Welcome to this week's Friday edition of The Max Revenue Letter. The news, trends, and top producer insights you need, without the snoozefest. Today: 5 briefs, 2 podcasts, 1 poll… let’s roll!

ICYMI: HUB International confidentially filed for an IPO last Friday. Some history first, because the path here is fascinating.

HUB went public in 1999, listed on the NYSE in 2002, got taken private by Apax Partners and Morgan Stanley in 2007, then sold to Hellman & Friedman in 2013... where it's been ever since.

Here are the numbers: a $29 billion private valuation, $4.75B in 2025 brokerage revenue (+10.1%), and 49 acquisitions in a year most firms were catching their breath.

Timing's no accident. 2025 was the best US IPO year since 2021, and brokers have been the sector's MVPs... accounting for 6 of the top 16 insurance IPOs since '21. HUB's closest comp, Ryan Specialty, trades at 16-18x EBITDA ... above the 14-16x private deals typically command. If HUB prices near that, it's basically a permission slip for every mid-market PE roll-up to dream bigger.

One caveat: "confidential filing" means testing the waters... not committing 100%.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)... the organization that sets cybersecurity standards for the insurance industry... confirmed this week that 3.1 terabytes of data stolen from its systems has been published online by the ShinyHunters ransomware group.

The breach occurred via a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's PeopleSoft software, was discovered June 11... and the NAIC didn't post its first public notice until six days later. Fellow trade group NAMIC called them out for it, noting the NAIC "did not follow similar standards imparted onto insurers for responding to cybersecurity events."

The good news: no PII, payment data, or policyholder information appears to have been compromised. The bad news: if the organization writing the cyber rulebook can get hit, so can your clients. This one writes its own punchline.

Two stats that tell the whole story: AM Best says Q1 marked the 8th consecutive quarter of pricing cuts in the US cyber market... while Travelers/Corvus recorded the second-worst ransomware quarter on record with 2,400+ victims. How is that possible?

The market isn't ignoring the threats, it's splitting on them. Well-protected businesses get price relief. Everyone else gets hammered.

The reason: VPNs. Corvus/Travelers found them behind 85% of ransomware claims in late 2025. At-Bay found VPNs drove 73% of all ransomware attacks... up from just 38% two years ago.

Takeaway: Lower rates today. But the math isn't sustainable.

Demotech crunched the numbers on the 10 largest US trucking companies... and the results are brutal.

Between 2021 and 2025, insurance and claims costs jumped 54.4% while revenue grew just 9.95%. That's insurance costs growing more than 5x faster than revenue.

The fallout: combined net profit fell 46.9%... and three companies posted net losses in 2025. For reference, zero did in 2021.

The driver is no mystery: the median nuclear verdict in trucking cases hit $51M in 2024... up from $44M in 2023 and just $21M in 2020.

The good news? Legislative pushback is actually working. Florida's 2023 tort reforms dropped the state from #2 to #10 nationally for nuclear verdicts... and a federal bill now aims to route big interstate trucking cases into friendlier federal courts.

Hopefully relief is on the horizon.

Travelers just built its own AI. The company announced TravelersLLM... a proprietary large language model trained on millions of company documents... and claimed it outperformed ChatGPT and other commercial models on tens of thousands of insurance-specific questions. The goal: faster underwriting, better claims decisions, and decades of institutional knowledge available instantly across the enterprise.

Let's be clear about what this means, because it's easy to scroll past another AI headline and miss the significance:

Every other carrier is essentially renting someone else's brain. They're plugging ChatGPT or Claude into their workflows and fine-tuning around the edges. Travelers built the brain itself... and trained it exclusively on how Travelers thinks about risk.

That's a massive competitive moat.

The carrier AI arms race is heating up... and Travelers is clearly in the lead.

To get a quote:

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In this episode, Micah breaks down his curiosity-based approach to moving those "I'm happy with my agent" prospects without resorting to pressure or manipulation.

In this episode Micah and Trey talk with Mega Producer and Insurance Nerd, Brandon Schuh. Brandon explains where the market is, why it is where it is, and even more importantly, where it's going.

Today's email was written by Trey Shields

Edited by Merick A. | Illustrated by Pat Riot

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