2024 Executive Outlook | Robin Joshua, Echelon Insurance

Robin Joshua, president, Echelon Insurance

Heading into 2024, we can anticipate an increasingly conservative market for commercial property insurance, driven largely by high inflation rates alongside an increased frequency of natural disasters. In 2022, natural disasters cost the insurance industry $3.1 billion in losses, and we’ve seen this trend continue in 2023 with wildfires, flooding, windstorms and more. A recent study found extreme weather affected 60% of Canadian businesses.

As a result, niche, underserved industries perceived as high-risk will face additional challenges in finding the coverage they need. This will drive an increased need for sophisticated and data-driven risk modelling, individualized underwriting, and proactive loss prevention.

Increased claims due to natural disasters, paired with inflation-driven rising repair costs, will make it more difficult to insure risks to their value going forward. Insurance providers will need to refine and enhance their risk modelling to combat this, and brokers will need to focus on loss prevention advice to balance risk and bring coverage solutions to their commercial clients.

Individualized underwriting and analyzing each risk on its own merits will be key to navigating current marketplace challenges. A cookie-cutter approach often leveraged by standard commercial insurers will prove to be less effective as the market continues to harden in the coming year.

Greater focus on education around proactive risk mitigation is imperative. This should be a joint effort between the insurer and the broker to help businesses take the necessary steps to prepare and limit losses in the event of a natural disaster or other type of loss. Numerous resources and technologies are available to help prevent or minimize loss in the event of a natural disaster, including the expertise of insurers’ in-house loss prevention teams. It’s our responsibility to ensure customers are leveraging these resources and maximizing their risk-mitigation efforts.