State of the independent adjuster fraternity

View the video here on your mobile device.

Greg Madill is a principle with the Toronto-based company Upper Canada Adjusters, Inc. and has over 25 years of experience in the industry. He shares his thoughts about the state of the independent adjusting fraternity in Canada.

Greg Madill: The independent adjusting fraternity is healthy. There will always be room in the market place for adjusters with expertise who handle different types of losses outside of what a normal company adjuster would see; based on either their complexity, their size,  or their location. So, there will always be room for an independent adjusting firm.

In the Toronto  marketplace it’s a bit different because of the number of exposures that are here, and the complexity of the risks that are here. We are not seeing the same kinds of claims that you would in small town Ontario; simply because they don’t have the extent of the manufacturing, or the industrial, or for that matter the commercial sector.

Staffing is the biggest concern. As I indicated previously  we have a lot of people who’ve retired.  There was a long period of time where the independent adjusting business fell off.  The mindset of the insurance companies was to keep a lot of stuff in-house; so, a lot of the adjusters either left the business entirely or went and worked for staff adjusters, and have not come back into the independent fraternity. What we’re left with is a disproportionate level of experience within the average independent adjusting firm. So you’ve got people that have been in the business a long time. You’ve got this huge gap where there’s no one that has say,  10 to 20 years experience, and then you’ve got a large number of people that are new to the  business. As the older principles are retiring and leaving the business, it’s not instantaneous to replace them.  Simply because they are not there. There’ s this void in experience. We are seeing an impact on the nationals . . . as they consolidate. There are fewer and fewer national adjusting firms as the firms continue to merge. And that strictly relates to their desire to capture market. But that really has limited impact on the small, one-off,  owner-operated independent office, which really remains the backbone of the IA in Canada.