Intact Financial Corporation is signaling that scale, risk-based pricing and heavy investment in data and artificial intelligence (AI) will be central to how it navigates a tougher property/casualty landscape, as climate losses, geopolitical volatility and distribution disruption continue to reshape the market.
In his 2025 annual report letter, chief executive officer Charles Brindamour (pictured) said the group delivered “outstanding financial performance” despite a year marked by Canadian wildfires, UK flooding, European heatwaves and severe ice storms in Ontario and Québec.
For 2025, Intact reported net operating income per share (NOIPS) of $19.21, up 33% year over year, with a 21% return on equity (ROE) and estimated ROE outperformance of 7.4 percentage points versus the industry. Over the past decade, NOIPS has grown at a 12% compound annual rate and ROE outperformance has averaged 6.7 points.
Brindamour framed that performance as the product of a long-term “game plan” built around four pillars: clear definitions of success, an outside-in view of structural trends, disciplined use of the company’s strengths, and sustained investment in talent.
A major focus of the letter is the way climate risk is reshaping catastrophe exposure and, by extension, the economics of homeowners and commercial property insurance.
The last 11 years have been the warmest on record globally, and 2025 was Canada’s second-worst wildfire year by area burned, at 8.9 million hectares. At the same time, global insured natural catastrophe losses topped US$100 billion for the sixth consecutive year, according to Swiss Re Institute estimates cited by Intact.
Brindamour argued that in some hazard-prone zones, repeated events mean insurers and policymakers should stop treating severe weather as a remote risk.
“In places where the same natural disaster happens consistently, the event is no longer a risk but a certainty,” he wrote, pointing to Canadian floodplains where about 10% of the population lives. In such areas, he suggested, insurance on its own becomes an unsustainable “maintenance” product and must be paired with land-use changes, buyouts or relocation.
He set out five principles for public-private climate partnerships, including a focus on high-risk and vulnerable communities, maintaining undistorted risk-based pricing, restricting development in current and future floodplains, tightening building codes, and materially increasing adaptation spending.
Brindamour was critical of price suppression in catastrophe-exposed regions, arguing that “premiums signal risk” and should be allowed to rise in line with hazard levels to discourage building in the wrong places.
For insurers, the letter underlines why Intact and peers have been pushing regulators to reconcile affordability concerns with the need to reflect climate risk in rates and underwriting appetite, particularly in wildfire- and flood-exposed regions.
Intact positions its data and AI capabilities as core underwriting differentiators. The group says more than 600 AI specialists now run almost 600 models across the business, generating over $200 million of annual benefit in 2025, with a goal of exceeding $500 million by 2030.
Machine learning now underpins pricing and risk selection for more than 90% of the Canadian personal lines book and about 60% of Canadian commercial lines, with similar tools being rolled out in the U.K. and Ireland. Beyond underwriting, more than 200 AI tools have been deployed across customer experience, software engineering and operational efficiency.
Brindamour linked these investments directly to underwriting performance, saying data and predictive AI account for around a third of Intact’s ROE outperformance.
The letter also highlights the insurer’s decision to internalize much of its claims and supply chain. Intact has the largest claims team in Canada, operates 38 auto service centers nationally, and owns property restoration firm On Side Restoration, which now handles close to half of its Canadian property repairs. In 2025, it expanded that platform with the acquisition of Excellence Renovation in Québec.
That level of vertical integration is not unique in the Canadian market, but Intact is among the most aggressive, betting that tighter control of repair networks, legal spend and loss-adjustment processes will help contain loss ratios and loss adjustment expenses as climate- and inflation-driven severities rise.
On the asset side, Intact manages its $42.6 billion investment portfolio in-house, and says 80% of strategies have beaten benchmarks over the past decade, contributing roughly 100 basis points of annual investment outperformance relative to industry peers over the last five years. The group reported a total capital margin of $3.7 billion at year-end 2025 and has delivered an internal rate of return of about 20% on acquisitions since 2011.
Looking ahead, management has indicated an annual catastrophe loss expectation of around C$1.2 billion, up from $900 million a year earlier, with roughly three-quarters of that in Canada. Expense ratios are being targeted in the 33%–34% range, and the company is aiming to sustain upper-teens ROE and about 10% annual NOIPS growth.
Growth priorities are clear: in Canada, Intact believes it can expand its already leading P&C position by 50% by 2030, driven by commercial and specialty lines and continued consolidation through BrokerLink and direct writer belairdirect. In the U.K. and Ireland, where it has about 6% of a roughly £25 billion commercial market, it wants to double the size of the business over the same horizon.
In global specialty lines — which operates across the US, Canada, the U.K. and Europe and accesses more than 70% of the global specialty market —the ambition is to reach US$10 billion in annual direct premiums written by 2030, up from nearly US$7 billion, while keeping the combined ratio below 90%.
Brindamour’s letter offers insurance professionals a detailed view of how a large multiline carrier is trying to turn structural headwinds into competitive advantages.
Intact is explicit that it expects “hard” market conditions in many climate-exposed personal and commercial lines to persist, and is calibrating its capital, catastrophe budgets and technology investments accordingly. Its stance on risk-based pricing and land-use policy also signals the kind of arguments other carriers are likely to make as debates over homeowners affordability and catastrophe exposure intensify in Canada, the U.K. and other developed markets.
At the same time, the emphasis on AI-driven underwriting, internalized claims and specialty expansion underscores a broader industry shift: in a world of taller loss distributions and constrained investment yields, outperformance is likely to hinge less on short-term cycle timing and more on structural capabilities in data, capital allocation and operational control.
Whether regulators and policymakers allow the kind of risk signaling and adaptation incentives Intact is calling for will go a long way toward determining how sustainable that strategy is — and how easily others can replicate it.
