How economic uncertainty is affecting Intact’s commercial clients

Intact Financial Corporation (IFC) is seeing some pressure on its commercial book of business related to economic uncertainty, “but nothing major” so far, IFC chief executive officer Charles Brindamour said Wednesday during a 2025 Q1 earnings call.

“[It’s] fair to say that in the past couple of months, in the first quarter, we have seen some changes. I don’t think they’re a major issue in terms of top line at this stage,” Brindamour said in response to an investor question about what Intact is hearing from commercial clients regarding their economic outlook and the instability in the market.

That said, there is market pressure in all jurisdictions, Brindamour adds.

For example, in transportation lines of business, Canada’s largest insurer is seeing “a bit of a slowdown,” he says. “We’re starting to see at the economic level some changes, indeed, and as this becomes more ingrained, we’ll report on that in the next quarter.”

However, retention remains strong, particularly in personal lines, where insurance is mandatory. “Top line in personal lines is not really sensitive to economic changes and retention is very strong,” Brindamour says. “Same thing in commercial lines, really, especially in the SME [small and medium enterprise] and mid-market space.

“In commercial automobile, you’ll see sometimes a bit more variation because it’s easier to put a fleet on the block, so to speak, and reduce the amount of insurance you give,” Brindamour says. “But otherwise, people keep insuring themselves and retention remains very strong across all our markets — in the low 90s, upper 80s, depending on where you look.”

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But one market — multi-family dwellings — is “down meaningfully in the U.S.,” Brindamour notes. In general, that market is facing rising premiums, reduced capacity and stricter underwriting rules. The California wildfires have also affected the market in terms of pricing and availability of coverage.

For Intact as a whole, “commercial lines growth was muted due to specific profitability actions we’re taking in the U.S. and in the U.K. in particular, and we continue to see pressure in large accounts across all jurisdictions,” Brindamour says.

“That being said, rates remain in the mid-single digits in most lines…We expect growth to improve for the remainder of the year as remediation actions taper off and our actions kick in.”

In Canada, commercial lines’ operating direct written premium growth was 1%, up to $1.13 billion in 2025 Q1 from $1.12 billion in 2024 Q1, driven by mid-single-digit rate increases in most lines.

“We continue to see increased competition in large accounts,” Intact says in a press release. “The combined ratio was very strong at 81.2% for the quarter, 6.1 points better than last year, driven by robust underlying performance and favourable prior-year development.”

Jason Contant

Jason has been an award-winning journalist with Canadian Underwriter for more than a decade, including the past three years as associate editor and, before that, as digital editor for seven years.