Commercial Insurance Brokers: directory of firms

It starts with an interview, not a form. A broker who understands commercial risk will ask how the work is done, who else is on site, what is promised in the contracts, and what would actually stop the business trading. The Insurance Bureau of Canada's advice is to work with your insurance representative to find a policy that meets your needs, and notes that the representative can help determine applicable coverages, premiums, deductibles and available discounts. That conversation becomes a written submission.

The submission goes to markets. For ordinary risks, several insurers may respond with comparable programmes. For specialised operations the field narrows quickly, and placing the risk may mean approaching insurers that handle a particular industry, or splitting a programme across more than one policy. This is where a broker's contacts genuinely matter, because a business cannot approach most specialty markets on its own.

What comes back has to be compared on wording. Two proposals can show the same headline coverages while differing on exclusions, deductibles, the definition of the indemnity period for business interruption, and the requirements the business must meet to keep the coverage valid. Ask the broker to set the differences out in writing, and read the exclusions before the summary page.

Commercial coverage is general insurance business. In Ontario, the Registered Insurance Brokers of Ontario regulates general insurance brokers and publishes a broker search and a brokerage search, which it encourages consumers to use before doing business. The Alberta Insurance Council licenses and oversees insurance agents, brokers and independent adjusters in that province and provides a public lookup. In British Columbia, the Insurance Council of British Columbia's Insurance Licensee Directory publishes licence status and class for current licensed agents, agencies, adjusters and firms, along with the firms a licensee is authorised to represent. In Quebec, the Autorité des marchés financiers maintains the registers of authorised firms and individuals.

For a business, the check is worth doing at the brokerage level as well as the individual level, since it is the firm that holds the contracts with insurers and the firm that will be answerable if something is mishandled. Ask which insurers the brokerage is appointed with for your class of business, and who at the firm will actually service the account at renewal and at claim time.

A commercial programme has to keep up with the business. New premises, new equipment, a new service line, a first employee, a contract in another province, a vehicle bought for deliveries: all of these are mid-term changes to report rather than renewal footnotes. Certificates of insurance requested by clients and landlords should be issued from the current policy, and the requirements in those contracts should be read against what is actually in force rather than assumed to be equivalent.

Once a year, sit down with the broker and go through operations, values, contracts and claims. Bring the numbers: revenue by activity, payroll, equipment and stock values, and any change in the way work is performed. A renewal treated as an administrative formality is the most common way a business ends up under-covered without anyone deciding that it should be.

A commercial broker holds contracts with several insurers and can approach more than one market with the same submission, which matters most when a risk is unusual or when a business has been declined elsewhere. An agent represents a single insurer and can be very effective where that insurer has a strong appetite for the industry in question. Buying direct removes the intermediary and with it the comparison of wordings, which is manageable for a simple risk and unwise for a complicated one.

Whichever route you take, the deciding factor is the same: whether the person arranging the coverage understands how your business actually works. The Insurance Bureau of Canada operates a business insurance helpline for general questions about commercial coverage, which is a reasonable place to get your bearings before you commit to a programme you do not yet understand.