Winston Smith

Winston Smith, CPCU, API is the Chief Executive Officer of Bridge.

Winston came to Bridge after a decade on the carrier side of the Property & Casualty industry. His first love will always be insurance, and in particular independent agents, but he’s grown to like the tech side of the industry too.

Prior to his current responsibilities at Bridge, Winston ran his own micro-Private Equity fund, Hammersmith Capital.

While on the carrier side, Winston was a general manager responsible for $000M P&Ls across multiple states for the Safeco and Liberty Mutual brands (but he takes no responsibility for the LiMu Emu) and spent a LOT of time in the field with Safeco-appointed agencies (and is lucky enough to count many of them as friends).

In Liberty Mutual’s management trainee program he designed new products in the U.S., created the go-to-market strategy in São Paulo, Brazil (sim, ele fala português), performed multivariate analyses on J.D. Power customer satisfaction surveys (hint: you don’t like your carrier unless you like your agent!) and created a new operating model for the Fraud Investigations Unit.

He started his insurance career at AIG on Water Street in Lower Manhattan as an underwriter of Executive Lines for Financial Intuitions during the Great Recession.

Winston holds the CPCU and API designations and has an MBA from NYU Stern and his undergrad degree from Princeton. He lives in Johns Creek, GA with his wife and two kids.