“The 2026 Elite Women are powerhouses; they’re adaptable, they’ve been around, and they have grown up in the industry,” says Handel.
Aarons-Martin cited NAAIA’s research on the well-publicized underrepresentation in management and executive roles. “It underscores what many women already know from lived experience: talent alone doesn’t guarantee advancement. What makes a measurable difference is intentional sponsorship by industry leadership, not just at their present organization, and growing visibility as a subject matter expert and thought leader as a speaker at conferences or serving on boards.”
A number of IBA’s Elite Women 2026 have taken on this mantle, not only by excelling in their own roles, but also by opening doors, forming ERGs, and mentoring others to rise up through the industry.
Women in the Workplace 2025 report by McKinsey & Company states, “Decades of research show that ERGs – traditionally organized around shared identities – play a powerful role in helping employees feel connected to their colleagues and their company. Since women tend to have less access to senior-level networks and manager career support, the career advice and practical support offered by ERGs can help to level the playing field.”
Senior Vice President, Marketing
Admiral Insurance Group
Strategic vision, creativity, and a deep commitment to people
At the core of her leadership philosophy is connection: Charlene Goodwin sees successful marketing not as a numbers game but as creating a genuine emotional bond between an organization and its audiences. Her focus on recruitment marketing is about honestly communicating culture and values.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Admiral’s Wild Side campaign, which she describes as one of the most exciting projects her team has undertaken. Designed against the backdrop of an aging insurance workforce, the campaign targets early-career talent and aims to completely upend tired perceptions of the sector.
By leveraging bold, ENS-inspired visuals and the invitation to “come work on the wild side with us,” Goodwin reframes insurance as innovative, challenging, and creatively rewarding. The tangible payoff is already evident in increased interest and lead volume flowing to recruitment teams, proving the power of a differentiated employer brand.
Goodwin is also a pioneer in using technology and data to serve both clients and the broader public. Earlier in her career, she battled some resistance to using social media for real-time catastrophe loss estimates, eventually helping position her firm as a go-to source during events like Superstorm Sandy, with even New York State turning to them for insight.
“Right now, we’re using Instagram to get a sense of who we are for talent that is coming to us,” she says. “We use LinkedIn for product-related information and for recruitment. We’re able to boost posts or use some LinkedIn ads to get a broader reach. One of the things that we’ll be focusing on more in 2026 is getting that awareness of the insurance industry in general and then more specifically for Admiral.”
Charlene GoodwinAdmiral Insurance Group
Today, Goodwin channels that same forward-thinking mindset into sophisticated marketing automation, building rich customer profiles that support highly targeted, relevant communication rather than generic mass email blasts.
She says, “It’s being able to build out a customer profile as you would in a CRM. If somebody is interacting with the website, you can mark their interest based on what they’re looking at. You can do that as they’re registering for events or webinars or interacting with your material.”
And she adds, “I want to send relevant content because there are so many places to pull information from, and we use that to give a better customer experience.”
Equally important is how Goodwin makes it clear there is no job she is unwilling to do alongside her team, and she deliberately hires those with curiosity and problem-solving ability rather than narrow industry experience. She invests heavily in mentoring younger professionals and interns, helping them navigate corporate life and explore the many career paths insurance can offer.
As a woman in a senior role, she is acutely aware of the importance of visibility and representation. She leverages her influence to extend beyond her department through employee empowerment groups focused on recruitment, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and philanthropy – initiatives she says are now deeply woven into company culture. Part of this is offering a platform for underrepresented voices to share their experiences with the company.
Goodwin says, “A lot of what we try to do is also build in the team-building aspect so we can work together and learn from one another while we’re doing good for our local communities.”
Senior Vice President and Head of Inland Marine
Amwins
Technical expertise, entrepreneurial grit, and empathy
Ultimately, Heather Frain’s impact lies in her ability to blend rigorous technical leadership with empathy, inclusion, and purpose. From the outset of her career, she has demonstrated a builder’s mindset. She has launched multiple programs from the ground up, including Amwins’ contractor’s equipment Inland Marine program and a logistics program, approaching both with meticulous attention to detail.
She explains, “I’m very detail oriented, and I believe that whenever you’re putting anything new together, you need to have the basics and the foundations to enable that program to be successful.”
In building the Inland Marine program, Frain was intentional about incorporating value-added services, which include:
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a safety services team that helps insureds identify and mitigate risks while staying compliant with evolving regulatory requirements
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a special investigations unit that protects insurers and insureds through proactive fraud detection and prevention
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a dedicated claims team that provides 24/7 support to resolve claims quickly and fairly
These help insureds become stronger, safer businesses rather than merely policyholders. In a crowded Inland Marine market where everyone wants to write, Frain ensures Amwins delivers high-quality service by embedding support, insight, and partnership into the program. “I really feel that by offering value-added products to our insureds, that’s how we can really stand out,” she says.
Heather FrainAmwins
She focuses not just on product design but also on creating sustainable structures that will support long-term growth and stability, a hallmark of a strategic leader. What sets her apart is her insistence that insurance programs deliver more than capacity and price.
Frain’s leadership is equally evident in how she manages risk and change. She is proactive in spotting coverage gaps and identifying emerging issues such as rapidly rising equipment values and the impact of tariffs. Rather than penalizing insureds when conditions shift, she works closely with capacity partners to ensure clients are protected, demonstrating a strong advocacy orientation and a commitment to doing insurance the right way.
She also keeps a keen eye on the industry. “I love to look at my competitors’ forms, to be honest, to see what they’re offering and see what they’re doing,” Frain says.
Her influence, however, extends beyond underwriting. As both an alumna and a steering committee member of the Amwins Women’s Leadership Program, Frain invests heavily in cultivating the next generation of women leaders. Drawing on her own experience founding an MGA while raising young children, sometimes closing big deals with her oldest daughter (now in law school) sitting at the desk in a highchair, she models what it means to pursue ambition without sacrificing authenticity or family. Her core message to emerging leaders is grounded and modern: accept that balance is rarely 50–50, and lead without ego as part of a true team.
Frain is passionate about helping insured companies become better and, in turn, making the industry better for everyone who works in it.
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
Fortegra
Vision, operational tenacity, and future-focused
Abbie Taylor’s role spans more than 500 associates across multiple countries, with a clear mandate to position operations as an enabler of underwriting and growth. Her leadership is rooted in listening to executive peers, direct reports, and frontline teams in offices – and using those insights to identify and remove barriers so others can succeed.
“I’m there to make sure they can focus on underwriting the business and growing the business profitably. When I think about the collaboration, it’s how do I make sure that we’re doing all of the operations effectively,” she says.
With a leadership philosophy driven by values and integrity, Taylor believes in aligning her personal values with those of the organization and points to Fortegra’s emphasis on “unwavering integrity” as foundational. From there, she prizes disciplined execution and deep technical expertise in one’s craft, recognizing that insurance is complex and demands rigorous, detail-driven professionals.
She says, “I’m always trying to have lunches with broader groups and to have one-on-ones with a wider range of people, because it’s through those avenues that you understand where the challenges are.”
Taylor is also a highly collaborative problem solver who operates comfortably across functions and geographies. She recently led a cross-functional, international initiative to optimize Fortegra’s UK and European operations, bringing together stakeholders from operations, compliance, finance, underwriting, and technology to align processes end to end – from underwriting through to the financial ledger.
Abbie Taylor Fortegra
This structured collaboration, rooted in respect for local regulatory nuance and informed by US best practices, illustrates her ability to translate strategy into tangible operational improvements.
Under Taylor’s leadership, Fortegra has invested in modern, configurable platforms to support the specialty business globally, with another platform launching to serve warranty, embedded, and related programs. She pairs these platforms with robust data engineering, ensuring high-quality data and efficient processing, and a sharp focus on data science to refine underwriting decisions across more than 100 programs, where even small improvements in combined ratio translate into meaningful value over millions of dollars of premium.
Perhaps most notably, she puts talent and inclusion at the center of Fortegra’s long-term success. She champions Fortegra Network of Women (NOW), the company’s women’s ERG, as both a formal and informal mentorship engine that expands networks and fosters a culture of belonging for women in insurance.
“It’s a two-way street where it’s women and leaders that are being very intentional in reaching out and trying to bring up future leaders,” says Taylor. “But it’s also individuals who are more junior being proactive in creating those opportunities. And that’s why something like the NOW is so important, because it allows the two to come together.”
Agency Manager
Comparion Insurance Agency
Performance rigor, cultural advocacy, and innovative
Leaning heavily into forming personal connections, Luz Wolford invests in the individual behind the producer, using simple but meaningful gestures: birthday shoutouts, handwritten Christmas cards, team lunches, and light-hearted games that highlight colleagues’ personal stories, like guessing “who worked at McDonald’s when they were 21?”
These practices lower guards, foster trust, and remind agents that they are valued as people, not just quota carriers. She says, “I want to make sure my team knows that I care for them as individuals. For me, it’s putting people first.”
At the same time, Wolford is intensely performance driven and unafraid to lead from the front. Having spent almost 15 years as a sales agent herself, she insists on being “knee to knee” with her team, willing to jump on calls, sell policies, and secure referrals alongside them.
She says, “It’s making sure that I know what the job entails because it’s hard for a leader to lead a team when you don’t know what the job really is or what it takes.”
Luz WolfordComparion Insurance Agency
This credibility underpins a culture of accountability and high standards, where success is celebrated publicly. Her adaptive mindset was tested and proven during the pandemic. Promoted to manager, she was told to “hire and train” a field sales force entirely virtually – something she had never done. She pivoted quickly, moving coaching to Teams and FaceTime, shifting sessions into evenings to accommodate agents’ childcare responsibilities, and relentlessly troubleshooting remote-work friction. This willingness to rethink schedules, formats, and tools kept production on track and strengthened loyalty in a moment of industry-wide disruption.
As a Spanish speaker, Wolford is also a powerful advocate for Hispanic customers and bilingual talent. When Liberty Mutual, owners of Comparion, created their Amigos@Liberty + Allies program, Wolford was eager to become a difference maker through the new initiative. There, she earned valuable mentorship opportunities for her new leadership role while also mentoring Hispanic agents herself.
This initiative has also seen significant business results for Wolford and her team. She says, “I remember as an agent not having enough material. I’m bilingual, so I knew a lot of customers, but it was hard for me to give them paperwork when it was all in English. If we want to go after a lot of Hispanic clients, we have to have that support.”
Recognizing that “half of the population is Hispanic” in markets like Texas, she has highlighted the need for accurate bilingual documentation and support so agents can build trust with loyal, underserved customers.
“I wanted to remind the agents that even if it’s something small, you’re making a difference within the company. You might not see it right now, but I promise you, eventually it’ll be so big that you could look back and say, I was part of that change,” she says. “It took us about a year and a half, and we were able to get a lot of that material that we were working on out there and approved.”
Finally, Wolford champions innovation, particularly around AI and social media. She understands that customers increasingly prefer to text or buy online and is training agents to blend AI and local presence by using video, educational content, and digital channels to humanize themselves and reach modern buyers.
Conclusion – what it takes to be an Elite Woman in 2026
Taken together, the stories of this year’s honorees reveal a clear profile of what it takes to be an Elite Woman in 2026:
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a people-first, relationship-driven leader who prioritizes genuine connection
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a deep commitment to developing others through mentoring, coaching, and sponsorship
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a strong advocate for inclusion, diversity, and underrepresented voices in insurance
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a hands-on, lead-from-the-front style grounded in real technical and operational expertise
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a future-focused innovator who uses technology and data to improve customer and business outcomes
Meet the judges
- Agnesa Bakhshyan
Chief Growth Officer
The Buckner Company - Alexis Faber
Chief Operating Officer
WTW - Alka Manaktala
Managing Partner
Insurance Office of America - Ashley Stivers
Director, Brokerage and Placement, Insurance Services
Franklin Street - Becca Faust
Executive Vice President and Branch Manager
USG Insurance Services - Berri Willis
Vice President
Burns & Wilcox - Beth Diamond
Group Chief Claims and Litigation Officer
Beazley - Chartenya Cleveland
Director of Underwriting Solutions
The Hanover Insurance Group - Christina Colby
Chief Customer Officer
Guidewire Software - Christyn Yoast
President, USA
BOXX Insurance - Concetta Barrineau
Agency Owner
Sumter Insurance Group - Cristina Varner
Executive Vice President, and Life Sciences and Healthcare Practice Leader
CRC Group - Grace Hanson
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Elysian - Holly May
Office President and Broker
CRC Group - Iliana Sadler
Vice President and Strategic Client Advisor
Lockton - Jenna Kirkpatrick Howard
Senior Vice President
Lockton - Jennifer Kessel
Chief Operating Officer
USG Insurance Services - Karen Williams
Senior Managing Director
Risk Strategies Company - Kelly Bryant
Managing Director and National Tug and Barge Industry Leader
Aon - Kelly Stearns
Senior Vice President, Head of Primary and Surplus Markets
HSB – Hartford Steam Boiler - Kimberly Hans
Executive Vice President and Head of Distribution
Munich Re Specialty – North America - Mandi Constantino
Associate Vice President, Business Development
AmTrust Financial Services - Marife Molina
Partner and Executive Vice President of Revenue
C3 Risk & Insurance Services - Mary Keiser
Senior Vice President and National Food and Beverage Practice Leader
HUB International - Melissa Hill
Head of Claims, North America
Allianz Commercial - Merial Brown
Assistant Vice President, Operations
Berkley Select - Meryl Golden
Chief Executive Officer and President
Kingstone Insurance Company - Monique Gilliam
Senior Manager, Claims Strategy and Operations
DoorDash - Nancy Mellard
Executive Vice President and General Counsel
CBIZ - Neha Thaker
Chief of Strategy and Market Intelligence Officer
HSB – Hartford Steam Boiler - Rashmi Melgiri
Co-Founder/Chief Executive Officer
Functional Finance - Raven James
Vice President – Human Resources and Director of Diversity, Belonging and Inclusion
Brown & Brown - Rebekah Ratliff
Mediator/Arbitrator
JAMS - Reina Gregorio
Divisional President, Professional Liability
Great American Insurance Company - Rhonda Velez
Sales Executive
CRC Group - Ria Lizuka
Underwriter II, Cyber and Technology E&O
AXA XL - Sheila Bright
Associate Director Training and Education, HIGG U
Higginbotham Insurance - Shruti Engstrom
Managing Director – Cyber and E&O Product and Claims
Aon - Snejina Zacharia
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Insurify - Susan Combs
Chief Executive Officer
Combs & Company - Whitney Ross
Executive Vice President and Chief Claims Officer – North America
HUB International
Insights
Insurance Business America invited industry professionals from across the US to nominate exceptional female leaders for the 11th annual Elite Women list. Nominators were asked to provide details of their nominee’s achievements and initiatives over the past 12 months, including specific examples of their professional accomplishments and contributions to the industry as a whole.
To select the winners, the IBA team relied on the help of an independent and esteemed panel of judges that included:
The judges and the IBA team reviewed all nominations, examining how each individual had made a meaningful contribution to the industry, to whittle down the list to the final 73 Elite Women. Self-voting and voting for relatives were prohibited to avoid conflicts of interest.
