With sky-high inflation and rising premiums, businesses can’t gamble on one-size-fits-all insurance. Specialization is the only way to get real, cost-effective coverage.
Inflation is hitting businesses hard, with nearly 65.7% expecting cost-related challenges. The impact is even greater in key industries – almost 57% of agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting businesses, 55% in accommodation and food services, and nearly 48% in manufacturing anticipate significant financial strain.
In this environment, a generic approach isn’t just inefficient, it’s expensive. Businesses need specialized coverage to secure cost-effective, tailored protection against evolving risks.
Rishi Jaitley (pictured), a seasoned insurance expert with over a decade and a half in the industry, has seen firsthand how businesses struggle with rising costs and outdated risk management strategies. As a broker at My Insurance Broker, he champions a specialized approach – one that prioritizes industry-specific insights over generic policies. By working closely with business owners, Jaitley helps identify hidden vulnerabilities, opportunities to optimize coverage, and secure better pricing through strategic insurer relationships.
“As brokers, [we] fill the application, use our marketers internally to send it off to carriers, and we allow them to price or govern the price dictation on what a risk should be quoted at,” he said. “What we're doing here is we're taking a little bit more of a niche-specific approach.”
Instead of taking a broad, generalist approach, Jaitley emphasized the value of deep industry knowledge and strategic carrier relationships. “When we do that, we have a better understanding of the sensitivities of the proprietors that we're looking to target,” he said. “You also have a better relationship with the insurance markets to understand what drives profitability within that segment.”
The result is greater value fir both existing and prospective customers, he said.
In the transportation industry, insurers scrutinize driver hiring practices. “One of the key things is their driver hiring practices,” Jaitley said. “If you can help instill best practices into those operator businesses, they tend to have a better risk assessment and therefore drive a more practical and sustainable pricing model for them from an insurance lens.”
With insurance costs climbing, many business owners reevaluate their coverage. “These business owners are having to become more solution-driven,” Jaitley said. “It’s more difficult today to drive a profit, and a lot of the time [customers] are changing how their business is doing business.”
This means policy renewals require more scrutiny than ever before. “You’re not just going to assume, hey, I bought this policy five years or 10 years ago, and Tom Smith must be doing it the same way that he’s always [been] done it,” he said. “Understanding where the business is at today, where the business wants to be tomorrow, it all is part and parcel of the journey.”
Beyond policy structuring, proactive risk management significantly impacts premiums. “We really go in there and consult with the business owner,” he said. “So, we're talking about best practices, we're looking at the exposures to the risk, whether it's a tire manufacturer or recycler versus a products manufacturer and retailer distributor. They all have different exposures.”
Site visits and audits offer critical insights into a business’s operational strengths and vulnerabilities. “It really tells you the sophistication of the business, which is not necessarily a bad thing,” Jaitley said. “A lot of entrepreneurs … go through that journey rolling up their sleeves and they end up coming out the other side with a really successful business, [but] that doesn't mean that they know how to run a successful business.”
Small operational changes have a major impact on insurability. “It’s also recommending driver maintenance policies,” he said. “Are you doing regular and frequent checkups and audits on the functionality of your transportation vehicles? Do you have a process to turn those vehicles over? Are you changing your trucks every five [to] ten years to limit and reduce your exposure?”
Telematics is another tool that businesses can leverage. “Are you installing devices that can better respond in the event of a claim?” he said.
Market conditions continue to evolve. “I will speak over the last decade of what I've been able to see in my tenure in the business,” Jaitley said. “For the first five years of that decade, we saw a lot of premiums being driven to MGAs and non-traditional outlets that had more of an appetite.”
That trend, however, has started to reverse. “Over the last five years, we're seeing domestic markets and domestic carriers starting to bring that business back,” he said. “There are alternative ways to target and prospect what would otherwise be considered non-traditional domestic insurers with domestic insurers.”
This shift presents more opportunities for Canadian businesses to secure coverage locally. “You really see them starting to create an appetite of making sure that we're able to satisfy the needs of these Canadian business owners on Canadian soil,” Jaitley said.
“That’s not always the case, but it allows us to utilize existing contracts and relationships and leverage premium volumes and solutions that we may already have access to.”
