Subsidiaries Universal Fire & Casualty Insurance Company and Shield Indemnity Both Rated A- (Excellent) by A.M. Best with Revised Financial Size Category of VII ($50 Million to $100 Million)

WATERFORD, Michigan – March 21, 2022 – Universal Shield Insurance Group (Universal Shield) previously announced in January 2022 that A.M. Best assigned a Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A- (Excellent) and a Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating (Long-Term ICR) of “a-“ (Excellent) to Universal Fire & Casualty Insurance Company (UFCIC) and its wholly owned subsidiary, Shield Indemnity, Inc. (Shield). A.M. Best assigned both ratings a stable outlook.

Furthermore, on March 18, 2022, based on Universal Shield’s year-end 2021 financial filings, A.M. Best revised the Financial Size Category of Universal Shield to Size VII ($50 Million to $100 Million) from its previous Size VI category. The group’s rating information can be found at this link.

As stated a few months ago, “We are very pleased that A.M. Best has carefully analyzed and recognized our companies’ strong financial condition and stable future outlook,” said Christopher (Chris) Timm, CIC, CEO of Universal Shield. “We serve the commercial P&C and specialty surety marketplace as a multi-line, multi-product, multi-market brand innovating and successfully executing cutting edge strategies to provide our distribution partners and retail customers with market responsive products and services all through an unwavering company culture of quality and integrity.”

Some highlights from A.M. Best’s Rating Rationale on the consolidated financials of UFCIC and Shield include:

  • The company’s strong “level of risk-adjusted capitalization as measured by Best’s Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR) scores at the 99.6% level”;
  • Strong underwriting results from the companies’ legacy business and the expectation of profitable operational performance over the near term;
  • The expansion of the group’s focus to a broader array of products, features, and potential growth beyond its current 31 state property and casualty (P&C) geographic footprint (now 32 states as of February 21, 2022); and
  • The diligence of the group’s extensive reinsurance program for enterprise risk management (ERM).

“Our broad and growing U.S. footprint, risk appetite, and nimbleness allow us to leverage the group’s admitted and non-admitted facilities to serve our business partners with excellence,” said John Catrabone, Chief Distribution Officer of Universal Shield. “We are uniquely positioned to provide world-class service to our business partners. We believe that service has become a lost art in this business, and we won’t thrive if we can’t help make our partners successful. Our experienced “hands-on” responsive culture utilizes state-of-the-art systems connected to our partner’s management systems.  Because we built our systems from the ground-up, we are not constrained by legacy systems – we seek to reduce historic transactional friction by using external data pre-fill capabilities, our proprietary web-based rate / quote / bind / issue portal, and other unique insurtech capabilities.”