Sponsor Spotlight: Manulife Bank Climbs on Board
Originally printed in Sport Quarterly, June 2009

Jane Strong didn’t quite know what she was getting herself into the first time she stepped into a dragon boat in 2007.

“It was a brand-new experience. I’d never been in a dragon boat before,” says Strong, Manulife Bank’s assistant vice-president of product and marketing services. “But it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of enthusiasm. It was just a great day.”

Manulife Bank, a subsidiary of Manulife Financial, has been a gold sponsor of the Manulife Dragon Boat Festival for the past three years. Manulife Financial is the event’s title sponsor.

The festival’s proceeds go toward the Nova Scotia Amateur Sport Fund. To date, the Dragon Boat Festival has raised more than $1.2 million for the sport fund, which has led directly to more than 900 grants for amateur athletes, coaches, officials and sporting organizations around the province.

This year’s event takes place on Saturday, July 11 on Lake Banook in Dartmouth. Manulife and Manulife Bank will both enter boats in the Festival, which involves teams of 20 paddlers and a drummer facing off in a series of races.

Strong says encouraging and supporting local sport is one of Manulife’s key values. “Manulife likes to be involved with different community events, in support of the health of our communities and also to support health care in general,” she says.

Strong, who is based out of the main branch in Waterloo, Ontario, has been involved with the Manulife Hike and Bike in her community for the past 10 years in support of the St. Mary’s Regional Cardiac Care Centre in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Manulife Bank recently expanded in Halifax, establishing a second national headquarters in the Manulife Building on Joseph Howe Drive. “It has been our main growth area for the Bank,” Strong says. “It really operates as a second centre for us. We have 50 people located there and we’re looking at growing that.”

The company’s main offering is Manulife One, a financial product that brings all a customer’s banking needs—mortgage, line of credit, chequing and savings accounts, etc.— into one account. Interest is calculated daily so every dollar of income leads to less debt and less interest to pay down.

“All your funds are put into one account to make the most efficient sense of your dollars,” says Strong. The company has 170 financial consultants across the country. “It’s growing quite dramatically.”