As president of HUB International’s Ontario and Atlantic regions, Matthew Studley (pictured) is stepping into the top role at a time when volatility is reshaping how brokers and insurers do business.
Across Eastern Canada, he says, the core challenge is simple to describe and harder to manage: clients are trying to steer their businesses through a risk landscape that feels anything but stable.
“What many of our clients are dealing with is extreme volatility in terms of how to manage their business,” he said. “Like anything else in risk, volatility and uncertainty add challenges to pricing and coverage.”
Against that backdrop, Studley points to a prolonged soft market that has pushed pricing in some specialty lines to levels he believes are no longer sustainable.
“We’ve been experiencing, especially in Canada, for quite some time now, a softening market environment – decreasing pricing, broadening coverage terms and some insurers who are prioritizing getting new clients in the door relative to renewals,” he said.
In other words, carriers have been cutting rates and loosening terms in a bid to grow market share. In certain niches, that pattern has persisted for years.
“I am hopeful that some of that in specific niche areas is going to start to level off towards the end of this year, however soft markets tend to stay longer than they rationally should,” Studley noted.
Studley noted that some specialty lines have now faced soft market conditions for 10 to 12 consecutive quarters, pushing premiums down to what he described as “razor‑thin levels”. At this point, he said, it’s hard to see how insurers can earn a sustainable return, particularly given that the underlying risk environment is still expanding rather than shrinking.
Public company directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability is one of the clearest examples he sees.
Studley pointed to publicly traded directors’ and officers’ liability as a prime example, saying pricing in that segment has been falling sharply for a long time.
“I wouldn’t say for the board members of public companies the risk environment has dramatically reduced in that timeline – I would say the exact opposite.”
Regulatory scrutiny, shareholder activism, cyber exposures and social issues have all heightened potential liability for boards. Yet in many cases, coverage has been getting cheaper and broader. For Studley, that disconnect raises difficult questions about how long current market conditions can last – and what happens when they turn.
Cyber liability is another line where he sees significant pressure on rating.
Because losses can take years to fully emerge, new entrants with clean balance sheets have been able to write cyber aggressively without the weight of historic claims.
“Because they’re long tail liability, you can have newer insurers who have fresh capital to deploy coming in and undercutting rates because they don’t have the legacy loss book that some established providers have,” Studley explained.
That may look attractive to buyers in the short run, but he is wary of strategies that depend more on optimism than on data.
“It can reinforce bad long‑term plans, or you could get lucky, but to me luck is not a strategy – certainly not one that clients can count on,” he said. “So it makes me nervous when insurers are pushing too hard into some of those things.”
He stresses that price relief is not inherently a problem – provided it’s sustainable. The concern arises when discounts today translate into capacity withdrawals, sharp corrections or restrictive terms tomorrow.
“Of course, it’s great to get a client a discount, but you want to make sure it’s a sustainable discount or at a minimum clients understand it can’t last,” Studley said.
According to Studley, many sophisticated buyers would rather avoid a boom‑and‑bust cycle on their insurance budgets.
“What we found is that CFOs and general counsels of these firms (as much as they would like a huge discount year over year) would really like long‑term stability in terms of operational cost,” he said.
That preference for predictability extends beyond pricing to relationships and service. Companies facing more complex risk – from cyber to AI – are looking for advisors who can help them see around corners, not just shave a few points off the premium.
“Clients are facing a disproportionate number of new risks that they either weren’t thinking of in the past or didn’t have the same interaction with in the past,” Studley said.
