$50 million pay package for Slide Insurance’s leading executives draws criticism

Slide Insurance CEO and founder Bruce Lucas has come under criticism yet again.

Lucas and his wife, the company’s chief operating officer and chief risk officer, earned $50.3 million during the second and third years after building Slide on policies transferred from failing insurers and takeouts from state-owned Citizens Property and Casualty Insurance.

The disclosures, a decade after Lucas raised eyebrows for paying himself a hefty bonus after forming Heritage Property and Casualty using Citizens takeouts, were in a prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining Slide’s plan to sell stocks on the public market.

The latest disclosures provoked sharp comments from critics suspicious of insurance industry claims of financial hardship earlier in this decade. Those claims led to reforms that shielded companies from paying most litigation costs brought by plaintiffs while raising costs for policyholders to dispute their insurers’ claims decisions.

The $50.3 million in salary, stocks and bonus payments to Lucas and his wife, Shannon, in 2023 and 2024 appeared on Page 132 of the prospectus.

The Tampa-based company reported a net income of $288 million for the two years — or 13% of gross premium of $2.2 billion collected over the same period.

The filing also stated that Slide increased premiums by 23.2% for policies it took out of Citizens, Florida’s so-called insurer of last resort, when those policies renewed during 2024.

Slide declined to respond to questions from the South Florida Sun Sentinel about the disclosures.

It cited a “quiet period” — an information blackout that can last up to a year after companies file IPO registrations, according to a website operated by ICR, a financial communications consultant.

During the period, principals are barred from discussing their companies’ financial performances or prospects. The period is intended to prevent market manipulation and to ensure potential investors receive relevant information from the company’s prospectus.

Slide’s prospectus describes the company as a “technology enabled, fast-growing coastal specialty insurer” that has developed an ability to identify and execute opportunities for expansion faster than competitors.

“We control all aspects of our value chain, including technology, underwriting, actuarial, distribution, claims and risk management which allows us to maximize profitability while maintaining disciplined underwriting standards,” it says.

But critics of the 2022-2023 legislative reforms said the profit and compensation figures posted by Slide proved they were right to be skeptical.

Waylon Thompson, president-elect of the Florida Justice Association, a trade group for plaintiffs attorneys, said, “Slide’s ability to turn profits so quickly and file to go public is the result of the unabashed overcharging of policyholders for a devalued insurance product in Florida.”

The legislative reforms, he said, are allowing property insurers to “cash in while Florida property owners are paying the highest premiums in the country” with “little to no guarantee that their insurance companies will pay their claims.”

Birny Birnbaum, director of the Center for Economic Justice, an advocacy organization for low-income consumers, called Slide’s profits “outrageous.” They stemmed from legislation, he said, that “punished” Citizens policyholders with “forced takeouts and massive rate increases (that allowed) new entrants like Slide to grow from zero to $1 billion without any significant acquisition expense.”

Rep. Hillary Cassel, a plaintiffs attorney and vice chair of the House Insurance and Banking Subcommittee, accused Slide executives of “paying themselves millions of dollars in compensation on the backs of Florida policyholders.”

An article posted on the Insurance Journal website on Monday quoted Douglas Heller, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, as calling the compensation numbers “really shocking.” According to the article, Heller asked, “What is the amount of money that Slide policyholders had to pay to cover this?”

The article noted that Lucas’ $21.2 million compensation in 2024 exceeded that of all but one Florida-based publicly traded insurer and rivaled pay and bonus levels for large national insurers like Allstate, Chubb, State Farm, Liberty Mutual and Progressive.

Regulators: We don’t control pay

A spokeswoman for the Office of Insurance Regulation, responding to the Sun Sentinel’s request for reaction to Slide’s compensation, profit, and increases for Citizens renewals, said it’s “inaccurate to suggest that executive salaries at any insurer are solely funded by Citizens depopulation efforts.”

She noted that the salaries are reported by Slide’s holding company — Slide Insurance Holdings Inc. — which includes a Managing General Agent, a reinsurance holdings company, a claims administrator, a contractor broker, an in-house insurance agency, and two “non-operating entities.”

Slide is, “for the time being, a privately held company and, unfortunately, the OIR does not have the authority to control what they do or do not pay their employees at any level,” she said. “However, we would note that the document you cite indicates these salaries are not paid from the regulated entity (carrier), but from the holding company which owns a constellation of other companies operating in multiple states.”

The prospectus notes that 99.5% of Slide’s policies cover Florida properties and the remaining half a percent are in South Carolina.

Policyholders are not obligated to remain in Citizens, the spokeswoman said, and are encouraged to explore their options.

“Florida’s property market is the healthiest it’s been in over a decade, and consumers should be talking to their agents regularly to ensure they have the best insurance for them at the best price available,” she said.

Slide’s prospectus offered several reasons why its costs exceed what Citizens charges, including that it must maintain reinsurance coverage in coastal areas that account for 30% to 40% of premiums, while Citizens is not required to purchase comparable levels of reinsurance.

The company also said its coverage surpasses what Citizens is allowed by law to offer, including:

— Up to $10 million in coverage per insured property, compared to Citizens’ maximum of $700,000 in most areas of the state, and up to $1 million in Monroe and Miami-Dade counties.

— Personal liability coverage up to $500,000 compared to up to $100,000 by Citizens.

— Personal property coverage up to 75% of value, compared to Citizens’ 50%.

— Medical payments up to $5,000, compared to Citizens’ $2,000.

— No requirement that policyholders maintain flood insurance.

— Offers of coverage on screen enclosures, solar panels, animal liabilities, equipment breakdowns and personal property. Citizens offers no coverage for these liabilities.

Building business

Lucas, the Slide CEO, has previously used Citizens policies to build a book of business.

A few years after founding Heritage Property & Casualty — also using Citizens takeouts — Lucas in 2015 paid himself $16 million in stock awards and a $10 million bonus, the Palm Beach Post reported. The following year, he asked state insurance regulators to approve a 14.9% average rate hike even though no hurricane had struck the state for a decade, its news article said.

At that point, only 16% of Heritage’s policies had not been taken out of Citizens.

Lucas launched Slide in 2021. It became Florida’s sixth-largest insurer by the end of March 2025, according to the latest quarterly Residential Market Share Report released by the state.

In 2023, the company quickly built its book of business by assuming over 158,000 policies of two failing companies, and by relying on laws that the state revised in 2022 to encourage more takeouts from Citizens.

Last year, Slide assumed 135,975 Citizens policies — the most of any of the 16 companies that participated in Citizens’ depopulation program. In 2023, Slide assumed 82,781 Citizens policies.

A filing by the Office of Insurance Regulation last week showed that the company had 342,209 policies at the end of March. Of them, 292,029 covered owner-occupied single-family homes and 37,467 were condo unit policies.

About 56% of its policies were assumed from Citizens, the prospectus says.

Until 2023, the state allowed Citizens policyholders to reject takeout offers for any reason. The new law prohibits policyholders from renewing with Citizens after they receive a takeout offer that would increase their premiums by 20% or less than their current Citizens premium.

Higher-cost estimates

In 2024, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported that Slide took over 15,478 Citizens policies the year before after policyholders failed to respond to letters estimating their renewal premiums would increase beyond 20%.

Proposed renewal premiums averaging 40% to 832% higher than Citizens’ premiums were sent for three takeouts to policyholders in 759 out of 992 Florida ZIP codes.

The state Office of Insurance Regulation in late 2023 responded to complaints by capping insurers’ offers at 40% over Citizens’ estimated renewal costs. It also capped the number of renewal offers any single company would be allowed to send out.

Slide addressed the Sun Sentinel’s findings by saying that the high-increase offers were “outliers” and noted that customers who received the letters and agreed to the takeout were ultimately renewed for less than the amount estimated in their takeout letters.

Last year, an insurance agent serving on Citizens Market Accountability Advisory Board complained that companies were reducing water damage coverage by capping it at $10,000 or eliminating it altogether when they depopulated Citizens customers.

An Office of Insurance Regulation rule requires insurers that take out Citizens policies to provide coverage comparable to Citizens’ for at least three years.

On a coverage comparison sheet posted on Citizens’ website, Slide and four other companies reported that they excluded water damage coverage from their takeout policies. The agent, however, said that Slide was the only insurer he was aware of that excluded the coverage.

At the advisory board meeting, an office official said a clause was added to its latest round of takeout authorizations reminding insurers that comparable coverage was required.

A Slide spokesman previously told the Sun Sentinel it was not the only company that had removed water coverage from policies taken out of Citizens.

A Citizens spokesman said that the company’s director of agency services was assured in October 2024 by Lucas and the CEO of Monarch Insurance that the companies had agreed to provide a minimum of $10,000 of non-weather water coverage in future takeouts.

Monarch later told the Sun Sentinel that it never fully eliminated water damage coverage but automatically replaced full water damage coverage with limited coverage capped at $10,000 for Citizens takeouts.

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at [email protected].

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