The insurer building resilience while the market cuts rates

Opportunity and uncertainty have a strange habit of arriving together. Because while commercial rates have fallen by 7 percent in Q2 and capacity is still abundant, beneath the surface the risks threatening businesses are becoming more difficult to manage. From record-breaking climate losses to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, the gap between a softening price cycle and a hardening risk reality is deepening. That widening space between price and protection is the resilience gap.

It’s within that gap that Sovereign Insurance has defined its niche. As Colette Taylor, chief operating officer at Sovereign Insurance, explains, a soft market isn’t an excuse to simply cut prices in pursuit of growth. Instead, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate the value of underwriting expertise and disciplined risk selection.

“While property rates have declined for nine consecutive quarters, underwriting discipline and risk selection have become more important to us, not less,” says Taylor. “It’s about understanding the quality of the book, being clear on the risks that you want to write and when you need to walk away.”

“At Sovereign, our underwriting expertise makes all the difference,” Taylor notes. “That’s what gives us the confidence to seek out opportunities in our target areas and to be competitive with them. We understand that sustainable growth comes from the quality of the business that you’re writing, not simply just the volume of business that you can put into your portfolio.”

It’s a strategy that’s been honed over recent years, with Sovereign focusing on deepening partner relationships and maintaining underwriting standards while its people remained highly engaged throughout periods of real change. 
“We have proven the individual pieces,” says Taylor. “The next four years are about connecting them so they compound. Under-writing expertise, partner relationships, and how we operate should each make the others stronger.”

For Taylor and her team, success depends on maintaining those relationships and growing from there, while leaning into Sovereign’s homegrown roots. 

“Sovereign is Canadian owned and operated,” she says, “and I think that’s more important than ever right now. That means all of our underwriting authority, all our decision-making, is done here in Canada. Having that so close to our partners allows us to be nimble. It means we can make decisions fast, empowering the people within Sovereign to respond to our partners about opportunities quickly.”

Sovereign is also deliberately focused, which is a choice rather than a limitation. Being part of the Co-operators Group gives it the best of both worlds: the financial strength and values of Co-operators combined with its own underwriting authority, appetite, and the specialist relationships that define Sovereign itself.

That focus is what allows Taylor and her team to put the right resources and expertise against the right relationships, which leads to better outcomes for everyone involved. “It creates more consistency in how we’re able to show up,” Taylor says. “Because when we’re making decisions, we’re making them with great confidence − which our partners can feel.”

Sovereign reaches the market one way: through brokers and MGAs. There is no Sovereign direct channel, no second route to the same client. When a partner grows, Sovereign grows. And as the broker landscape consolidates, that commitment carries even greater weight. 

The 10 largest broker groups now control roughly one-third of national broker-distributed premium, up from about 28 percent in 2022 − meaning status now has to be earned with fewer partners who have real leverage. For Taylor, this is further confirmation that Sovereign is on the right path. 

“We’re very intentional about the partners we work with,” she says. “It allows us to dedicate our expertise and resources to those relationships to create meaningful opportunities along the way. For us, it’s about being easy to do business with. You have to be competitive from a pricing standpoint, have a market-leading proposition, and people have to enjoy dealing with you too.”

It’s that level of care coupled with industry expertise that Taylor believes will define Sovereign’s success in the years to come. As for growth opportunities, she tells Insurance Business that they focus on “going deeper before going wider.”

“There’s significant opportunity in our core mid-market business,” she notes, “and headroom to grow in the segments where we have strong underwriting expertise, established capabilities, and a clear understanding of the risks we want to write.”

Energy and natural resources is another area where Sovereign is deliberately building, as is cyber. Worryingly, Canadian organizations are paying a record $7.11 million on average for a data breach, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 – and yet just 22 percent of respondents carry any form of cyber insurance, and only 12 percent hold a dedicated stand-alone policy, according to IBC. For Taylor, this isn’t a demand problem - it’s a design fault.

“As an industry, we’ve built cyber products for specialists to sell to other specialists,” says Taylor, “which works well when brokers have deep cyber expertise and are then able to sell that product on. However, it makes it much harder to navigate for brokers who don’t. Brokers need the confidence to speak the language. We are building cyber so that a generalist broker can sell it with confidence. That is how the protection gap actually closes.”

Aside from cyber, Sovereign is also looking at AI and its impact on underwriting, claims, and risk identification. 
“AI will help our underwriters analyze information more efficiently,” Taylor says, “meaning they can focus on the risks that require deeper judgment − because decisions that need empathy will always require the human touch. The opportunity here goes beyond simple automation; it’s to use technology to give our people more time to focus on the areas where they add the most value. The test is whether our partners feel it: faster answers, clearer decisions, and more underwriter time on the risks that need judgment.”

And in a market where opportunity and uncertainty are increasingly going hand in hand, that human-led trust may prove to be Sovereign’s most valuable differentiator of all. 

For Taylor, that is the point of the strategy: to make resilience an advantage Canadian businesses can buy, not just an outcome they hope for.

“We’re not trying to win a headline this year,” says Taylor. “We’re trying to be the insurer the industry looks to, and the one Canadian businesses trust with the risks that matter most to their future.”