Applied Systems has quietly announced that it is pausing the publication of the Applied Commercial Index. The measure of premium rate increases in Canada shows rates decreasing across most commonly placed commercial lines of business in the first quarter of 2026.

Going forward, Applied says the analysis it provides will be aligned more closely with the company’s current and emerging solutions. (Applied Systems is a provider of cloud-based software in the insurance industry.) The commercial lines index reflects information from approximately 22,000 data transactions each quarter.

In the June and final edition of the report, Applied Systems says average year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter renewal rates decreased across most lines. Only business and professional services demonstrated a rate increase from one quarter to the next.

Across the board, however, all rate increases were notably lower when compared to the same period one year ago. Overall, rate increases in the first quarter of 2026 came in at just 1.67 per cent, down from 3.85 per cent in the first quarter of 2025.

“The Q1 2026 results reflect a significant acceleration of the market softening we’ve been tracking over the past several quarters,” says Steve Whitelaw, senior vice president and general manager, Canada, with Applied Systems.

“The Applied Commercial Index has provided brokers and insurers with critical market intelligence to navigate an increasingly competitive landscape,” he adds. “As we look ahead, we are pausing publication of this report as we reimagine how we deliver insights and value in alignment with our evolving commercial lines roadmap.” 

Company explains pause 

In conversation with the Insurance Portal, Whitelaw later emphasized that the company is not ceasing publication of the index, rather it is re-engineering underlying systems to make better use of the growing volume of data that has come with the company’s expanded and expanding capabilities.

“When we first launched the index, we were reporting on five lines of business in the commercial market. We’re now collecting data on 13 lines of business and a lot more data about those, we have access to in our system now,” he says, likening the pause to the re-tooling of a production line in auto manufacturing. “We’re basically taking the pause to rebuild that underlying architecture to take advantage of the data we now have access to.” 

As the company continues to roll out capabilities to brokers too, he says this will also be input into the research results. Anonymity of the data in play is one area currently being worked on. 

Two developments assisting the technology’s advancement, he adds, include the introduction of standards crafted over the past several years by the Center for Studies and Insurance Operations (CSIO), and the company’s acquisition of Cytora in the third quarter of 2025. The acquisition gave Applied Systems a new product but also access to a team of artificial intelligence engineers that Whitelaw says are brilliant at what they do.

“That’s allowing us to rethink how we collect data,” he says. The resulting reports, when they are relaunched, he says will provide a broader view of the industry, expanding on the five segments the company reports on today, with richer insights inside each of those segments.