Wawanesa doesn’t expect a market turnaround anytime soon, according to Stacey Mills, the insurer's vice president of mid-market, who spoke at a recent broker panel in Vancouver. The company's current planning assumes the soft market will persist through all of 2027, with any real hardening unlikely before 2028.
Mills said that timeline isn't a hard guarantee. A major catastrophe event early in the new year, or renewal pressure working through reinsurance programs, could shift things faster than expected. But absent one of those triggers, she said Wawanesa is building its 2027 strategy around continued softness rather than betting on relief.
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That backdrop is shaping how selective the insurer plans to be about new business, according to Mills. Wawanesa is still growing, she said, but is being deliberate about which accounts it takes on, since much of what comes in during a soft market arrives at pricing the insurer would rather not accept.
The outlook was more pointed from Sarah Scott, vice president of commercial insurance, who predicted flat growth at best for program business heading into 2027. Even holding gross written premium flat, she said, still requires real underlying growth, since rates in that segment continue to fall.
Scott said she doesn't expect that dynamic to shift on its own. In her view, it will likely take a specific triggering event, a shift in profitability within a segment, before the market starts to correct. And she was direct about where she expects that correction to show up first.
"Given how soft it is in BC, I think we'll see it here first before we see it anywhere else in the country," Scott said. "This is the toughest market."
Part of Wawanesa's answer to that outlook is defining more precisely what it actually wants to write, according to Lisa Thomson, vice president of small business. She said the insurer plans to roll out a more deliberate appetite statement early in 2027, using a simplified framework to signal to brokers which business fits well, which doesn't, and which falls somewhere in between.
Mills made a similar point, pushing back on what she described as outdated assumptions some brokers still hold about Wawanesa's appetite. The insurer writes a broader book than its reputation suggests, she said, pointing to recent growth in construction, manufacturing and wholesaling as evidence the company is actively trying to diversify beyond its traditional small-business base.
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Thomson also pointed to a more concrete change already underway: the BC earthquake rating, which she described as a longstanding internal concern, is currently being reworked, with the change expected to land sometime in 2027. She said she expects that update to directly affect how the insurer “shows up for brokers and clients in the province”.
Heading into a market where rates keep dropping, Mills said the advice she's giving brokers runs counter to the obvious instinct to compete purely on premium. Choosing an insurer, she said, should come down to who will still be there as a long-term partner, not just who offers the lowest number this year.
The bigger opportunity, in her view, is underinsurance. When a client's premium drops due to softening rates, she said, that gap between what they're paying and what they were paying creates a natural opening for brokers to revisit whether coverage limits still reflect current values, rather than simply passing the savings through.
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She cited estimates suggesting 40% to 60% of businesses are meaningfully underinsured for direct physical damage, a gap she said reflects poorly on the industry as a whole when a client eventually suffers a loss they assumed was covered.
Mills framed that conversation as one of three ways brokers can differentiate themselves from competitors chasing business purely on price: correcting underinsurance, focusing on risk prevention and loss reduction rather than just claims response, and taking on the ongoing work of educating clients about an increasingly complex industry. Brokers who lead with all three, she said, are offering something a client genuinely can't get by simply shopping around for a lower premium.
