Progressive

The Progressive Corporation is an insurance holding company based in Mayfield Village, Ohio. It is the fourth largest auto insurer in the United States and is ranked 91st on the Fortune 500 list. 

The company offers a range of insurance products, including automobile, personal property, homeowners, and commercial insurance. It also provides additional services such as roadside assistance, rental car reimbursement, and accident forgiveness. It provides its services through a network of more than 30,000 independent agents and directly through its website and mobile app. 

In addition to its insurance products, the company offers a variety of value-added services, such as its Name Your Price tool, which allows customers to tailor their insurance coverage to their budget. The company also offers a Snapshot program, which tracks customers’ driving habits to determine their insurance rates. The Progressive Corporation also owns multiple companies, including the Drive insurance brand, which provides motorcycle and recreational vehicle insurance.

The Progressive Corporation is one of the oldest car insurance carriers in America, covering drivers since 1937 -- when it opened its doors in Mayfield Village, Ohio. Progressive was formed by Joseph Lewis and Jack Green as Progressive Insurance Company.

Although licensed to write all types of automobile and casualty insurance, they limited themselves to auto insurance, and  were writing about $100,000 worth of insurance annually.

People finally had jobs and money, so they could afford cars and insurance, but gas was rationed so they couldn’t drive and didn’t have many accidents.” The booming, car-crazy, postwar economy further accelerated Progressive’s business: premium revenues reached $480,000.

Progressive grew in the postwar period, acquiring assets of $2 million and more than 25,000 policyholders, and establishing offices at 3600 EUCLID AVE. and branches in Akron and Youngstown.

Accordingly, Progressive Casualty was formed to write policies for those drivers who had trouble finding coverage elsewhere. Public Company Incorporated:  as Progressive Casualty Insurance Company Employees: 7,300Revenues: $2.3 billion Stock Exchanges: New York SICs: 6331 Fire, Marine, and Casualty Insurance; 6399Insurance Carriers, Nec; 6719 Holding Companies, Nec Starting, the company found a niche by insuring more risky drivers.

Peter B. Lewis, son of Joseph Lewis, and his mother borrowed $2.5 million, pledging their majority stake as collateral, and completed a leveraged buyout of Progressive.

Progressive Casualty, which accounted for 75% of the corporation's business, was writing its non-standard, high-risk auto insurance in Ohio and 8 other states.

Progressive became a publicly held company and constructed a new corporate headquarters at 6300 Wilson Mills Rd. in MAYFIELD VILLAGE the following year. Lewis took Progressive public with the sale of 110,000 shares. As a response to the need for affordable small business insurance, Progressive expanded its insurance offerings to include commercial auto insurance.

Lewis, a long-time collector of art, first began the Progressive Corp.'s art collection, when he purchased Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung Series.

These pricing policies helped the company's premium volume increase to $157.3 million.

The company wrote over $830 million in premiums, over five times as much as it had at the beginning of the decade. In 1986, the company began insuring long-haul trucks and bus fleets.

The corporate collection constituted over 1,000 pieces of award-winning contemporary art. After the 1987 stock market crash, Lewis ousted his investment team and brought Alfred Lerner, chairman of Equitable Bancorp, MNC Financial Inc., and MBNA Corp., on as chairman and director of investments. That year it suffered a decline in income due to overstaffing and losses from its trucking insurance business, began. The company went public and is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the PGR symbol. The sum of the company's written premiums breached $1 billion.

Following the passage of Proposition 103, Progressive had backed away from the California market, laying off 800 workers at its Rancho Cordova office.

Lewis was characterized as "a brilliant and unusual man" in a 1990 Financial World profile, and he has been credited with the managerial savvy that kept Progressive in the vanguard of auto insurance.

Progressive became the nation’s largest provider of automobile insurance through independent agents. The experiment had lost $84 million—an amount unheard of and unacceptable at Progressive—and was eliminated.

Progressive had reduced its revenues from the state to $50 million and created a $150 million reserve to pay for rate rollbacks to 260,000 current and former policyholders. By reducing the number of employees and eliminating most of its trucking insurance, Progressive returned to profitability. Progressive became the largest automotive insurer in its home state, Ohio.

Progressive continued its tradition of innovative services in 1994 when it introduced its 1-800-AUTO-PRO service. Progressive reported net written premiums of $2.4 billion, helping the company to grow 37.7% that year. The company operated a fleet of 2,600 vehicles, complete with laptop computers and internet access, as part of its Immediate Response service. Although a publicly traded company, Progressive has remained a family-run enterprise: The founding Lewis family owned 19 percent of its stock. In addition, after being led by Peter Lewis for nearly four decades, one writer noted that “Progressive’s biggest risk is losing Lewis.” Brother Daniel, 13 years Peter’s junior, stood in the wings, but as of that year the elder Lewis, at 60, still occupied the company’s top three positions.

Progressive served its policyholders in the United States & Canada through more than 30,000 independent agents, 200 claims offices, and 7,500 employees nationwide and in Canada.

The company announced its interest in taking into account personal credit histories, which reflected a customer's financial responsibility and how he chose to pay his bills when setting their auto insurance rates in California, something which Progressive was able to do in other states.

The company offered quotes over the Internet through its own Web site (www.progressive.com) and was the first auto insurer to sell policies online.

1998: Auto premiums accounted for 93 percent of Progressive's total net premiums written, which reached $5.3 billion.

1999: It was the fifth largest auto insurer in the United States and was set on becoming the largest. At the beginning of 1999, Progressive created a second CEO position, perhaps to ensure an orderly management succession when 65-year-old Peter B. Lewis decided to retire.

2000: In 2000, Lewis, then 66 years old, stepped down as CEO of the company, but remained chairman of the board.

2003: The Progressive Corp. was the third largest insurance company in the United States, with more than $11.9 billion in written premiums, underwriting 12 million people. In 2003, Progressive launched another industry first, our concierge level of claims service.

2016: That number crossed the $20 billion mark.

According to Progressive, the company mission is: “to seek to be an excellent, innovative, growing, and enduring business by cost-effectively and profitably reducing the human trauma and economic costs of auto accidents and other mishaps, and by building a recognized, trusted, admired, business-generating brand".

According to Progressive, the company vision is: “to become consumers’ number one choice and destination for auto and other insurance".

According to a February 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Progressive has a leg up on its rivals in Pay As You Drive insurance, a form of vehicle insurance also generically known as usage-based insurance. Progressive has seven U.S. patents covering usage-based insurance methods and systems, with more patents pending. Progressive began working on the concept in the mid-1990s and continues to refine the concept and bring it to the mass market.

Snapshot is Progressive's Pay As You Drive or usage-based insurance program. Snapshot is a voluntary discount program where drivers can save money on their car insurance by sharing their driving habits with Progressive. According to Progressive, Snapshot is best for people who drive less, in safer ways and during safer times of day. Snapshot customers can make changes to their driving habits that will lead to bigger discounts by checking their driving data and projected discount on progressive.com over the course of their initial policy period.

Drivers plug a device the size of a garage door opener into the onboard diagnostic (OBD) port of their car. The device records and sends the driving data to Progressive, and Progressive uses that information to calculate the rate. After 30 days, customers find out if they're eligible for a discount based on that 30-day "snapshot" of their driving habits. At the end of a six-month policy period, Progressive calculates the customer's renewal discount and customers return the device to Progressive. The company doesn't take into account how fast the car goes although it does take into account how fast and frequently the vehicle operator brakes. Snapshot is voluntary and customers can opt-out at any time. The customer is charged up to $50.00 if they do not return the snapshot device to Progressive should they decide not to engage in the program after receiving it.

Snapshot is currently available in 45 states plus the District of Columbia. Because insurance is regulated at the state level, Snapshot is currently not available in Alaska, California, Hawaii, and North Carolina. Most recently, Snapshot became available in Indiana in May 2015.