From Handshakes to Cinergy

Using Innovation and Flexibility to Define Our Approach

The Cincinnati Insurance Company was founded by four small business owners. They not only created our company but also established and managed their own independent insurance agencies. From our beginning in 1950, we understood what it means to run a business, and we’ve applied that knowledge through the innovative and flexible policies we’ve offered commercial insureds ever since.

While we now protect businesses of all sizes from all sorts of risk, we’ve never forgotten our roots in the small businesses that have always driven the American economy forward. And in recent years, we’ve turned our pioneering spirit to breakthrough technologies to help serve them even better, faster while never forgetting our greatest differentiator, personal relationships.

From Suits to Skid Steers

It all started with a small business. In February 1952, just over a year after we wrote our first-ever personal lines policy, Cincinnati Insurance co-founder John Schiff, Sr. (Jack), drove across Mill Creek to Cincinnati’s Price Hill neighborhood. There, he sold our first-ever commercial lines policy to Moore’s Men’s Shop, protecting it from burglary.

And it started small: While Cincinnati wasted little time in expanding our commercial offerings, including bringing our leading approach to package policies to business shortly after introducing our first homeowner’s policy, personal lines remained our bread-and-butter for decades.

But it did not stay small: Businesses appreciated the innovative, flexible approach insisted upon by Jack Schiff, Sr., and his brother and fellow co-founder Bob Schiff, as well as the wide variety of non-insurance options we offered, such as including loss control services and providing leasing services and commercial loans. Today, commercial lines provide the majority of our premium income, and we work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, in all manner of industry, from retailers like Moore’s Men’s Shop, to dentists and veterinarians, to nonprofits and religious organizations, to large financial services and construction companies.

One Plus One Equals Three—Small Business and Cinergy

Still, as Jack Schiff, Sr., noted more than 45 years ago, “those who have taken advantage of opportunities to develop a business in the American free enterprise framework” are at the heart of the U.S. economy. There are more than 33 million small businesses in this country, making up 99.9% of all businesses in the U.S. And so, in 2018, we began work on a new platform to better serve them and the independent agencies they work with: Cinergy.

Combining the best of our history of innovation and adaptability, Cinergy offers flexible, customizable products through an intuitive, easy-to-use platform. “Within the first two screens, you know the eligibility definitions, our classes of business, and, if it fits from there, we want to write that business in Cinergy,” Chris LaTulippe, vice president of Commercial Application Systems, says. From a handful of agents in Illinois in 2021, by our 75th anniversary, Cinergy will be available to agencies in just about every state we serve.

Those agents had a major hand in building the award-winning platform, offering suggestions on how to improve it and new features they wanted. “We’ve continued to listen, gather good feedback—and it’s helped us make quick improvements,” Commercial Small Business Vice President Brian Reisert explains.

Refocusing on our roots in small business led to another first: Our first patent, for the dynamic markup language-driven product administration system pioneered by Cinergy, which increases our ability to move new products to the market quickly. More than 70 years after beginning to innovate in commercial lines, we’re still bringing new ideas and approaches to our agency customers and their clients and redefining what responsiveness really means.

As The Cincinnati Insurance Companies celebrates 75 years of being A Bridge to Better, we honor our legacy of putting agents first, our noble industry, and our commitment to meeting the ever-evolving needs of policyholders.