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Online executive education, designed in Montreal

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Innovation Leader Certificate: Banking & Insurance

About Course

Innovation in banking and insurance runs into legacy systems, regulators and risk committees, and most training ignores it.

The Innovation Leader Certificate: Banking & Insurance gives mid-level professionals a practical method to scope, test, fund and defend an initiative inside a regulated financial institution. Every module is built on real sector cases, from underwriting and claims to account opening and investment committees. You work on a real initiative from your own organization and leave with an innovation file ready to present to a committee. 32 hours, 8 modules, 100% online and self-paced, designed and delivered in Canada by EGI CANADA.

What Will You Learn?

  • Tell apart innovation, transformation and modernization, and fund each one correctly
  • State the cost of inaction in figures a committee will accept
  • Turn customer and front-line feedback into a clear, solution-free problem statement
  • Run idea-generation sessions that produce usable options, and screen them with a weighted grid
  • Design low-cost experiments with a written decision threshold and a risk perimeter compliance can approve
  • Identify when a project creates a model under OSFI Guideline E-23, and what that requires
  • Decide between building, buying and partnering, including exit costs and third-party due diligence
  • Build a staged funding request and defend it in 90 seconds
  • Prepare the handover from pilot to operations before the pilot succeeds
  • Leave with a complete innovation file and a dated 90-day action plan

Course Content

Module 1: Innovation Under Constraint. What the Word Really Means Here
What you will be able to do by the end Classify an initiative by horizon, tell an innovation project apart from a modernization project, name the real constraints weighing on your initiative (at least one of them regulatory), and put a figure on the cost of inaction. By the end of the module, you will have completed the first page of the business file you will build throughout the program.

  • 1. One word, three meanings
  • 2. The three horizons, the realistic version
  • 3. Why things move slowly, and when slowness is right
  • 4. The Canadian regulatory framework as a design input
  • 5. Innovation, transformation, modernization: three different things
  • 6. The deciding question: the cost of inaction
  • Transfer to your context
  • Case study
  • Annotated answer key
  • Workshop: the initiative sheet
  • Self-assessment
  • Key takeaways

Module 2: Start From the Customer, Not the Technology
What you will be able to do by the end Restate your problem from what people actually experience rather than from the solution you had in mind, build an interview guide that does not steer the answers, and spot the customer signals already available in your organization that nobody reads.

Module 3: Generate, Sort, Stop
What you will be able to do by the end Run an idea-generation session that produces workable options rather than a list, apply a weighted screening grid you can defend in front of a committee, and document a decision to drop an idea.

Module 4: Test Small. Experimentation in a Regulated Environment
What you will be able to do by the end Identify the assumption your project depends on, choose the least expensive test that can answer it, define a risk perimeter your compliance team can accept, and write a decision threshold before you launch.

Module 5: Data, Models and AI. Innovating Where Oversight Is Strongest
What you will be able to do by the end Place a data use case on a risk scale, recognize what counts as a model under the regulator's expectations, raise the governance questions before a project is committed, and distinguish what is ready for production from what is not.

Module 6: Working With Others. Partnerships, Ecosystems and Open Data
What you will be able to do by the end Decide between building, buying and partnering with a defensible figure, anticipate what a third-party due diligence review will ask for, and write a partnership note that addresses the four questions that cause these relationships to fail.

Module 7: The Business Case for Uncertainty. Fund, Measure, Decide
What you will be able to do by the end Structure staged funding conditional on learning outcomes, choose indicators that do not push your team toward incremental work, separate quantifiable benefits from those that are not without weakening your case, and defend a request in ninety seconds.

Module 8: Making Innovation Stick. Governance, Culture and the 90-Day Plan
What you will be able to do by the end Recognize the failure mode specific to your institution's organizational model, make a precise request to your manager, prepare the handover of a project to operations before the pilot succeeds, and leave with a dated plan for your file.

Assessment