Sun Life Financial plugging into the startup industry

Sun Life Financial is tapping into the expertise of Silicon Valley through a partnership with a startup platform that incubated PayPal.

The Plug and Play Tech Centre celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, and Fred Tavan, global head of reinsurance and insurance risk and research at Sun Life, sees the platform as one of the original players in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. According to Tavan, one of the ways Plug and Play finds startups is by scanning and taking applications from around the world. Chosen groups from this poll enroll in 12-week programs that run throughout the year. For each of those sessions, Plug and Play starts with 4,000 companies before filtering them down to the 25 or 30 that will go through the course, with the expectation that they’ll be pitching and raising seed money when they finish.

Having partnered with the centre last week, Tavan isn’t yet sure what Sun Life’s involvement will look like beyond the basics. “We definitely want to end up doing some coaching and mentoring,” says Tavan. “But at the same time, the primary reason we’re there is really to monitor what’s going on with the ecosystem and really listen in on all of these innovative ideas.”

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As a corporate partner, Sun Life will be able to send its executives and other leaders to provide direction to the startup groups throughout the year. It will also have the chance to invest in or purchase ideas of interest. Among Sun Life’s areas of interest are the insurance category, as well as media, mobile, health, the Internet of things, financial technology and security.

“It’s going to be a matter of connecting the dots between the ideas we’re hearing from Plug and Play and then coming back and connecting them to the ideas we’re having across Sun Life,” says Tavan.

Sun Life Financial expressed interest in the partnership after Tavan attended one of Plug and Play’s biannual expos earlier this year where startups had the chance to pitch to a variety of stakeholders. “This is an amazing opportunity to tap into the ecosystem there,” says Tavan.

“Because there’s so [many] venture capitalist companies out in Silicon Valley, most startups globally end up going there to raise money. It’s become a great hub for everyone to gather and find out what’s going on globally.”

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