Toni Logan of American Integrity on the agent strategy that held through Florida's worst years
FOCUS Insurance Services has published its 2026 Policy Makers Annual Report, a 76-page collection built from interviews with an inaugural class of state regulators, carrier executives, MGA founders, and technology leaders. The interviews were conducted by FOCUS President Pete Crowe at conferences including AAIS, Target Markets, Insurance Innovators, and Gallagher Re, plus virtual sessions, and are supported by company reporting and published data from the NAIC, Conning, Capgemini, J.D. Power, Munich Re, and The Institutes.
The report's organizing argument is that the industry has completed a real underwriting recovery and that holding onto it is now an operational problem rather than a pricing one. Contributors include Triple-I chief economist Michel Léonard on reading the recovery through the data; regulators Kate Harris and Jason Lapham of Colorado, Mike Yaworsky of Florida, and Andy Case of Mississippi on AI governance and claims standards; Ascendex co-founder Andrée Bourgon and Crowe on the gap between the 90 percent of insurers evaluating GenAI and the 12 percent ready to deploy it; and East Tennessee Mutual president Art Meadows on modernization. The full report is at teamfocusins.com/policymakers.
One section deserves separate attention from anyone responsible for distribution.
Toni Logan is Senior Vice President at American Integrity Insurance (NYSE: AII), the Tampa-based homeowners carrier founded in 2007, with 437,000 policies in force across Florida and the Southeast as of the first quarter of 2026, written through more than 1,000 independent agents who exclusively represent the company. She joined in 2015 after nearly three decades at Allstate and USAA, and has run the function through the most volatile stretch in Florida property insurance history. Her account is less a brand story than a case study in what relationship distribution costs to operate.
Logan's premise is that agents are experts on policy but too occupied writing business to track the forces moving underneath the market. When the pandemic collided with Florida's fraud crisis, American Integrity decided to fill that gap itself.
In 2020, before Florida's litigation reform, CEO Bob Ritchie circulated what the company internally calls a manifesto: a written prediction of what the Florida market would do absent legislative change. Agents thought it overstated at the time. Three years and a wave of insolvencies later, those same agents told him he had called the sequence, down to roughly how many carriers would fail.
The position was backed with infrastructure: quarterly webinars, white papers and talking points developed with the company's VP of Legislative Affairs, and delegations of 30 to 35 people at legislative Capitol Days, where Ritchie was frequently the only carrier CEO present and top agents were brought along so legislators heard from distribution directly.
The mechanism worth studying is restraint. The material explained what was happening and left the conclusion to the agent, never prescribing a course of action. Advocacy would have read as a capacity pitch. Analysis read as partnership, and agents began treating the carrier as market intelligence rather than a vendor competing for shelf space.
Every carrier describes itself as relationship-driven. Logan can itemize what that statement actually means.
Agents hold the CEO's mobile number and use it. Access extends across the leadership team, so agents know their underwriter by name along with claims leadership and the executives over sales, product, and pricing, and those lines stay open year-round rather than at renewal. The sales force is trained on the economics of the business rather than sent to drop off branded merchandise. Logan plans the annual top-producer trip herself, and it has spawned agent peer groups that now hold standing calls to compare what is working in their markets.
The binding constraint is time rather than intent, which is the point FOCUS makes alongside the interview. Hours absorbed by servicing backlogs and data entry are hours unavailable for relationship work, so relationship capacity is an operations question before it is a culture question. A carrier that wants this playbook has to find the hours somewhere: automation with human sign-off, outsourced servicing and first notice of loss, or a decision about what licensed staff should not be doing.
American Integrity was among the first carriers to withdraw capacity when fraud was draining the Florida market. Agents pushed back and thought the company was overreacting. The market then moved as the carrier said it would. When reform arrived, the company held its position again, waiting to confirm the changes would stick before reopening, and kept agents informed through the delay.
Two things made that survivable. The reasoning was shared at every step, and the reopening followed a stated rule: capacity would return slowly, and top producers would get first access. That turned a promise made in the hard years into an allocation mechanism in the good ones, which is a different thing from goodwill. The company now writes hundreds of policies a day.
With Florida stabilizing, the same distribution engine is carrying the carrier into Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, with senior leadership visiting each state to restart the relationship work from nothing. Asked what happens when automation gives competitors more time to pursue relationships of their own, Logan's answer is that familiarity is difficult to manufacture. Whether the model travels without a shared crisis to teach through is the open question.
The Policy Makers Studio films live at ITC Vegas at Mandalay Bay, September 29 to October 1, twenty minutes on camera with Pete Crowe. Anyone interested in being interviewed for a future edition can reach him at peter.crowe@teamfocusins.com.