A team from Fanshawe College has topped the Insurance Institute of Canada’s (IIC) 2026 NextGen Risk: Insurance Case Competition – and the subject matter says as much about market priorities as it does about emerging talent.
Run by the IIC’s Insurance Career Connections division, the competition brought together 14 teams from post‑secondary institutions in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. This year’s brief was a broker‑led solution for commercial property fire risk mitigation and coverage for a fictional client in Northern Alberta – a region where wildfire, remote infrastructure, and capacity constraints have become real‑world concerns for commercial P&C carriers.
The case centered on a commercial client seeking guidance from a broker on managing fire risk and securing appropriate coverage.
Teams had to assess the risk profile, recommend mitigation measures, and design a placement and advisory strategy. Students were expected to grapple with issues that brokers and underwriters deal with daily, including construction and occupancy, ignition sources, and fire protection, among others.
The choice of a Northern Alberta fire scenario is notable. In recent years, Canada has seen an increase in large wildfire events, with record loss years driving shifts in how carriers view accumulation, secondary perils, and risk engineering. For brokers, demonstrating the ability to quantify and mitigate such risks has become central to securing terms, especially as some markets push for higher deductibles, sublimits, or tighter warranties around fire protection and maintenance.
Sponsored by CNA Insurance, Wawanesa Insurance, Hub International, Intact Insurance, and Peace Hills Insurance, with in‑kind support from Bow Valley College and Canadian Underwriter, the 2026 competition named Fanshawe College as the first‑place winner, earning $4,000 in prize money. Mount Royal University took second place and $2,000, while Seneca College placed third and received $1,000.
The results, however, are more than a scoreboard. The sponsors span both the carrier and intermediary sides of the market and are active in commercial P&C across Western and Central Canada. They are also contending with familiar pressures of property capacity, cat‑exposed risks, inflation in rebuild costs, and the need for better risk data and client engagement.
The competition ran over three days in Calgary.
“This year’s NextGen case connected to various touchpoints of our business, and it required the competitors to perform as part of multifunctional teams in order to solve it,” said Peter Hohman, president and CEO of the Insurance Institute.
From an employer’s perspective, that multifunctional expectation aligns with how commercial accounts are handled in practice: broking, underwriting, engineering, claims, and increasingly analytics all feed into decisions on higher‑hazard property accounts.
Many of the competitors are currently taking Insurance Institute Chartered Insurance Professional (CIP) courses for academic credit, and some are involved in campus insurance and risk clubs. That alignment between education and designation matters in a labor market where carriers and brokers are competing with banks, tech firms, and other sectors for analytical and client‑facing talent.
For the industry, the NextGen competition serves several functions. It acts as an early‑stage filter for students who are comfortable presenting to senior practitioners, defending a risk recommendation, and incorporating feedback. It reinforces the Institute’s curriculum around core property and broker skills at a time when commercial property is under heightened underwriting scrutiny. It also gives sponsoring firms a chance to identify talent in regions where they are actively hiring, particularly Alberta and Ontario, which remain key growth markets for commercial P&C and specialty lines.
With Canada facing demographic turnover and continued volatility in cat‑exposed property business, events like NextGen Risk provide one structured way for carriers and intermediaries to influence, and tap into, the next wave of commercial and broking professionals. The focus on fire risk, mitigation, and broker advisory skills suggests that, at least for now, the market’s message to students is clear -- and that is understanding the risk and being able to explain it is just as important as placing the coverage.
