About
I sell insurance the way I’d want it sold to me.
I’m a commercial lines account executive at Western Financial Group in Bedford. I write restaurants, contractors, fleets and commercial property across the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Western Financial Group, Bedford Division · 1746 Bedford Highway
Three countries, one office on the Bedford Highway
I was born in Bangladesh and went to school in India before moving to Canada for university. I did a Bachelor of Commerce in finance at Dalhousie, here in Halifax, and stayed.
Starting over in a new country three times teaches you a few things that turn out to be useful in this job. You learn to read a room quickly. You learn to ask the question everyone else is politely avoiding. And you get good at explaining a complicated thing in plain words, because for a long time plain words were all you had. That covers most of what a commercial broker actually does.
The finance background pulls its weight too. When I look at an account I’m not only matching a business to a policy form. I’m working out what a bad loss would do to the balance sheet, and which coverage has to hold because of it.
Licensing and training
Applied Commercial Solutions
ACS B230 through the Insurance Institute of Canada, passed at the highest grade available. The course is about complex commercial risk and how to build coverage around it.
Definity Elevation+
Graduate of the Atlantic Elevation+ program. Most of the value was time in a room with underwriters, learning where their appetite really sits.
B.Comm, Finance
Dalhousie University. Before insurance I worked in budget analysis and financial reporting, which is where the balance-sheet habit comes from.
I also go to the Atlantic Symposium each year and keep close contact with the underwriting teams at my markets. That sounds like a detail. It isn’t. Knowing who will actually look at a difficult risk, and how they want it presented, is most of the difference between a placement and a decline.
The interviews
Outside the day job I interview business owners around Halifax and put the conversations online. I ask what it cost to open, what nearly ended it, and what they’d do differently. Almost everything I understand about running a business in this province came from those conversations rather than from a policy wording.
Tell me what you run.
Your industry, roughly what you do, and when the policy renews.
Rayanur Rahman 