In insurance, the most consequential moments often begin with the least inspiring objects: a form, a checkbox, a waiting period. Michael Stocks has spent much of his career staring at that mismatch. The decision matters enormously. The experience around it can feel administrative. His answer at Empire Life has been consistent: remove the needless friction, explain the remaining choices and keep a human close enough to help.
Stocks is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Retail at the Canadian insurer. The title suggests campaigns and positioning. His public work reaches much further into the plumbing. He has talked about electronic data feeds, digital contracts, application turnaround, advisor workflows, product design and the psychology of people who begin their research online. Marketing, in this version of the job, is partly the discipline of making the operation keep the promise.
That promise has evolved in public over more than a decade. In 2013, when Stocks was Empire Life's vice president of insurance marketing, the company launched a consumer campaign meant to make life insurance easier to discuss. The website did not simply publish information. It offered a route to find an advisor. Education and distribution were designed as one journey.
The unglamorous work of speed
Two years later, the work became almost comically specific. Empire Life changed its electronic application process so information could flow into a managing general agency's back-office system without someone receiving a PDF and typing the details again. Stocks explained the benefit in plain language: less re-keying, faster processing and faster payment for advisors.
There is a useful philosophy hiding inside that small integration. Transformation does not need to begin with a dramatic new channel. It can begin with noticing that a person has to copy the same field twice. Remove enough of those repetitions and the whole system starts to feel different.
Fast & Full became the clearest expression of that approach. The digital application was built for insurance and later investments, with features designed for advisors and clients rather than a paper form squeezed onto a screen. By 2017, Empire Life reported that 70 percent of Fast & Full applications had selected electronic contract delivery during its early rollout. Stocks called digital documents more convenient and faster, another step toward making coverage simple to obtain.
“Consumers today want to be able to do everything online, and that includes receiving documents digitally.”Michael Stocks, 2017
The platform mattered even more when in-person routines broke down in 2020. Stocks wrote that Empire Life entered that period with digital applications already in place, including co-browsing, screen sharing and video chat. These were not ornamental features. They allowed an advisor and client to work through the same complicated decision from different rooms.
The metrics became sharper. A 2022 Empire Life circular said that more than 80 percent of a defined set of automatically approved juvenile applications were issued within one day when the digital questionnaire, electronic contract delivery and signature conditions were met. In 2025, Stocks said about 62 percent of the company's applications were processed within five days or less, with some automatically approved and issued within 24 hours.
The funnel ends in a conversation
Digitization can tempt a company to imagine the ideal customer as a solitary clicker who glides from search result to checkout. Stocks' account of insurance buying is more observant. People research online. They check a price. Then, often, the size and duration of the decision become apparent. They want to speak with somebody.
In 2024, he described Empire Life's consumer site as a lead-generation path that could connect shoppers with independent financial advisors. Roughly 250 advisors across Canada participated in the referral program. The direct purchase option remained for customers who did not want a conversation, but Stocks said it represented a very small percentage of sales.
That is a more interesting result than a perfect checkout funnel. The website is not failing when a visitor asks for help. It has brought the person to the point where the right questions become visible. The conversion is not merely a sale. It is a handoff from private research to informed advice.
This hybrid behaviour is especially important to how Stocks talks about younger customers. He has cited research showing that many millennials look for information online yet purchase in person through an insurance agent or another financial professional. Their digital fluency does not eliminate advice. It changes the standard for advice.
“Millennials tend to want to really understand how things work and ask the question ‘why’ more than others do.”Michael Stocks, 2025
The word “why” creates work for both the marketer and the advisor. A recommendation needs a reason. A product page has to prepare a useful conversation instead of drowning the visitor in terminology. The advisor needs tools that clarify rather than obscure. The customer's desire for explanation becomes a design requirement.
A marketer with an operator's eye
Stocks studied at Western University's Ivey business school from 1986 to 1990. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a strategic marketing executive and consumer expert, and recommendations from colleagues add texture. One calls him an organized strategic thinker who plans and executes thoroughly. Another points to his mix of consumer-packaged-goods and financial-services experience, quantitative fluency and willingness to explore digital tactics in detail.
That combination helps explain why his quotations often land on operational particulars. In conversations about participating life insurance, he has discussed asset mix and the ability to adjust across market conditions. In product interviews, he has moved from the needs of middle-income Canadians to pricing, coverage and distribution. In application updates, he has focused on the time between submission and issue. The customer story and the system story are never far apart.
The same pattern appeared when Empire Life added a tool for digital compliance letters in 2024. Advisors could customize content blocks, preview a letter and download or print it. The feature sounds mundane until one remembers what compliance represents to a customer: the written reason for a consequential recommendation. Making the task easier for an advisor can make the explanation more consistent for the person receiving it.
Stocks also speaks in the language of experiments. In a 2025 post after a panel on future-proofing advisory practices, he listed practical uses for generative AI: draft a client email, summarize a meeting, brainstorm, produce multilingual video and prepare social content. His enthusiasm came with an operator's instinct to turn a broad technology into a list of jobs someone could try now.
When the brand catches up to the work
In January 2025, Empire Life launched new vision and mission statements as part of a wider brand refresh. Stocks thanked the Brand Leadership Group and Brand Working Group, a small public gesture that located the launch in collective effort. The new mission promised expertise and intelligent solutions to help Canadians navigate life with confidence.
A mission like that risks floating above the daily experience. Here, the earlier work gives it weight. Confidence can mean a customer understanding why a recommendation fits. It can mean an advisor seeing the same screen as a client. It can mean a form arriving without re-keying, a contract appearing electronically or a compliance letter being easier to prepare. The sentence works because a decade of details points in the same direction.
By mid-2026, Stocks was publicly recruiting two product-management leaders, one focused on insurance products and new markets and another on insurance product marketing. He asked for strategic thinkers who cared about execution, autonomy and results. The job post felt consistent with the career around it: product and marketing placed beside each other, ideas tested by what they make possible.
Insurance will never become a casual purchase, and it probably should not. The stakes resist the breezy language of ordinary ecommerce. Stocks' work suggests a more credible ambition. Keep the seriousness. Lose the repetition. Put the explanation where the question appears. Use software to shorten the wait, then use a person to help with judgment.
The lesson travels beyond insurance. In any complicated category, the best digital experience may not remove the expert. It may give the expert better context and give the customer a clearer reason to call. A good system does not pretend the decision is easy. It makes the next step obvious.