Married insurance execs earn $50 million in 2 years

• Slide Insurance, a Florida-based company, paid its CEO and COO more than $50 million total in 2023 and 2024.
• Much of Slide’s business comes from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. policyholders who were essentially forced to switch.
• Critics find the executive compensation “grotesque,” given Florida’s insurance woes and high premiums.
• Slide’s profits grew substantially from 2023 to 2024, while its reliance on reinsurance raises concerns, among industry observers about its long-term stability.

A Florida insurance company’s husband-and-wife team of top executives earned pay in 2023 and 2024 that totaled more than $50 million, according to federal filings.

Tampa-based Slide Insurance Company, the state’s sixth largest insurance company, which started operations in 2022, paid its CEO Bruce Lucas $21 million last year, more than all other Florida insurance companies except for one. And Slide’s COO Shannon Lucas made $16.5 million that same year, according to a May 23 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported in the Insurance Journal. Meanwhile, national insurers’ CEOs such as top executives at Liberty Mutual and Progressive, are making less than Shannon Lucas in total compensation, the article notes.

The pair earned $12.6 million in 2023.

The public filing has sparked condemnation and calls for more reform from a few quarters.

The Insurance Journal highlighted how Slide founder and CEO Bruce Lucas, who left Heritage Insurance Company in 2021, is making nearly five times his successor at that Deerfield Beach-based insurer he helped co-found in 2012. Current Heritage CEO Ernie Garateix made $4.3 million in 2024, the Insurance Journal reported.

Captive policyholders

Douglas Heller, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, called the compensation package, “grotesque,” especially considering Florida’s insurance woes due to its vulnerability to catastrophic hurricanes. Also problematic for Heller: how much of the start-up’s business came from policyholders essentially forced to take Slide Insurance because Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, wanted to pare its rolls.

Citizens’ policyholders can be forced to take a policy from a commercial insurer should the policy cost within 20% of what the estimated Citizens’ policy would have renewed at.

Slide, from 2023, when it started taking Citizens’ policyholders, to the end of May 2025 has assumed a total of 232,901 policies that were under Citizens, according to information on the state-backed insurer’s website. Slide currently has 343,000 policies in force, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.

The Washington-based consumer education and research organization that’s more than 50 years old has found that residents in most Florida zip codes are paying the highest premiums in the country, Heller said

The compensation for Slide’s executives, Heller said, is “just shocking and should offend the sensibilities not just of every policyholder who pays premiums to Slide, but every politician who created the conditions for Slide to move in, take all these policies and vacuum up this for their personal windfall.”

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Slide Insurance officials did not return an email seeking comment, but industry officials have long pointed out that Florida’s insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the state. Insurance companies that want to increase their premium rates by 15% more than the previous year company must undergo a public hearing before a panel from the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation, justify the increases with historical claims and future risk assessments and then hope for the regulatory body’s stamp of approval.

Current situation targeted for legislative changes

Still, Republican Rep. Hillary Cassel, who works as a plaintiff’s insurance attorney and introduced legislation this year that would have changed the landscape in which Slide has taken root, said the situation points out exactly why the current set of rules should be modified. Her legislation sought — and ultimately failed — to roll back a 2022 change that made it so that attorney fees, in most cases, would not be added into litigated settlements for policyholders against their insurers.

The 2022 tort changes have caused the number of suits against insurers to plummet, and, some say, stem a tide of legal fraud, add up to a healthier insurance market with more consumer choices and slow the premium growth from the crisis of a few years ago when some premiums were tripling. Cassel, however, has said the changes have left Florida homeowners still paying more and with few avenues to hold their insurer accountable. And the Lucases are paying themselves on the backs of Florida policyholders, she said.

“This is exactly the type of egregious behavior that, as the vice chair of the House Insurance & Banking Subcommittee, I am committed to ensuring oversight and transparency into any and all payments … so runaway insurance costs are reined in, claims are paid and Floridian may continue to secure coverage for their property,” Cassel said.

More: Report: As insurance market wobbled, some companies paid billions to affiliated firms

Cassel’s subcommittee was holding an investigation during the last legislative session into insurance company payments, but it did not come to any conclusions about why parent companies of Florida insurers distributed $680 million to shareholders and distributed billions more to company affiliates.

The report filed with federal authorities shows that Slide is heavily reliant on reinsurance to pay claims, Heller noted.

Risky business

Reinsurance is what insurers must buy on the global financial markets to fortify their reserves to prepare for when or if a catastrophic level of claims hit. The reinsurance market has improved since the Florida market started wobbling beginning in 2019, but Florida’s insurance crisis peaked as the reinsurance market became particularly tight. Reinsurance costs typically account for the largest, single chunk in an insurance premium — about 30% to 50%.

“To be highly reliant on reinsurance that’s a real concern, especially in Florida, where the reinsurance market has been extremely volatile, and there’s only so much they (Slide) can take out of the Florida reinsurance fund,” Heller said. “And if you’re highly reliant on reinsurance … you could imagine things going south for Slide customers really quickly.”

Slide entered as other insurers left

Slide did enter the market at a moment of high risk for Florida insurers: 10 Florida-based insurance companies became insolvent between 1999 and 2023, and some national carriers decreased Florida business.

The risk appears to be paying off for Slide: What was left for stockholders after expenses, taxes and costs (commonly known as the profit) grew from $87 million in 2023, its first full year in business, to $201 million in 2024.  That’s about a 130% growth in net income attributable to common stockholders, according to the federal filing.

Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky could not be reached to comment on the filing, and Slide officials did not comment due to the “quiet period,” according to reporting from the Insurance Journal. This period falls between when the initial public stock offering is registered with the federal government and a month after stock trading begins, to ensure that officers don’t release new information that could affect investor decisions.

Still, Harold Levy, founder and managing partner of HL Law Group in Fort Lauderdale, which represents insurance policyholders, said the situation sounds like the same old insurance game: deny, delay, defend.

“Further evidence that it is clearly a profitable strategy to take in premiums and not pay claims,” he said, after hearing of Slide’s expanding executive compensation and profits.

Anne Geggis is the insurance reporter at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at ageggis@gannett.com.Help support our journalism. Subscribe today