By Mia MacGregor

April 21 - (The Insurer) - Mangrove Property Insurance has set its sights on being a long-term player in the Florida market with its strategy going well beyond growing solely through Citizens takeouts, the startup's CEO Stephen Weinstein has told The Insurer.

Admitted homeowners carrier Mangrove launched in January, and the St. Petersburg-based carrier has quickly added business to its portfolio by assuming roughly 30,000 policies from Florida's insurer of last resort Citizens in April, with plans in place for a further takeout in June.

However, despite those assumptions, former RenaissanceRe general counsel and senior executive Weinstein said Mangrove does not view itself as solely a Citizens takeout carrier.

Talking to The Insurer on the sidelines of last week's ClimateTech Connect conference in Washington, D.C., Weinstein emphasized Mangrove’s goal to be a long-term player in the Florida market.

“Our vision for Mangrove is to be what I call a permanent franchise. A long-term, sustainable player offering stable, consistent capacity to our preferred channel, the independent agents, and our joint customer, the policyholder,” he said. “That’s really core to our identity.”

While Mangrove is participating in the Citizens depopulation program, Weinstein reiterated that the company’s strategy extends far beyond takeouts, with the newly launched carrier "willing to partner with key players in Florida and be helpful."

Mangrove is passionate about working with agents “who can treat us like a partner, and we’ll allocate the majority of our capital, and our most important capital, our time and our bandwidth, to the agency channel," explained Weinstein.

“We are also grounded in the partnership ethos,” he continued. “And I’m excited to partner with the Citizens management team and the state to help depopulate Citizens, subject to our robust underwriting criteria.”

While takeouts are not core to Mangrove’s overall strategy, Weinstein said they serve an important role.

“It’s not intrinsic to our strategy, but it’s valuable,” he said. “And I think it also helps us establish ourselves as a good corporate citizen to the state and a player in the ecosystem.”

In April, Mangrove assumed roughly 30,000 policies from Citizens, achieving an 86.4% acceptance rate of those selected.

Altogether, Mangrove is authorized to assume up to 81,040 policies from Citizens across the April and June cycles.

Weinstein considers the two rounds of assumptions as a single strategic initiative.

“We see it as one part of the same,” he said. “I view the portfolio as an intrinsic portfolio. We’re never going to grade the April assumption in a vacuum or the June voluntary channel in a vacuum. It’s the portfolio that we’re assembling, and that we will present to the reinsurance market.”

Looking ahead, Weinstein said Mangrove will “focus like a laser on execution of all the obligations and commitments we have today."

“We’re going to be great stewards of the policies that we’re assuming from Citizens today, and of the policies that we plan to assume in June,” he said.

“And importantly, we will enter into partnerships on a statewide basis with agents enrolled in our voluntary program, hopefully in all 67 counties.”

“Our vision is to be a player in Florida,” he said. “We have a lot of runway to take the skill set of our really extraordinary and experienced management team and do things that we believe we can do really well, and continue to grow in partnership with our agents, reinsurers, and other stakeholders in the state. We want to be a good partner for Citizens.”