New Beginnings: Launching Cincinnati Financial Corporation

Built to Create Long-Term Shareholder Value

At The Cincinnati Insurance Companies, we care deeply about serving our customers and supporting our shareholders. And we’re always looking for new ways to do both.

In the 1960s, the stock market was on a roll. Fueled by growing prosperity, Americans sought new ways to build and protect their newfound financial security. At Cincinnati Insurance, we found a way to combine those opportunities, bolstering our own financial stability to enable us to offer a growing number of products sought by independent agents and their clients.

Shares in Success

In 1968, we announced plans to create a holding company, Cincinnati Financial Corporation. The new structure would allow us to more profitably invest our assets to benefit both our insureds and our investors.

Insurance companies are required to keep most of their investments in bonds. But as stocks rose and rose through the early 1960s, we invested in strong, dividend-paying shares like our own. Soon, however, we were bumping up against regulatory limits.

The holding company was an innovation that gave us not only new pathways to ensure financial strength, but also a sharp edge over the competition. Establishing Cincinnati Financial enabled us to diversify beyond even stocks and bonds. In 1970, a year after establishing the new holding company, we set up CFC Investment Company to manage real-estate investments—such as the Dillonvale Shopping Center in Cincinnati, later sold at a tidy profit—and to further support agents and their clients through vehicle and equipment leasing.

To Life Insurance And Beyond

That extra income did not just go to backing Cincinnati’s promises, but to making more. In 1972, we created two new subsidiaries. The first, The Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati, marked our entry into that field, while the second, Queen City Indemnity Company, was our first direct-billing operation. But their debuts were overshadowed by our first significant merger, one that instantly made us a major life insurer.

The Woodmen’s Modern Protective Agency was founded in St. Louis in 1903. Its mission aligned with ours—“to keep every promise… and to pay every just claim properly and in full.” The company was later named Inter-Ocean Life and Casualty Co. and was moved to Cincinnati in 1917. By the 1970s, it was a major life and health insurance company with some $60 million in assets.

The merger proved a great success. LICC quickly climbed to more than $1 billion of life insurance policies in force within a decade; Inter-Ocean quadrupled its policies in force to more than $2 billion over the same period. The two companies were combined into The Cincinnati Life Insurance Company in 1988.

Since then, Cincinnati’s stable of subsidiaries has continued to grow to meet the demands of our independent agents and their customers. In recent years we have created new businesses such as The Cincinnati Specialty Underwriters Insurance Company in 2007, offering excess and surplus policies, as well as our first business outside of the United States, Cincinnati Global Underwriting in 2019.

Cincinnati Global is our first acquisition since that of Inter-Ocean 46 years earlier. But it, along with CSU Producer Resources, our excess and surplus lines brokerage, and CFC Investment Company, which still offers leasing and financing services, underline the importance of Cincinnati Financial Corporation in finding new ways to deliver the Cincinnati Way and to create shareholder value over the long term.

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.