Sylvie Thrush Marsh

Yeah, it's a lot of saving themselves, unfortunately.

It would be no surprise to anyone who's been following the news lately that small businesses are under a lot of financial pressure, and we're seeing that in the restructuring activity at the moment.

No, exactly.

The impact's being felt really inconsistently right now, and that's part of what we were surprised when we looked at this data.

So accommodation, food services, like you say, kind of record highs there.

financial and insurance services, their highest level of restructuring in two years.

But on the other hand, wholesale trade, retail trade and administrative and support services are all down this quarter.

So we're seeing pretty significant macroeconomic trends, but it's not being felt consistently across the country.

Yeah, it's a couple of different stories there.

So when we're looking at what's happening in the insurance sector, there's a few different things.

Consumers are experiencing a pretty well-documented cost of living crisis, and many of them are choosing to go with less insurance or fewer insurance policies, so pretty straightforward there.

Interestingly, on the business side of things, since 2019, there have been year-on-year increases in the number of businesses being taken off the company's register, and each one of those is a customer who is lost for insurance providers.

And on top of that, you know, we've had, I mean, the phrase unprecedented times is pretty well worn right now.

There's been a lot of uncertainty for insurance providers to deal with.

And so that's affecting kind of the insurance landscape as well.

Yes, spot on.

There tends to be a lag in this kind of data because businesses can absorb some shocks, right?

It's not like one thing happens that goes wrong in February and in March we see this massive spike.

And we've had really, really high interest rates for most of 2023 and 2024.

We've had ongoing shocks with tariffs and with the documented closure of the Strait of Hormuz.