Turning things around

P.E.I. Mutual Insurance Company experience reprieve in 2017

After three consecutive years of significant claims activity totalling nearly $40 million in covered losses, members of P.E.I. Mutual Insurance Company finally experienced a bit of a reprieve in 2016.

The company, with its growing membership of 27,500 policyholders, was able to achieve an underwriting profit of $3.4 million in 2016 and a bottom-line income of $5.2 million, helping to offset much of underwriting losses experienced in the three preceding years.

Rudy Smith, chief financial officer, said the company’s saving grace has always been the success of its internally managed investment portfolio, especially in those years of underwriting losses. Over the past 10 years, the company has been able to consistently achieve a bottomline income mainly due to its consistent stream of investment income derived from the profits that have been retained and reinvested in the company since its inception in 1885.

Company CEO Terry Shea, who recently announced his upcoming retirement, expressed great pride in what the company has been able to achieve in his 16 years as the company’s CEO and for the 16 years before that as CFO. One of several key success factors that he noted was the reduction in the company’s expense ratio from 46 per cent in 2000 down to 33 per cent in 2016.

“Building efficiencies into the company’s day-to-day operations has allowed us to allocate more of our policyholder’s premiums towards the payment of claims and less towards the costs of running the business,” Shea said, reflecting praise and thanks to the team of staff, agents and directors around him that has seen the company’s grow from a premium base of $3.2 million in 1984 to $22.8 million in 2016.

Outgoing president Stewart MacRae was pleased to announce the company would be continuing with its 10 per cent mutual rebate to policyholders in the upcoming year, noting that this would be reflected on the renewal of their policies in 2017.

P.E.I. Mutual Summerside. is located in