If you are ready to unleash your potential, it's time to start your career with Manulife/John Hancock. Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services group that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. We operate primarily as John Hancock in the United States and Manulife elsewhere. We provide financial advice, insurance, as well as wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups and institutions. At the end of 2018, we had more than 34,000 employees, over 82,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving almost 28 million customers.

WATERLOO, ON, June 19, 2018 /CNW/ - Manulife today asserted its plans to further strengthen its leadership position in the Canadian insurance market. A key component of this plan is the launch of its Manulife Par participating whole life insurance product and an artificial intelligence algorithm that will transform the underwriting process. The whole life insurance market represents over half of all insurance sales in Canada*. By launching Manulife Par, satisfying advisor and client demand, and relying on Manulife's well-established network of advisors, the Company is confident it will gain market share. "Manulife has a proud 130-year history of innovation and leadership in insurance," said Alex Lucas, Head of Individual Insurance, Manulife.

Manulife Financial Corp. said Thursday it will cut about 700 jobs as it becomes the latest financial services company to streamline and digitize customer service operations. The cuts will largely target customer service positions that are no longer necessary as the company automates customer transactions, said Manulife Canada CEO Michael Doughty. "Our industry, including us, are still doing too many things the old way: processing paperwork, accepting mail, answering telephone calls on information requests that clients should be able to access on their own." "This is a pretty bold step in transforming ourselves to become a digital, customer-centric organization," said Doughty. The job cuts will come through voluntary exit programs and natural attrition over the next 18 months, the financial services company said.

Manulife plans to focus personal client services on the 20 per cent of services dealing with major life events such as a death in the family, while automating the 80 per cent of client interactions that cover submitting claims, asking questions and other routine tasks. The shift is needed as customer expectations have changed dramatically in recent years and the financial services industry needs to catch up, Doughty said. "Client expectations have changed so dramatically, and they no longer compare us to other financial services institutions, they compare us to the best service that they're getting from the best companies across any industry." Manulife said that along with cuts to customer service jobs, the company will look to recruit and train digital talent to adapt to new technologies. The company is already using artificial intelligence in its life insurance operations to analyze millions of data points with algorithms to speed up the underwriting process, Doughty said.

It's just before 9 a.m. on a sunny morning in late July 2015, and a dozen police officers are gathered near the Healthy Fit chiropractic and pain management clinic in north Toronto. They have a search warrant, and they're about to seize evidence in what will eventually become one of the largest health insurance benefits fraud cases in the country. Together, they take the elevator to the fifth floor of a nondescript six-storey office building just off Highway 401 and enter through the glass door of unit 502. Detective Constable Kevin Williams is among the first to go in, followed by the rest of the officers, some in full uniform, others in plain clothes. He approaches the desk and explains their plans to the receptionist, who is quiet, if unhelpful. Williams is looking for something specific. He searches the clinic's office and an examining room, but doesn't find much. Then he decides to check the closet. Opening the door, Williams traces his eyes over shelves, boxes and bags full of orthotics, orthopedic shoes and braces for treating sore backs, knees and arms. "I think there was also one or two of those tension machines, like the Dr-Ho's kind of machine," Williams recalls, referring to the electrical muscle and pain therapy device made famous by infomercials.

Insurance and technology are inextricably linked. The risks we seek to manage have always been connected to the tools we use. But, as Accenture's 2017 Technology Vision for Insurance points out, this relationship recently reached an inflection point. In the past, humans generally changed themselves to make use of new technologies--we learned to drive, we learned to type, we learned to code. But now modern technologies are sophisticated enough to adapt themselves to us.

Canadian financial services firm Manulife Financial Corp. is banking on artificial intelligence being a significant asset for its next project. The company's Toronto-based Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is collaborating with Silicon Valley-based Nervana Systems on a new AI-based application that could help portfolio managers analyze the high volume of online information, financial news, emails, and documents they receive when researching investments. "If you think about all of the things that a portfolio manager or researcher might look at when making decisions… a lot of it is social data – emails, industry reports, stock and economic data," Ace Moghimi, Manulife's Boston-based head of innovation, North America, told ITBusiness.ca. "The system we're putting in place essentially uses natural language processing, supported by an underlying deep learning neural network, to go through vast stores of unstructured data, allowing researchers to analyze the information much faster than they would be able to on their own," he said. The project's genesis lies within the LOFT division itself, which researches ways that Manulife can incorporate emerging technology and unconventional business processes into its products and services – and its Toronto-based data scientists were particularly taken with AI and deep learning, Moghimi said.

Manulife's Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is undergoing efforts to accelerate its adoption of new technologies. In April, the Canadian insurer's U.S. unit John Hancock took a deep dive into blockchain--collaborating with startups ConsenSys and BlockApps. More recently, Manulife began exploring artificial intelligence and deep learning in its innovation labs through partnerships with Nervana Systems and indico data solutions. Once complete, the platform will serve as a means for research analysts to analyze and decipher natural language from public sources to make smarter investment decisions, the company said. Jesse Bean, LOFT's chief experience officer and VP, head of innovation, global solutions delivery spoke with INN about how the insurer is exploring deep learning and how the technology fits into Manulife's innovation strategy.

Financial services group Manulife is collaborating with Indico Data Solutions, a Boston-based company that specializes in «Deep Learning». Manulife's Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is collaborating with Indico Data Solutions, a Boston-based company that specializes in «Deep Learning». This collaboration is part of a strategic effort to leverage best-in-class products and accelerate business adoption of innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and virtual reality. Manulife's LOFT will use indico's platform to develop an AI and Deep Learning tool to analyze unstructured financial data. Using Deep Learning, Manulife will be able to analyze data from news articles, analyst reports and other similar sources and present recommendations that could help investment researchers and portfolio managers make more informed decisions faster than ever before.

Boston-based indico data solutions, which specializes in deep learning and artificial intelligence, announced it will be partnering with Manulife - known to us in the States as John Hancock - and its Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT). With indico's platform, LOFT will build an AI-enabled solution that will help guide investors. The tool will use artificial intelligence and deep learning to analyze unstructured financial data - in text and image form - from sources like news articles and analyst reports. From this analysis, it will then make recommendations for portfolio managers to make more informed investment decisions - and hopefully, in less time than they do now. "Indico will help us accelerate our use of Deep Learning to improve the decision-making capabilities of our analysts, portfolio managers and researchers," Greg Framke, chief information officer at Manulife, said in a statement.