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This article was published 03/04/2019 (2522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Great-West Life name, in existence since the company started 128 years ago in Winnipeg, will disappear from the retail landscape in a major reorganization announced today.

Great-West Life and subsidiaries London Life and Canada Life are rebranding under the name Canada Life, even though the original company of that name is smallest of the three.

The companies will also be integrating their products and services.

The rebranding will take place over the next year, replacing the Great-West Life name and its skeleton key symbol. “It will be a new logo, look and feel and all that,” said Paul Mahon, president and CEO of the holding company, Great-West Lifeco, that owns the three companies.

“We also like that a single brand will be more broadly known to Canadians instead of some people knowing who Great-West Life is, others London Life, and others Canada Life,” he said.

The Canada Life name was decided upon after extensive planning and market research, including surveying. The company’s buildings in Winnipeg will receive temporary signage until they can be completely rebranded later.

The second part of the announcement, the integration of the companies into a single legal entity, is still subject to approval by federal regulators, policyholders and board members. The federal regulator is the superintendent of financial institutions.

However, the three companies are operating almost as one company already. Great-West Lifeco purchased London Life in 1997 and Canada Life in 2003.

“It’s the work we do in the background to simplify our corporate structure,” Mahon said of the integration.

Mahon promised there would be no job losses as a result.

“This is not at all in any part about trying to get at job reductions. As a matter of fact, this change won’t result in any job reductions,” he said.

The three companies have more than 11,000 employees in Canada. The duplication between the companies has been largely eliminated already. “We brought our administration systems together, and we brought a lot of our finance and accounting systems together, all in the background,” Mahon said.

Efficiencies will be in marketing and the company’s ability to spend less time building duplicate products, Mahon said.

Neither is Winnipeg threatened as the company’s largest employment base. Great-West Life is the city’s largest public company, with 3,300 employees in Winnipeg.

“This doesn’t change in any way our commitment to Winnipeg,” Mahon said. “Winnipeg will continue to be a very, very important part of our operation in Canada.”

The three companies combined serve 13 million customers, or nearly one in three Canadians, and have 23,000 distributors across Canada.

“Our intention is to migrate to a unified product portfolio, first for our individual or retail products throughout this calendar year of 2019, and then for our group products in 2020,” Mahon said.

‘This doesn’t change in any way our commitment to Winnipeg. Winnipeg will continue to be a very, very important part of our operation in Canada’Paul Mahon (above), president and CEO of the holding company, Great-West Lifeco. 

Great-West Life was established in 1891, London Life in 1874, and Canada Life in 1847, two decades before confederation.

Each has developed individual strengths over time that have been and will be further integrated. For example, London Life is known for a strong line of life insurance products, and Canada Life for a very strong brokerage market. Great-West Life has been known for its group insurance plans. It was the first to venture into that market in the early 1900s and today is the largest group health insurer in the country.

“We view this as a play where we can leverage the strengths of the three companies; we can become more efficient, more focused on innovation and faster to market,” he said.

The assets of the newly branded Canada Life total $450 billion, as of Dec. 31, 2018. Last year the companies donated more than $13 million to projects in Canada.

“This is really a transition over a couple of years, but the one thing we want customers to know is all the products and services that are currently in place, all of those important promises we’ve made, none of those change,” Mahon said.

The change is for the Canadian operation only. It doesn’t affect the holding company Great-West Lifeco (TSX symbol: GWO), which owns all three entities. Neither does it include its extensive United States and European businesses.

Great-West Lifeco, second only to Manulife as the largest insurance company in Canada in terms of assets, is owned by Power Corp., a Canadian multinational diversified management and holding company based in Montreal. 

The holding company, Great-West Lifeco, has 31 million customers from all its companies worldwide, 24,000 employees, and more than 240,000 brokers.

Total assets are $1.4 trillion.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca