ENCONs Environmental program notes steady growth as it reaches the five-year mark

OTTAWA, ON – June 2, 2014 –  ENCON Group Inc., a leading managing general agent in Canada, announced today that June 2014 marks the five-year anniversary of the company’s Environmental Insurance program. Since the program launched in 2009, the company has sold thousands of policies to a broad range of clients and the number of submissions received annually has nearly doubled.

“Companies are becoming increasingly aware of their environmental exposures, as well as the need to protect themselves,” said Brian Cane, Vice-President of Construction and Environmental Insurance. “We’re seeing a definite up-tick in the number of owners, risk managers, lending institutions and government agencies at all levels who are requesting environmental coverage for the businesses they manage or deal with.”

One of the factors contributing to the growth in Environmental insurance is the fact that most Commercial General Liability (CGL) insurance policies include limited or no coverage for environmental losses. There are more and more cases where general liability policies containing the typical pollution liability exclusion are not responding to claims against insureds relating to allegations of damages caused by pollution. 

“We’ve worked hard to develop a series of products that will protect clients when they need it the most,” explained Cane. “This is why our Environmental products guard against many of the common exclusions found in other environmental and CGL policies. For example, some pollution products contain exclusions for asbestos and mould/fungi, and most CGL policies contain a pollution exclusion.”

ENCON’s Environmental Liability policies are also among the very few policy wordings that include exemplary or multiplied damages, and civil fines, penalties or assessments in the definition of loss. This is becoming increasingly important, given that the fines and penalties against property owners for environmental infractions can be as high as $300,000.

“Given that the majority of brokers we deal with do not specialize in environmental insurance, we’ve made it a priority to develop a number of educational webinars, seminars, articles and claims examples to arm brokers with the information they need to educate their clients about this emerging area of insurance,” said Cane. “Nearly 600 brokers attended our recent Environmental Insurance webinar, which demonstrates the high level of interest in this market.”

ENCON sells its site-specific and operations-based Environmental Insurance products through a growing network of more than 1,000 brokers. For more information about the environmental insurance products, please visit ENCON’s Environmental insurance eMarketing Kit or product pages.

http://www.encon.ca