Risk and resilience

Building trust and delivering on our Purpose through a robust approach.

Proactively identifying, measuring, managing, monitoring and reporting risk is key to making our business more resilient. A risk management mindset helps us meet our financial commitments to Clients. At the same time, it protects our competitiveness and long-term resilience.

Our approach

Our Risk Management Framework sets out the components of our risk programs and explains how they operate together in conducting business activities. The framework, our corporate strategy, and our business objectives are aligned and embedded across every business segment. Our Annual Report provides more details on our approach to risk management.

Sun Life's Risk Management Framework promotes the application of a consistent approach to managing risk exposures across Sun Life. Exposures include but aren’t limited to environmental (including climate impacts) and social risks.

Our Internal Audit team provides a quarterly opinion on the effectiveness of internal controls, risk management and governance processes to the Audit Committee of the Board. Additionally, our risk management process is included in an annual external audit of Sun Life's internal control over financial reporting.

Our Risk Appetite Policy is integral to our approach. It outlines specific constraints that define the type and amount of risk that Sun Life is willing to accept.

The purpose of the risk management process is to identify, measure, manage, monitor, and report on the key and emerging risks impacting or likely to impact the Business Plan (12-18 months time horizon), Strategic Plan (3 to 5-year time horizon) and for certain relevant risks, the Long Term time horizon (beyond 5 years, up to and beyond the year 2050).  On a quarterly and annual basis, a formal risk identification process is initiated and our risk exposure is reviewed using a variety of methods and measures. To learn more, refer to our Risk Management Framework.

We have built a strong corporate culture reflected in our core values of being caring, authentic, bold, inspiring and impactful. These values set the tone and guide our high business standards, integrity and ethical behaviour, respect, and commitment to doing the right thing for our Clients. A key premise of our culture management framework is that everyone has an important role to play in preserving and enhancing our culture, which includes managing risks at Sun Life.

Risk management as a subset of our overall culture focuses on:

  • values
  • tone from the top
  • transparency
  • effective challenge
  • effective communication
  • incentives
  • accountability
  • organizational resilience

We encourage discussions on risk decisions and urge employees to speak up about potential concerns. We have a structured employee feedback process that helps improve risk management practices. Our Ethics Hotline empowers employees to play an active role in reporting all known and suspected breaches of our Code of Conduct.

Everyone at Sun Life is responsible for recognizing and managing risks when making business decisions. Our mandatory training program helps employees spot, minimize and report risks that could affect our business.

This training covers topics such as:

  • Code of Conduct
  • Safety and Emergency Preparedness
  • Business Continuity
  • Financial Crime Awareness
  • Data Privacy and Information Security
  • Workplace Awareness and Respect

Our three lines of defence model outlines specific duties related to risks, oversight and reporting.

Risk identification and measurement

One of the ways we assess risk and the effectiveness of our internal controls is through stress testing. Stress testing is a risk management technique that includes integrated scenario testing, reverse scenario testing and key assumption sensitivity testing. These exercises help us analyze Sun Life’s resilience under extreme circumstances, which may include a severe economic shock, health pandemic, cyber breach, extreme weather event and more. Our business continuity plans consider various situations under which a disruption may occur. Every year, we update our business continuity plans to integrate evolving risks and our scenario analysis findings.

Effective climate risk management starts with identifying and assessing the climate-related risks that are most relevant to Sun Life’s business. To strengthen this approach, we have been implementing climate risk assessments in several risk areas across the enterprise as part of the integration of climate risk into enterprise risk management processes. These assessments evaluate Sun Life’s exposure to both physical and transition risks across short-, medium-, and long-term time horizons.

Refer to Climate Resilience and our 2025 OSFI B-15 Climate Risk Management Report for more details.

2025 Highlights

  • 99% of employees completed risk-related training1.
  • Further built our capabilities to identify, measure, manage, monitor and report evolving sustainability risks.

Learn more about our progress and performance in our 2025 Sustainability Report.

Commitments and memberships

United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative – Principles for Sustainable Insurance

More resources

Explore more sustainability topics

Sustainability topics

We’re focused on taking action on 16 priority sustainability topics that our stakeholders identify as most important and that we believe have the biggest impact on our business.

Back to sustainability topics

Sustainable investing

Sustainable investing can help us deliver on our Purpose of helping Clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives, while strengthening the resilience of our general account portfolio.

Next topic: Sustainable investing

1 Training completion rates are as at January 15 since annual training assigned during the reporting year may be completed after year-end.