The coronavirus pandemic has significantly increased plan members’ willingness to seek help for their mental-health concerns and to access video or telephone counselling, said Julie Gaudry, senior director of group insurance for RBC Insurance, during Benefits Canada’s 2020 Mental Health Summit on Nov. 12. An RBC Insurance survey of plan members found two-thirds (67 per cent) […]
Trying to define the perfect portfolio is as complicated as asking what it takes to be healthy — with a number of factors at play and no singular answer. Even modern finance pioneers don’t agree on what the perfect portfolio looks like, noted Stephen Foerster, professor of finance at Western University’s Ivey Business School, when […]
The Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Pension Plan is betting that artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a role in pension administration going forward. “I won’t pretend that we’re Netflix or Tesla in this, but we are [taking] small steps today so we can take advantage of these advances of technology into the […]
The San Bernardino County Employees’ Retirement Association implemented a simple innovation 15 years ago that’s added nearly US$1 billion to the fund’s total value as of Aug. 31, 2020. That innovation is “informed rebalancing,” said Arun Muralidhar, adjunct professor of finance at George Washington University, when speaking at the Canadian Investment Review’s Investment Innovation Conference […]
As far back as the beginning of civilization, centralized ledgers have been the answer to solving trust issues, said Michael Casey, chief content officer at CoinDesk, in a keynote presentation during the Canadian Investment Review’s Investment Innovation Conference in November. The first form of writing ever recorded was a ledger on a Sumerian tablet dating […]
The prospect of a Joe Biden presidency with a Republican-held senate is an ideal outcome for markets, said Charles Myers, founder and chairman of Signum Global Advisors, during the Canadian Investment Review’s Investment Innovation Conference in November. Speaking the morning after the election, Myers said Republicans’ expected continued control of the senate would have “very […]
Internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy is reaching pockets of the population that had never previously accessed mental-health care and achieving clinical improvement for users, said Adam Kelly, chief commercial officer at MindBeacon Group, during Benefits Canada’s 2020 Mental Health Summit. iCBT, which is delivered asynchronously either through guided text conversations with a trained psychologist or social […]
The mental-health impacts of isolation and quarantine are clear, but Canadians may not realize loneliness can also harm their physical health, said Diane McIntosh, psychiatrist and chief neuroscience officer at Telus Health, during Benefits Canada’s 2020 Mental Health Summit on Nov. 12. “There have been correlates that loneliness or isolation . . . is like […]
Two-thirds of employees making short- or long-term disability claims cited their workplace or work-related issues as a cause, but despite this only one in three Canadian employers has a mental-health strategy in place. “Businesses may have several piecemeal strategies but not an overall strategy and the result is that their efforts either amount to nothing […]
Technology and artificial intelligence can play important roles in helping to address mental-health issues, but they also have the potential to greatly exacerbate them, according to Bill Wilkerson, executive chairman at Mental Health International and an advisory board member at EQ Care. Speaking at Benefits Canada’s 2020 Mental Health Summit on Nov. 13, he pointed to studies […]