Aviva Canada’s chief executive, Nav Dhillon (pictured), expects Canada’s commercial property and casualty market to soften through 2026, even as personal lines remain under strain from poor industry profitability and climate‑driven volatility.
Speaking to Insurance Business after Aviva Group released its 2025 results, Dhillon said the company has been focused on strengthening its Canadian book, particularly in personal auto, and is now applying the same discipline more widely as the industry shifts gears.
Personal auto has been one of the toughest lines in recent years. Dhillon said Aviva’s Canadian unit has been working on three fronts: rate adequacy, refined segmentation and service.
“The first is to make sure that we have the right rate adequacy across the portfolio,” he said, noting that regulatory dynamics differ by province but that Ontario remains a major focus given Aviva’s premium volume there.
“The second part is refining our segmentation models, making sure that we’re delivering more specific pricing to the customer base,” Dhillon added. “We did a huge amount of work over the last 12 months on that. We actually launched new models last year to do that. And the third is making sure that we’re delivering great claims service.”
Those efforts, he argued, have underpinned Aviva’s improved personal auto performance, “considering… that the industry is still posting above 100 CORs in the auto line.”
On the property side, 2025 was a relative respite for Canadian insurers after a record year of insured catastrophe losses in 2024. Dhillon cautioned against extrapolating too much from the recent calm.
“We would say that 2025 was quite a benign year,” he said. “Inflation and claim severity were in line with our expectations, but from a pure CAT perspective, it was a relatively benign CAT experience for Canada, coming off a very, very strong CAT experience in 2024. So we wouldn’t think that 2025 is the new norm.”
The contrast, he suggested, underlines the volatility of the Canadian market.
“That just shows you the volatility of the Canadian marketplace in some ways as well,” he said. “The weather is such a prominent aspect in terms of headwind to manage.”
Aviva is responding on several fronts. Dhillon said the company is updating its home catastrophe model and rolling it out region by region.
Looking ahead to 2026, Dhillon expects a divergence between commercial and personal lines.
“We continue to expect the commercial lines market to soften,” he said. “We think that rates will either flatten or decline across most major lines, because there is strong capital availability, there have been improved results over the last years, and there is an abundance of capacity. So that really just breeds a lot of competition.”
In contrast, he does not foresee a rapid easing in personal lines.
“We do believe that personal lines should remain firm, given the overall poor industry profitability in personal auto,” Dhillon said. He added that persistent catastrophe exposure in personal property across the country would also keep pressure on pricing.
Against that backdrop, Dhillon said Aviva is putting broker needs at the centre of its investment decisions.
“For Aviva, the broker proposition is paramount to all the decisions that we make,” he said.
A major focus is a multi‑year technology upgrade across key lines, from personal to claims, designed to give brokers a consistently smooth trading experience – faster response times, clearer appetite, and generally making it easier for them to do business with Aviva.
Dhillon acknowledged that trading conditions remain challenging for intermediaries.
“When I speak with brokers, we can all agree that the trading conditions are challenging right now,” he said. “The secret to that is making sure that we’re engaging with our broker partners early, and we’re working together to deliver enhanced value to our customers.”
Beyond line‑of‑business dynamics, Dhillon said Aviva is closely tracking broader macroeconomic and geopolitical developments, from inflation to capital markets and global tensions, even where the direct Canadian impact is limited.
“We, as a company, are always focused on managing risk,” he said. “So we always look at the macro trends, and we always look at what’s happening in the environment that we operate in. We’re keenly watching inflation, we’re keenly watching investments across our portfolio as well.”
He framed that vigilance as business‑as‑usual.
“It wouldn’t be any different strategy to when we were managing tariffs last year, as an example,” he said.
