Helping Agents Keep Their Independence

Dedicated to the Independent Agency System

Not every independent agency can be appointed to represent The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. It’s a status that our agency-customers sought out, achieved and now carry with pride. It’s a sign that they are the very best at what they do.

It is our job to help them become the best and stay that way. Seventy-five years after our prospectus declared our allegiance to the American Agency System, we remain convinced of the importance of the independent agent—and we work diligently to help keep them independent.

Slow and Steady

We conduct business only through independent agents; they are the lifeblood of our company. Given their value to our model, it is more essential that we work only with the best agencies out there.

Our founders recognized how critical it was to work with the right partners. “Management feels that a slow growth based on the best quality of business, the better selection of agents, and a conservative investment policy, while curtailing present profits to some extent is more sound for the future,” Jack Schiff, Sr., told shareholders in 1954. Indeed, we appointed only five agencies in our first two years, and rejected dozens.

Expansion beyond Ohio was consequently slow, as we sought out only the best independent agencies in new states where we hoped to do business. By the mid-1980s, we were licensed in 37 states—but did business in only 17. Cincinnati Insurance was licensed in Pennsylvania in 1967 but didn’t enter the state until 1983. Even today, we remain careful and exclusive, entering our 46th and most recent state—Maine—in 2021, and then only when we found the right agency, Clark Insurance, to work with.

Invested in Independence

“The strategy is to appoint the best agents in the community,” CEO Steve Spray says. “Start that relationship and focus on helping them.”

Over the years, we’ve helped our agent customers by doing what it takes to keep them going and independent. Moody’s Investors Service cites our “long-term relationships with independent agencies” as a key part of our financial strength, so it is no surprise that we go above and beyond to maintain them, starting with generous commissions and profit-sharing programs. Beginning in the 1970s, we launched educational and training programs to ensure that our agency partners had the staffing and know-how they needed to sell our products. Over the years, we’ve sent Cincinnati associates in to manage agencies facing closure, and even ran a short-term program to acquire agencies in danger of losing their independence.

Today, our focus is more on helping agency partners manage succession, offering loans, securing young staff and providing management training, “anything we could do to help them stay privately held,” retired Chief Insurance Officer J.F. Scherer says. “We really jumped knee deep into trying to do everything we could as a company to help agencies perpetuate themselves.”

“I want to own my own business. I want to have some control of the destiny of our company,” Bryan Hall, president of Montana’s First West Insurance, says. “Cincinnati always wants to find ways to help you–they want to make you better, and then in turn ask for ways in which they can improve to make them better.”

Their vision, our support: “If the agent is successful and we can contribute to that success, that’s victory for us,” Spray says.

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.