Good Morning. Welcome to this week’s recap. The news, trends, and Top Producer insights you actually want to read. Grab a fresh cup of coffee and let’s get started.

AccuWeather dropped its 2026 hurricane season forecast this week and the headline looks almost boring. Eleven to sixteen named storms, four to seven hurricanes, two to four major hurricanes. Slightly below average.

Don’t fall asleep, though. Water temperatures across the Gulf, Caribbean, and Atlantic are forecast to hit exceptionally warm levels this summer, with that heat extending hundreds of feet below the surface. That is rocket fuel for rapid intensification, which is the thing that turns a Category 2 into a Category 4 before it hits shore.

AccuWeather's lead hurricane expert said flatly: "This year we are very concerned about rapid intensification."

The good 2025 results were a gift, not a trend. Despite zero landfalls, 2025 produced three Category 5 hurricanes.

Read that again.

A Delaware judge ruled this week that Meta's insurers have no duty to defend the company against thousands of lawsuits alleging its Facebook and Instagram platforms harm children.

The reasoning is worth understanding. The court found that Meta's alleged conduct involved deliberate design choices, not accidents, and CGL policies only trigger when there is an accident. Because the harm allegedly flowed directly from intentional decisions, there is no coverage.

Meta argued it never intended to cause addiction or depression, just that its design choices were accidents in hindsight. The court didn't buy it.

This is a preview of how courts are going to treat tech-driven harm claims across the board. Intentional design equals no coverage. If your clients are making deliberate product or operational decisions that carry downstream risk, their CGL is not the safety net they think it is.

The big boys are having a rough go of it. Public brokers are down 21% since March 2025, and Brown & Brown slid another 8% in late February after AI disruption headlines spooked investors. They started 2025 trading at a 17.8x EBITDA multiple, but ended at 12.9x. That's not an insignificant shift.

Meanwhile, the midmarket is hunrgy. Total brokerage M&A came in at 691 transactions in 2025, down 12% from 2024, sure, but analysts are calling it normalization, not a retreat.

Notables: BroadStreet Partners closed 69 deals. HUB did 49. Inszone punched in 45. The machine is still running, just at a more human pace.

The takeaway: consolidation isn't slowing, it's digesting. The mega-deals are in the belly of the beast. The midmarket is still moving. If your shop has been getting phone calls from people who "just want to grab coffee," those calls aren't stopping anytime soon.

Last week, the Department of Labor adopted a Final Rule reinstating the historic five-part test for determining who qualifies as a fiduciary under ERISA, ending more than 15 years of regulatory back-and-forth.

The previous administration tried repeatedly to expand the definition and got knocked down in court every time. The DOL also kept in effect Prohibited Transaction Exemption 2020-02, which provides an exemption for certain otherwise impermissible transactions involving plans subject to ERISA. The result is a cleaner line between who triggers fiduciary obligations and who doesn't.

For benefits producers, the uncertainty is over. Know where you stand before your clients ask.

The anti-DEI enforcement campaign is no longer theoretical. Last week, the EEOC announced a settlement with a Planned Parenthood chapter over the treatment of white employees, marking the first major reverse discrimination settlement under the current enforcement posture.

The same week, the agency filed suit against Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast, alleging the company violated Title VII by excluding male employees from a women-only networking event.

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas posted about it on LinkedIn personally, stating that Title VII does not permit sex-based disparate treatment in employer-sponsored events, trips, or training.

This did not come out of nowhere. In late February, Lucas sent a letter directly to the CEOs, general counsel, and board chairs of the 500 largest employers in the U.S., warning that race and sex-based employment decisions are unlawful under Title VII regardless of whether they are labeled DEI, and making clear the agency is ready to deploy systemic cases, pattern and practice lawsuits, and large-scale litigation. Sullivan & Cromwell

In their defense, they did warn everyone what was coming. Now they are doing it.

Chubb's chairman and CEO, Evan Greenberg doesn't typically traffic in hot takes. But buried inside his March letter to shareholders is a paragraph every commercial producer should know about. Greenberg called MGAs "a bad bet in the majority of cases." Not a flawed model. A bad bet.

His description of how the structure works: According to Greenberg, the MGA is "an agent with underwriting authority" who binds carriers, reinsurers, hedge funds, and private equity to risk they didn't price, gathered through brokers offering "cheaper prices and good commissions." A fronting carrier takes its fee. Another broker takes a commission. By the time premium reaches the balance sheet bearing the actual risk, it's passed through "four or five layers of intermediaries, who all take commissions."

His verdict: "The clear losers are the ultimate risk takers… cheap prices with huge intermediation costs." And: "We've seen this movie before, and it doesn't end well."

Chubb wrote $54.8 billion in net premiums in 2025. The MGA market Greenberg is critiquing grew at a 20.2% compound annual rate over five years and now exceeds $114 billion in U.S. direct written premium. Private equity owns more than 30% of all MGA entities. He's calling the fastest-growing distribution model in modern P&C a structural problem, publicly, in a shareholder letter.

The AI bet underneath the critique is what makes it interesting. Chubb has committed to automating 85% of major underwriting and claims processes, eliminating roughly 8,600 positions, and capturing a 1.5-point combined ratio improvement within four years. The MGA market grew because large carriers couldn't serve specialty segments fast enough. Slow submissions, rigid appetites, thin data. MGAs filled that gap with speed and underwriting judgment. Greenberg is betting AI closes it.

No insurer has proven that at scale. As of late 2025, only 4% of P&C insurers had deployed AI-assisted underwriting meaningfully. The industry expense ratio actually worsened in 2024 despite years of tech investment.

Greenberg did leave a door open: "specialist MGAs who earn their income as a share of underwriting profit" are legitimate, just rare. He even said Chubb does business with a few "on our terms."

That phrase is the tell. The risks that survive are the ones requiring genuine human judgment in thin-data environments like complex casualty, environmental, emerging risks with no actuarial track record. Those aren't problems a language model solves. Greenberg acknowledged it himself: "When it comes to most insurance, people still want to deal with people. It's a trust business."

Greenberg’s hot take explained for dummies: The MGA model was propped up by a hard market and excess capital chasing volume, not by MGAs being genuinely better underwriters. Now that the market is softening, admitted carriers are coming back for that business. And Chubb specifically is betting that AI lets them come back faster and cheaper than before, which removes the main reason MGAs won midmarket business in the first place.

Only time will tell if he’s right.

In this episode, Micah and Trey talk with Rich Varrato, a PGA Pro turned Agency Owner and Producer. Rich breaks down exactly how he used group captives as an entry point to build a $2M book of business, why most producers are underusing or misrepresenting captives, and what it really takes to make it in commercial insurance.

Today's email was written by Trey Shields

Edited by Noah Lott and Paige Turner

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