Hub International Limited (Hub) has acquired the shares of Nunavut Insurance Brokers Ltd., a full-service insurance brokerage firm operating in the Canadian territories of Nunavut and Northwest Territories.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The Nunavut operation will become part of Hub International Horizon Insurance (Hub Horizon), reporting to Hub Horizon president and CEO Keith Jordan. The acquisition will add three new office locations to Hub Horizon’s footprint in the territory.
Teaming up with development agencies in Canada’s far north, Jordan was one of the founding partners of Nunavut Insurance Brokers 10 years ago. Part of the motivation in creating the brokerage was to keep the territory’s insurance dollars from flowing south.
Approximately 31,000 people live in Nunavut, a Canadian territory created in 1999 that spans about 2 million square kilometres and that extends to the North Pole.
Nunvut Insurance Brokers is the only insurance brokerage with a physical office presence in Nunavut, although the market is competitive.
Large scale commercial brokerages such as
Aon and
Marsh also do business in the area, although insurance through other brokerages is arranged through southern Canadian offices in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, or Ottawa.
Nunavut is a young (median age of 22 years old), fast-growing community, with new jobs rapidly emerging in the mining and resource development sectors. Jordan said the physical presence in the territory helps the brokerage’s commercial accounts.
“With more and more commercial accounts being set up there because of the mining, because of the exploration, we do see a growth in the marketplace,” Jordan told Insurance Business.
“There are a lot of good, fairly large commercial accounts up there. We do quite a bit of property, but we also do a lot of construction accounts, small retail stores, service businesses. There is a fair amount of bed and breakfast places up there.
“There is quite a bit of mining spin-offs work. We don’t do the mines, but there are people involved in airports – either clearing airports or fuelling planes – or they are providing security services to mines, or they are providing other services to mines. The marketplace doesn’t look that big, but it’s clearly a good marketplace.”
The brokerage also does home and auto business, although the government web site states that most communities in Nunavut do not have road access.
How does Nunavut Insurance Brokers manage to serve people spread out over such a large territory?
“We do a lot by mail, a lot by fax still, and a lot by Internet,” said Jordan. “We use the Internet a lot. We actually designed the Nunavut Insurance Web site to work on lower speeds, because that’s effective up there. It’s not like they have high-speed Internet up there yet, although that’s coming.”
