Regulation
Ryan files protest after Florida commercial clearinghouse contract goes to Brown & Brown unit
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Ryan Specialty's Risk Market Infrastructure subsidiary has filed a notice of intent to protest Citizens Property Insurance's decision to award Florida's new commercial policy clearinghouse contract to Bridge Specialty Wholesale, a division of Brown & Brown, according to Insurance Journal. The notice was sent by Tallahassee attorney Eduardo Lombard in a Sept. 4 letter to Citizens.
Citizens announced on Sept. 1 that it had selected Bridge to develop and administer a system that would route commercial policies out of the state-backed insurer and into the surplus lines market, modelled on an existing residential clearinghouse. Citizens' award notice stated that if a contract could not be finalised with Bridge, it would turn to the "next-ranked eligible vendor", Risk Market Infrastructure. Insurance Journal reported that Citizens has not disclosed what the contract is worth; Lombard's letter asked Citizens to provide an estimated contract amount so that Ryan could secure the required protest bond.
The protest sits awkwardly alongside a Ryan statement issued the same day Citizens made its announcement. "Although we are disappointed that Risk Market Infrastructure, a Ryan Specialty subsidiary, was not selected as the administrator, we remain very supportive of the concept of a clearinghouse and will be pulling for its success," the company said on Sept. 1, according to Insurance Journal. Lombard declined to explain the grounds for the protest when contacted by the publication.
Insurance Journal traced the origins of the dispute to February, when Ryan representatives reportedly began lobbying Florida legislators to mandate a commercial clearinghouse. A slide deck circulated to lawmakers showed Ryan had already begun building what it described as "An AI-Enabled Ryan Specialty Enterprise" risk-exchange platform. Florida lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1028 in March establishing the clearinghouse framework, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law in June, despite objections from brokers, agents and regulators who argued the commercial market had shrunk enough to make a clearinghouse unnecessary.
Under the law, Citizens had three months from enactment to finalise a contract, a deadline that falls next week. The law also permits Citizens to extend that period, which Insurance Journal noted could give the protest process room to run. Citizens spokesman Michael Peltier told the publication that protests are not uncommon, and that state law generally allows bidders to challenge awards they believe were procedurally flawed. A formal protest must follow within 10 days of the notice of intent. If Citizens and Ryan cannot reach a settlement and Citizens does not re-bid, Ryan can appeal to the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings.
A conflict-of-interest question runs through the whole dispute. Insurance Journal reported that Florida Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky urged lawmakers last spring to include safeguards, and that an early draft of the bill contained a clause barring the program administrator from having conflicts of interest and requiring it to be Florida-based. Both provisions were removed before passage. The enacted law does state that it does not authorise rebates or other inducements to agents that would constitute unfair trade practices under Florida Statutes Chapter 626, Part IX, but that falls short of the structural protections Yaworsky sought.
The conflict-of-interest concern is not abstract. Any surplus lines brokerage running a clearinghouse designed to move policies into the surplus lines market is, by definition, positioned to benefit commercially from the volume it administers. That structural tension applies equally to Ryan and to Bridge, and it is the question the legislature chose not to answer cleanly. Whether the protest process forces a re-examination of that issue, or simply delays Bridge's contract, is what professionals in Florida's commercial market should watch over the next ten days.
Source: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2026/09/11/884797.htm
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