind every online disability claim
Sixteen additional case managers, costing C$1.45 million a year, reduced incomplete short-term disability files at day ten from 44% to 19% and the median time to a decision from 21 days to 13.
Two official languages drafted at once
Co-drafting a new small-employer plan delayed its launch by eleven weeks and cost C$520,000. Legal review found no difference in meaning between the versions, against 37 in the plan it replaced.
Health questions members can answer truthfully
Splitting compound evidence-of-insurability questions cut applications held for clarification from 38% to 15%, while the approval rate moved by a single percentage point.
Current focus
I am redesigning how a long-term disability claimant learns about the change from an own-occupation to an any-occupation definition, including the letters, calls and app notices before it, so that nobody first hears of it in a letter ending their payments.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one independent board seat, alongside my volunteer directorship, at a member-owned insurer outside group benefits, a credit union, a health-services organisation or a disability-services provider. I could give up to twenty-four days a year once Lacmorin's board has consented and possible conflicts with our plan sponsors and advisers have been reviewed.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
In the boardroom
Vallonée Adult Literacy NetworkVolunteer director · 2019–present
Formation
Bachelor of Arts (Honours), French–English translationAubrevale University · 1998
Graduate certificate in plain-language communicationCorvenne College · 2006
Amara paid for the case-manager calls from her own budget for a year, before anyone could show they worked. When incomplete files fell, she gave my team the credit and kept the cost argument for herself.
Solenne AchambaultVice-president, disability claims, Lacmorin LifeThe full record ↗
Contact
I would consider one independent board seat, alongside my volunteer directorship, at a member-owned insurer outside group benefits, a credit union, a health-services organisation or a disability-services provider. I could give up to twenty-four days a year once Lacmorin's board has consented and possible conflicts with our plan sponsors and advisers have been reviewed.
