One moment in Denis Garand’s work captures his philosophy in action: he helped transform a health microinsurance program to ensure people weren’t left waiting months for support. The goal, he explains, was simple – to process and pay claims faster, fast enough to compete with informal lenders who can show up at a family’s door as soon as hardship strikes.
In inclusive insurance, speed isn’t a nice-to-have. It can be the difference between recovery and collapse.
Over time, experiences like this led Garand to repeatedly revisit assumptions he once took for granted, relearning what insurance needs to do when the context, constraints and people it serves are fundamentally different.
That kind of thinking – practical, human, grounded in consequences – runs through Garand’s career. Across more than four decades in insurance, including extensive experience in microinsurance and international development, he has worked across markets where the rules, the data and even basic financial protections can look radically different.
Systems, society and learning by doing
Before he ever had an actuarial title, Denis Garand gravitated toward work that mixed real-world systems with human outcomes through social justice organizations, early jobs and the kind of curiosity that comes from trying many things.
Early on, Garand worked as a retail clerk at a convenience store, where the manager opened the books and encouraged him to participate in business decisions. The experience offered a practical view of how organizations operate.
His involvement in forming an insurance company in Western Canada further deepened his interest in insurance, particularly its role as an operating system rather than a standalone product.
Along the way, he joined the Canadian Air Force Reserve (402 “City of Winnipeg” Squadron), which gave him an opportunity to serve as a peacekeeper in Egypt, time away that helped him refocus his studies and shift toward business administration with an actuarial major.
Throughout this period and beyond, his motivation has stayed consistent:
“I’ve always had a strong instinct for social justice. I’ve always been interested in how systems affect people, particularly those who tend to be left out, and I didn’t choose this profession for the money. I chose it because it gave me a way to contribute and help people.”
Canada as a training lab and learning from the ground up
When Denis Garand describes his early actuarial career, he doesn’t frame it as a straight climb toward bigger roles. He frames it as a deep education built on responsibility and range.
At Co-operators, he was the sole group actuary in the group insurance area. That meant he couldn’t be a narrow specialist; he had to learn “every part of group insurance,” from administration to claims to how real-world operations connect to valuation and financial statements. It worked well as a learning lab, demonstrating how easily technical assumptions can drift away from operational reality, as well as how important it is to understand both.
He credits mentorship, rare at the time, as a meaningful accelerant. Just as influential, though, was working without layers of people to check his thinking. With no one else there to do it, he learned to test his work in several different ways. That habit, building internal verification and independent judgment, later proved essential in settings where data is sparse and actuarial capacity is limited or still emerging.
And then there’s the moment where his professional instincts collided with human reality: he describes how group insurance practices at the time often denied death benefits unless a newborn survived a set period. After seeing the impact of stillbirth on someone close to him, he pushed for a change:
“From a financial point of view, yes, it costs a bit more. But we’re talking about fractions of pennies, compared to the pain families were going through.”
In the end, that kind of practical compassion didn’t just change one policy. It helped set an industry direction.
Learning by “becoming a child”
If his Canadian experience taught him how insurance systems work, his international work taught him something harder: how fragile those systems can be, and how quickly assumptions collapse outside your home context.
Denis traces his first international assignments to opportunities through Co-operators, including working with co-operatives in Barbados and a struggling co-operative in the Philippines. For him, these weren’t side projects. They were perspective shifts, “lab experiments” that revealed how different legal contexts and market structures reshape what is possible versus what is necessary.
When asked how he navigates cultural and institutional differences, his answer is both simple and disarming: learn the culture, work closely with local colleagues, and “become a child” who learns through watching and hearing dialogue. This approach starts by listening and staying close to how people on the ground make decisions.
Microinsurance: “a different game”
Microinsurance – often called inclusive insurance today – became the arena where Denis Garand says he found his deepest professional meaning, describing it as “the thing I’m most happy about” in his actuarial career.
At its core, he describes microinsurance as serving the lower end of the market, people who are often underserved or ignored by traditional insurance, not only internationally but also in developed markets. He draws a line back to the roots of “industrial life insurance,” when insurers built mechanisms that worked for workers with limited means. Over time, the industry drifts toward higher-income markets, leaving a gap that shows up today in places like the gig economy and in communities that struggle to access an agent or understand where coverage can be found.
Denis notes that if insurance is meant to prevent families from being plunged into poverty by one event, then ignoring low-income segments is not only a market failure, it’s a social one. He states that inclusive insurance isn’t limited to “low average income” countries and that underserved segments exist everywhere.
When the tables don’t tell the story
One of Garand’s most provocative lessons challenges actuarial instincts: in inclusive insurance, mortality and morbidity assumptions are often not the dominant drivers of results.
In microinsurance, long‑standing practices such as evidence requirements, heavy underwriting and restrictive exclusions were frequently stripped away, especially in health coverage. The focus shifted from perfect data toward more practical questions:
- Do people trust the provider?
- Is the product sold effectively?
- Does the administration work well?
- Are claims paid quickly and fairly?
- Are providers taking advantage of the plan?
He gives a striking example: two health programs in India offered the same benefits, but one had claims experience seven times the other. The sole difference came from how one program was better marketed, communicated and integrated with health facilities. The example points to a broader issue: insurance outcomes are often operational and behavioral before they’re actuarial.
And it leads directly to his service-first stance on claims. Over more than a decade working with VimoSEWA, he helped improve record-keeping and transform a six-month claims cycle into something much closer to immediate relief.
Because in that context, timing is protection.
From community programs to national models
Garand’s career highlights are often less about a single product and more about systems changing shape.
The health insurance model built with VimoSEWA later became a reference point for broader public policy, shaping how India approached extending insurance to people living below the poverty line. Similar work with mutual health insurance organizations, supported through the International Labour Organization across several countries, went on to inform national health insurance approaches in places such as Ghana and Rwanda.
He also points to experience in Bangladesh where tightly managed primary care models – supported by clinics, lab testing and disciplined prescribing – could deliver basic care for a family at extremely low annual cost (around US$10 per year for a family of four in that specific context and time). The detail is startling, less as a “magic number” than as a demonstration of what becomes possible when delivery, incentives and local realities receive the same deliberate attention as pricing.
In disaster contexts, he highlights another theme: insurance as a more organized alternative to the patchwork systems often used to distribute post-catastrophe relief. He points to microinsurance responses to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, as well as index-based disaster coverage, where payouts can be delivered rapidly to help families recover while damage is still unfolding.
Rethinking what’s “normal” for Canada
One of Denis Garand’s most pointed messages is aimed closer to home: Canada has more to learn from global insurance innovation than we often acknowledge.
“To reach people, you have to use very different distribution systems. A lot of our regulations make that difficult. In other countries, regulators have allowed things like mobile payments and electronic signatures, and that changes what’s possible.”
He points to Kenya’s M-Pesa, a leading mobile-money system, as an example of how mobile platforms can dramatically transform efficiency and reach for everyday users. The point, he emphasizes, is learning from others: “We have a lot of good things, but we also have a lot of things we can improve and change.”
His international experience often leads back to a simple idea. What looks normal in one market is often the result of habit, legacy systems and rules that can be revisited, especially when the goal is to reach people who are currently left out.
Volunteering and stretching the profession’s purpose
Alongside his international work, Denis Garand has remained active as a CIA volunteer to gain different perspectives and further sharpen his thinking.
Denis is described as a versatile contributor to the CIA: from grading exams to involvement with the International Affairs Council to supporting research initiatives. He highlights that being on the task force that produced the CIA’s 2021 policy statement Pharmacare: Is There a Pill for That? was among the most interesting projects he worked on, as it allowed him to bring global health-care financing perspectives back to Canadian policy questions. As a volunteer, he was also able to work on the project oversight group of the research paper COVID-19: Setting the stage for a basic minimum income plan, where he supported researchers examining fiscal actions that could improve conditions for working-age adults living below the poverty line.
He encourages others who are thinking of volunteering to start with one thing that genuinely interests you. You’ll likely discover it becomes both a contribution and a learning engine!
Learn the business, not just the math
When Denis Garand talks about the future, he comes back to breadth.
“Actuaries need a stronger business background and a clearer understanding of why insurance rules exist – so they can recognize when these rules are helpful, and when they become barriers in new contexts.”
Rotation programs can be helpful but many professionals remain narrowly focused. He encourages new and future actuaries to build a broad worldview, because it’s that breadth that helps actuaries serve the public in meaningful ways, especially as markets and risks evolve.
And, perhaps most importantly, he challenges actuaries to take the profession’s public-service mandate seriously: “If whole segments of society are left out, then the work isn’t finished.”
Denis Garand, FCIA, is a Canadian actuarial consultant with decades of experience in insurance and international development. His work focuses on microinsurance and inclusive insurance, spanning more than 35 countries, and includes advising insurers, governments and regulators on health insurance, disability coverage and inclusive market design.
This article reflects the opinion of the contributor and does not represent an official statement of the CIA.