Sun Life Financial Inc.

Sun Life Financial Inc. is a leading financial services organization known primarily as a life insurance company. Founded in Montreal, Quebec as Sun Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1865 by Mathew Hamilton Gault , an Irish immigrant who settled in Montreal in 1842, its operations actually began in 1871. By the 1880s it had expanded to Central and South America, the West Indies, Japan, China, India, North Africa and other international markets. Over the next five decades the company grew and prospered, surviving the difficulties of World War I and the large drain on its finances through policy claims arising from the large number of deaths caused by the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918.

Capping a Montreal construction boom that began in the 1920s, the company completed construction of its new 26-storey headquarters on Montreal's Dominion Square in 1933. Although the new head office of the Royal Bank of Canada at 360 rue St. Jacques in Montreal was taller by several floors, the Sun Life Building was at the time the largest building in terms of square footage anywhere in the British Empire.

Following the outbreak of World War II in Europe, during the summer of 1940 the Government of the United Kingdom organized highly secret shipments of bonds and stocks to Montreal that were stored in the vaults at Sun Life. The securities were used to help finance the War. At the time, Gustave Biéler, a Swiss-born Canadian who was fluent in the French and English languages, was working as Chief Translator at Sun Life's head office. He joined the Canadian Army and was shipped overseas where, as part of the Special Operations Executive, he worked inside occupied France until being captured by the Gestapo and executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria.

During the post-war period, the company's successful business strategies made it one of Montreal's largest white-collar employers, one of the top corporations in Canada, as well as a global player in the life insurance field. For the first half of the 20th century, the city of Montreal had been the economic hub of Canada but the advent of political and terrorist movements demanding Quebec independence from Canada cast a pallor of uncertainty over the business community. Terrorist bombings of businesses owned by English-speaking Canadians resulted in a flight of capital from Quebec and an economic stagnation began to set in. Like many other companies located in places where uncertainty is a factor, Sun Life and numerous other corporations began concentrating their expansion elsewhere. The October Crisis of 1970 severely exacerbated Quebec's uncertain business climate and in 1973, Sun Life opened its American subsidiary's new headquarters in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts at the outskirts of Boston. In 1977, the newly elected soverignist Quebec government passed the Charter of the French Language, a law that required all companies in Quebec to operate in the French language. The Board of Directors of Sun Life announced that the new language law made it impossible for the company to conduct its global operations from Montreal. As such, in 1978 the company scaled down the Montreal facilities to serve as a branch service bureau while shifting its head office to temporary rented space in Toronto, Ontario. Immediately following the move, the company acquired a property at University Avenue and King Street in downtown Toronto and constructed a major ultra-modern office complex called Sun Life Center.

In 2000, Sun Life listed its shares on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges. It is one of Standard and Poor's Global 1200 companies. In 2002, Sun Life merged with Clarica Life Insurance Company of Waterloo, Ontario. Today, the company manages assets in excess of $350 billion and has more than 13,000 people on its payroll plus thousands of independent agents worldwide.