iA Financial Group Brand Guidelines: Industrial Alliance, 1892, 1905 & the Elephant

A Montreal benefit society and a Quebec City life insurer.

iA Financial Group, iA Groupe financier in French and formerly known as Industrial Alliance (Industrielle Alliance), dates itself to 1892 and has its head office in Quebec City. That date belongs to the older of two companies that later merged. French Wikipedia says L’Alliance nationale was founded as a mutual benefit society on 11 December 1892, at a meeting of 74 people in the basement of the Saint-Joseph church in Montreal, with the businessman Hormidas Laporte named its president. A thesis listed by IRÉC, the Quebec economic research institute, describes it as one of the few benefit societies of its time to reach a measure of financial success, alongside the Société des Artisans canadiens-français.

The same thesis says the Alliance nationale gave up its benefit-society charter in 1948 to become a mutual company, after large changes between its founding and the Second World War that included more centralised management. The thesis treats the society as a case study of how mutual aid in Quebec changed during the first half of the twentieth century. French Wikipedia adds that it took the name Alliance Mutuelle-Vie in 1958.

The second company, L’Industrielle, was founded in Quebec City on 15 May 1905, French Wikipedia says, by Bernard Leonard and a group of businessmen. The City of Quebec’s heritage register describes Leonard, who was born in Enniskillen in Ireland, as a glass maker and decorator who made the stained-glass windows of the basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré between 1912 and 1918, served as a city councillor and helped set up the insurer in 1904 and 1905. The Leonard family ran L’Industrielle until 1950, according to French Wikipedia, and from the 1970s it added car and home insurance to life cover. In January 1987 the two companies merged as L’Industrielle-Alliance, Compagnie d’Assurance sur la Vie.

From mutual to a listed group.

The listed company took shape in 2000. iA Financial Group says its shares have traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since 3 February 2000, and La Presse, in a profile published in September 2025, tied that listing to the company’s demutualisation, its conversion from a mutual insurer into a company owned by shareholders. Since then, the paper reported, the group had made about 70 acquisitions in 25 years, in Canadian insurance, in wealth management and in the United States.

The American side began in earnest in 2010, La Presse wrote, with the purchase of American Amicable, a life insurer in Waco, Texas; the group now also sells extended warranties distributed through car dealers there. Wealth management has grown through deals at home: on 31 October 2025 iA Financial Corporation announced that it had completed its purchase of RF Capital Group, which operates under the Richardson Wealth brand.

The structure was simplified in 2019. The company’s website says the holding company iA Financial Corporation Inc. has been in place since 1 January 2019; it trades in Toronto under the symbol IAG, while preferred shares of the operating insurer, Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc., trade under IAF, English and French Wikipedia say. The group lists individual and group insurance, individual wealth management, group savings and retirement, dealer services and car and home insurance, through subsidiaries including iA Auto et habitation, Prysm and the fund manager iA Clarington.

The company calls itself one of the largest insurance and wealth management groups in Canada. La Presse put its place more narrowly in 2025, describing it as the smallest of Canada’s listed life insurers by market value, behind Manulife, Great-West and Sun Life. On its own website the group also says that in 2010 it adopted the principles of Lean management, the Toyota method, as part of a drive for continuous improvement.

How Canadian insurers present themselves.

Canadian insurers work in two official languages, and their names often show it. Canada Life is Canada Vie in French, and Great-West Life had a French name of its own before it was folded into Canada Life in 2020. Companies based in Quebec, such as Desjardins, lead with French, while national insurers run their websites, forms and statements in both languages, so a wordmark has to read well in English and in French.

Colour does much of the work. Across the sector, wordmarks and symbols come in reds, blues, yellows and greens: Manulife and Desjardins both use green, Sun Life’s mark is built around a sun, and the weather beacon on Canada Life’s Toronto building signals in green, orange and white. Maple leaves and northern landscapes are a familiar visual shorthand for the country, and they sit easily beside those colours.

The names themselves have shifted. Sun Life and Mutual Life were mutual companies, owned by their policyholders, until they demutualised in 1999 and 2000 and became listed companies, Mutual Life under the new name Clarica; later mergers folded older names such as Great-West Life, London Life and Clarica into bigger brands. Much of the selling still happens through advisor networks and employers, and the websites are organised by need: pages on life, health, home, auto and group cover, and on investment and retirement products.

Insurers also publish a great deal about themselves, from annual reports to sustainability reports and public accountability statements, and those documents carry the brand as much as any advertisement. This guide sets out what can be checked about each insurer: who founded it, who owns it, how its name has changed, and what rests only on the company’s own word.

A two-letter name and a centenary symbol.

The short form is now the brand. The company that La Presse describes as formerly known as Industrielle Alliance leads its materials with iA, a lower-case i and a capital A, followed by “Financial Group” in English and “Groupe financier” in French. The company says the name iA Financial Group reflects the scope of the group and the variety of its products, and that it is much more than an insurance company. Its brand signature is “Get ahead” in English and “Prendre les devants” in French, which it says expresses a bold, proactive spirit focused on the future.

Its symbol is older than the short name. iA says it adopted the elephant in 1992, the year of its centenary, to stand for wisdom gained through experience, attentiveness, a sense of responsibility, family values, strength and stability. Its chief executive turned the same animal round in 2025, telling La Presse that 25 years earlier people might have imagined an insurance company as slow-moving, like a big elephant, but that the company was agile; the paper titled its profile “the elephant turned agile”, in its original French.

For a design guide, iA Financial Group shows how a long institutional name can be cut down to two letters while a single animal symbol carries the history. Compare Desjardins, another Quebec financial group, and Beneva, another Quebec insurer in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy, an elephant grey and a soft gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep iA Financial Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.