The invitation came through a roommate. Imen Zitouni was working in digital marketing when her best friend, employed by an insurance company, began bringing questions home. The industry was starting to work out what the internet meant for selling policies. Zitouni had answers. Eventually, the roommate's boss called with a practical proposal: instead of answering insurance questions at night, why not come answer them at work?
She took the call. More than two decades later, the subject still holds her attention.
The story is a tidy accident, but the career that followed has been built on deliberate choices. Zitouni moved from explaining early digital tools to Canadian businesses, including the basic mechanics of a computer mouse, to designing online insurance experiences at TD and AXA. At belairdirect and Intact, she moved deeper into the work: faster quotes, fewer questions, mobile service, and eventually an innovation lab. In 2024, she became Intact Financial Corporation's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, responsible for marketing across its Canadian companies and for the Intact brand internationally.
Her operating question has stayed remarkably consistent: how do you make a complicated institution easier for a person to use?
The internet before it looked inevitable
Zitouni graduated from HEC Montréal in marketing in 1999. At Cossette Interactive, she entered a commercial internet that still needed explanation. The work was partly persuasion and partly instruction. Businesses had to be shown what the web could do before they could be sold a strategy for it.
That background mattered when insurance came calling. Insurance is full of invisible machinery: risk models, regulation, underwriting and claims operations sit behind a customer who usually wants a simple answer. The early web did not remove that complexity. It gave customers a new place to encounter it.
At TD Insurance, beginning in the early 2000s, and then at AXA Canada from 2008, Zitouni worked on e-insurance, e-commerce, online quotation and sales tools. She joined Intact in 2011 to steer belairdirect's digital strategy. A 2013 relaunch of belairdirect.com emphasized responsive design, simpler content and ways to connect by phone, online or in person. The language sounds ordinary now. At the time, it represented a real shift in who controlled the journey.
The customer could arrive on a phone, move between channels and expect the insurer to keep up. A quote form was becoming a product in its own right. Zitouni's teams learned to watch what people did, shorten the path and revise it again.
Seven slides, one protected room
In 2015, Zitouni took seven PowerPoint slides to Intact chief executive Charles Brindamour. The pitch became Intact Lab. The initial team was small. Public accounts differ on whether it began with seven people or reached fifteen around launch, but the design was clear: assemble digital talent, give it room to experiment, and connect the experiments to customer problems.
That last part matters. An innovation unit can become corporate theatre, busy with demonstrations that never reach the main business. Zitouni's lab worked on the everyday points where insurance becomes tangible. Quick Quote reduced the burden of getting a price. Mobile photo capture let a user scan a driver's licence rather than type every field. The Intact app put documents, claims functions and other self-service tools into a pocket.
The mobile quoting work used the equivalent of three per cent of the research and development department's annual budget, Zitouni said in 2016. The point was less about doing everything cheaply than proving that a contained bet could produce evidence. Quote volume climbed 280 per cent after the mobile process launched, on the same budget. The application was updated more than thirty times by that autumn.
In a later interview, Zitouni described a 30-day rule for rapid prototyping and made a sharper point about the familiar phrase “fail fast.” Failure only creates momentum if the organization also decides fast. A prototype waiting months for an answer is simply a smaller version of bureaucracy.
The lab earned room to grow. By 2023, Intact said it had expanded from fifteen employees at launch to more than 300 professionals in digital, design and technology. By 2025, the broader organization was described as more than a thousand specialists across data, AI and customer experience, reflecting how the original model spread. Its mobile application won an OCTAS jury's choice award in 2018, and Intact described it as the country's most downloaded property and casualty insurance app.
A marketer with product scars
The path from chief digital officer to chief marketing officer could look like a change of subject. Zitouni frames it as a connection. Technology supplies capability and speed. Storytelling supplies meaning. Products and brands make promises to the same customer, and each can expose the other when the promise is thin.
Her record gives that idea weight. She has worked close to form fields and conversion rates, where vague language creates visible abandonment. She has watched small product choices create large operational consequences. As CMO, the medium is broader, but the discipline is familiar: understand behavior, respect context, and decide what deserves to scale.
That became particularly visible as Intact brought its name to Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe. A global identity needs consistency, but a joke, phrase or cue can land differently from one market to another. Zitouni has described the rebrand as a company-wide effort, with local freedom inside a recognizable system. The red brackets around the Intact name provide a visual frame. The local teams supply fluency.
The work also expands what counts as an insurance brand. Intact acquired the home-maintenance platform Jiffy in 2024, linking prevention and repair more closely to customer service. Its sponsorship portfolio moved further into Canadian sport, including founding partnerships with the Professional Women's Hockey League and the Northern Super League, a national partnership with the Canadian Olympic Committee, and long-running support for speed skating.
Zitouni calls investment in women's professional sport both a business decision and a contribution to a more equitable future. The logic joins reach with participation: support visible athletes, help underserved young people access games and programs, and attach the brand to institutions that are still being built. In August 2026, Intact and the Canadian Olympic Committee announced a $1 million, three-year program funding Olympian-led community sport projects.
Put up your hand
There is another thread in Zitouni's public work: who gets to enter the room. In a 2017 essay, she wrote about being the only woman on her information technology leadership team until 2014. She urged women to dream and change things, and has since spoken about mentorship and the influence of Intact executive Anne Fortin.
Her short version of the advice is “put up your hand.” During a 2024 visit to RSA in Dublin, she used the phrase while recounting how her own skills had been refreshed and reinvented at Intact. She also brought the chief executive a Montreal Canadiens jersey, customized with his name and Maurice Richard's number 9. It was a compact demonstration of her style: practical counsel, a local story and a personal object that makes the encounter stick.
HEC Montréal graduate; begins in digital marketing at Cossette Interactive.
Builds online insurance and e-commerce experience at TD Insurance and AXA Canada.
Leads belairdirect's digital strategy and web business after joining Intact.
Founds and scales Intact Lab; becomes senior vice president and chief digital officer.
Leads Canadian marketing and the Intact brand internationally as CMO.
Recognition followed the work. Quebec's Association du marketing relationnel named her its Marketing Personality of the Year in 2016. She received the OCTAS recognition in 2018. The Globe and Mail's Report on Business selected her as one of Canada's Best Executives in 2023, citing her leadership and impact on digital innovation. Since 2022, she has also served on the board of ADM Aéroports de Montréal and its Audit and Risk Management Committee.
Awards provide punctuation, but the more revealing measure is the distance between her first and current problems. At the beginning, businesses needed help understanding a mouse and a browser. Today, a global insurer is deciding which uses of artificial intelligence might genuinely transform marketing rather than merely speed up email. Zitouni has argued for searching for the larger idea, the use that changes the service or relationship, instead of settling for small productivity gains.
The bridge is the job
Zitouni's career is often described through technology, marketing and insurance. A fourth word connects them: translation. She translates a new tool into something a customer can use. She translates a protected experiment into an operating capability. She translates a Canadian corporate identity for teams in other countries without asking those teams to lose their accents.
Translation is less glamorous than invention. It requires knowing both sides well enough to preserve what matters. It also explains why a marketing graduate could build a digital lab and why a chief digital officer could become a brand steward. The work is the bridge.
The roommate's boss who called all those years ago had noticed that Zitouni was already doing it: taking unfamiliar digital ideas and making them useful inside insurance. The tools grew more powerful, the teams grew larger and the geography widened. The essential task stayed intact.