2026 Canadian Lenders Summit

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How creditor insurance is evolving alongside digital lending, changing borrower needs and new distribution models.

Creditor insurance was built around a relatively familiar lending journey: a borrower applies, speaks with a lender and considers protection alongside a loan. That journey is changing.

Join Nigel Branker, CEO of Securian Canada and Gary Schwartz, President and CEO of the Canadian Lenders Association for a timely conversation about digital lending, changing borrower needs and a growing protection gap.

Informed by Securian Canada’s work with populations often underserved by traditional financial protection models, Nigel will explore how new technology, operating models and stronger lender-insurer partnerships can respond to Canadians’ evolving needs, simplify the customer experience and make financial protection more accessible.

How AI is reshaping modelling, decisioning and borrower engagement.

AI is moving deeper into the lending lifecycle, from risk models and credit decisioning to customer advisory and operational workflows. This panel will explore where AI is delivering real value today, what comes next, and how lenders should think about governance, accuracy and human oversight. AI is entering lending through several doors at once: credit models, document review, customer service, fraud detection and the workflows connecting them. The opportunity is larger than making an existing process faster. Lenders may be able to reconsider which information they use, when they intervene and how consistently they make decisions. But a model that performs well in isolation can still produce poor outcomes when placed inside a live lending operation. This panel examines where AI has earned a place in the stack, how to measure its value and who remains accountable when a decision goes wrong.

How financial platforms are expanding products, distribution and access to credit.

The lines between banking, investing and lending are increasingly disappearing. This panel looks at how financial platforms are expanding into new forms of credit, using existing customer relationships and data to launch products faster, reach new borrowers and compete across traditional category lines.

How data and AI are changing the way lenders understand borrowers, assess risk and make credit decisions.

The next generation of lending will draw on richer data, more sophisticated models and increasingly intelligent decisioning. This keynote explores what that shift means for underwriting, risk management and the future of credit. A credit score compresses a borrower’s history into a useful signal, but it cannot tell the whole story of a person’s capacity or willingness to repay. New data and analytical methods promise a more current and detailed view, particularly when conventional files are thin or economic conditions change. The challenge is to distinguish information that improves a decision from information that merely makes a model more complicated. This keynote explores how lenders can test new signals, monitor models as borrower behaviour shifts and use greater predictive power without sacrificing explainability or fairness.

How do you find through uncertain times. How do tariffs, interest rates and consumer sentiment reshape the cost of capital and the appetite to lend. Lenders are making growth decisions without a settled view of what comes next. Tariff uncertainty complicates the economic outlook, interest-rate expectations influence funding strategies, and consumer confidence shapes demand for credit. Capital providers and lenders may read those signals differently. Bringing together perspectives from consumer lending and mortgage finance, this panel examines how that uncertainty translates into decisions about funding, pricing and credit appetite. How are lenders weighing warehouse facilities, securitization and private credit? What are investors demanding, what does borrower performance reveal, and when is preserving flexibility more valuable than pursuing growth?

Testing and measuring better strategies across the lending lifecycle. Lending teams have more data and more ways to optimize than ever, but knowing what actually drives better outcomes requires experimentation. A new acquisition channel can bring in more customers while worsening credit quality. A tighter approval rule can lower losses while turning away profitable borrowers. A collections campaign can improve short-term payments without changing eventual recoveries. These trade-offs are difficult to see without disciplined testing. This panel examines how lenders design experiments across acquisition, underwriting, pricing, line management and servicing; choose the right measures; and separate a strategy’s effect from changes in the economy or the borrower mix.

Building compliance into lending products, decisions and operations from day one.

Compliance is increasingly becoming part of how lending products are designed and operated, not simply a review at the end. This session explores how lenders can embed regulatory requirements into products, credit decisioning and workflows — from AI governance and model risk to AML, disclosures, complaints and emerging regulation. Lending products now combine automated decisions, multiple data sources, digital onboarding and third-party services. Each can create a compliance obligation, but reviewing the finished product after launch is a poor way to resolve a design problem. This session considers how lenders can build controls into the decision and the customer journey itself: what data may be used, how a model is tested, what a borrower is told and how a decision can be challenged. It also asks how to keep those controls effective as products, rules and models change.

How real-time data, embedded distribution and new credit products are changing when and where lending happens.

Credit is moving closer to the moment of need. This panel explores how real-time data, embedded lending and new distribution models are compressing the lending journey — and what that means for product design, underwriting, customer experience and the role of financial institutions. Borrowers increasingly encounter financing while buying a car, paying a supplier or completing another commercial task. That proximity can make credit more useful and reduce the effort of applying. It can also make the offer harder to compare and leave less time to understand its cost. This panel examines what embedded distribution changes for the lender: which transaction data helps assess risk, who owns the customer relationship, how products should be designed around a specific purchase and what happens after the transaction when the borrower needs service or support.

Why fraud, identity and onboarding now define lender economics.

Customer acquisition does not matter if the borrower is fake, manipulated or too risky to serve. This panel explores how lenders are responding to synthetic identity, income and document fraud, evolving verification tools, and the growing legal and regulatory expectations around identity, onboarding and fraud prevention. Faster onboarding has improved access to credit, but it has also compressed the time lenders have to establish who is applying and whether the application is genuine. Fraud losses are only part of the cost. Excessive checks can drive away legitimate borrowers, while weak checks can distort acquisition results and contaminate a portfolio before losses appear. This panel explores how lenders assess identity, documents and behaviour together, respond to synthetic and coordinated fraud, and decide where added friction is justified. It will consider how evidence can be shared and acted on within legal and regulatory limits.

What rising household stress means for portfolios — and how lenders can intervene earlier.

How can lenders spot financial stress before it becomes delinquency? This panel examines the economic, housing and portfolio signals pointing to borrower pressure, and how lenders can use those insights to manage risk and support customers earlier. Household pressure does not arrive uniformly. Higher housing costs, changing employment, debt obligations and expiring loan terms can affect borrowers at different times and in different ways. Aggregate delinquency data often becomes clear only after households have already made difficult adjustments. This panel asks which housing, credit and portfolio signals offer an earlier view; how lenders can distinguish temporary strain from a deeper affordability problem; and what interventions are useful before an account enters collections. The aim is to connect a better forecast with a better decision for the borrower.

How data, embedded finance and new underwriting models are changing small-business lending.

Small businesses remain difficult to underwrite and expensive to serve using traditional lending models. Traditional business lending asks for documents, histories and collateral that may poorly reflect how a smaller firm earns and spends money today. More current transaction and cash-flow data could help lenders see the business more clearly and respond when capital is needed. Yet a faster approval is useful only if the lender understands seasonality, customer concentration, repayment capacity and the cost of acquiring and serving the account. This panel examines which new signals improve underwriting, how financing can fit into business workflows and whether newer products are closing the credit gap or simply reaching firms lenders already understand.

How lenders are using automation, segmentation and hardship strategies to improve recoveries.

Once borrowers fall behind, lenders are rethinking how they approach collections. This panel explores digital and AI-driven collections, customer segmentation, hardship strategies, agency partnerships and the balance between recoveries, compliance and customer experience. Delinquency is an outcome, not a diagnosis. A missed payment may reflect temporary disruption, lasting financial strain, a servicing problem or an unwillingness to pay. Treating every account alike can waste resources and make recovery harder. This panel looks at how lenders segment accounts, choose the right time and channel for contact, offer workable hardship arrangements and decide when to escalate. It will also examine where automation improves consistency and where an experienced person is needed to understand the borrower’s circumstances.