Lawrie Savage & Associates Inc. was formed in 1997 to assist financial supervisors in emerging market countries to meet international standards in supervision and to otherwise increase the efficiency and effectiveness of supervision in their countries. Since that time the firm has successfully carried out projects in more than 30 emerging market countries and has gained international recognition for its work in this area. We have projects for FIRST, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations and USAID in countries such as Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bahamas, Barbados, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Montenegro, Oman, Panama, Peru, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Suriname, Tanzania, Trinidad, the United Arab Emirates and Zambia.

In 2005 LS&A was appointed to the FIRST Initiative Panel of pre-approved consulting firms, one of only a handful of consulting firms world-wide to have been selected in this specialized field of consulting.

LS&A is a "boutique" type firm in that we have a relatively small number (18 consultants) of highly qualified individuals who have extensive experience as financial supervisors and in financial supervisory consulting. We believe that we can provide the highest level of assistance to our clients by using personnel who have spent their careers working at senior levels in these areas, as opposed to having a larger number of more generally qualified consultants.

In all cases, the firm’s project work is supervised by Lawrie Savage, founder of LS&A. Lawrie commenced his career in 1966 with what is now the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Canada (OSFI). In a period of only 11 years Lawrie had become the senior Canadian regulator for general insurance companies. In 1985 he left OSFI to move directly into the insurance business, in 1987 becoming CEO of Westbury Canadian Life and Vice Chair of Elite Insurance Company, a related general insurer. At Westbury Canadian Lawrie oversaw a turnaround in profitability with the development and introduction of a number of new products and the implementation of new marketing and distribution strategies. Westbury Canadian and Elite were sold by the shareholder in 1990 and Lawrie joined Coopers & Lybrand Consulting in Toronto (subsequently PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting and now IBM Business Consulting) as Director of Insurance Consulting Services. His work with C&L was interrupted in 1991 when the Province of Ontario requested him to become the first Superintendent of the newly formed Ontario Insurance Commission. This was arranged on a secondment basis for a 2 year period, subsequently extended to 4 years. In Canada the provincial governments are responsible for marketplace supervision, so his tenure as Ontario Superintendent provided Lawrie with additional experience in oversight of the insurance marketplace. (OSFI’s responsibilities are only with regard to solvency supervision.) In Ontario Lawrie was instrumental in initiating and seeing through to adoption by the government, a package of new laws known as “life agent reform”, which helped to make the Ontario marketplace more competitive from the perspective of insurance consumers. Lawrie returned to C&L in 1995. With his extensive experience in insurance supervision it soon became apparent that emerging market countries needed assistance in modernizing and re-engineering their insurance supervisory frameworks and training their insurance supervisory personnel. This specialized niche market was not so easy to serve from the platform of a broadly based consulting organization such as C&L and Lawrie therefore formed specialist consulting firm LS&A in 1997.

Lawrie has been a director of a life insurance company, a number of property/casualty insurers and a Canadian trust company (non-bank deposit taking institution). He is a Program Leader and member of the Advisory Board for the Toronto International Centre for Leadership in Financial Supervision, a director of the Property and Casualty Insurance Compensation Corporation (the general insurance equivalent of a deposit insurance corporation for banks) and also a frequent advisor to the Policy Development Group at the Insurance Bureau of Canada (the trade association for general insurers in Canada). He is a member of the Advisory Board for the Risk Studies Centre at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. Lawrie has a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Calgary and an MBA from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

The majority of LS&A consultants are, like Lawrie, former Canadian financial supervisors with a keen interest in supervision and extensive experience in providing assistance in supervisory upgrading to emerging market countries. LS&A consultants typically bring more than 25 years of insurance supervisory and consulting experience to their projects. Please see the "Our Team" section for more information about our consulting associates.

While members of the firm have a vast amount of experience to offer to client countries, they do not merely bring traditional approaches. In fact our work in emerging market countries has established our reputation for applying leading edge techniques in risk based supervision, corporate governance and reliance oriented approaches, in ways that are especially adapted to the emerging market context where resources are more limited than in developed countries. In addition, rather than merely bringing "the Canadian way" to the countries in which we work, we make a concerted effort to work with the supervisors in the country concerned, drawing on our reservoir of knowledge and experience to assist with solutions which are entirely responsive to local issues and needs.

Our objective is always to maximize knowledge transfer to the local supervisory staff and the more time we are able to work together with them, the greater will be the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer process.