NFP, an Aon company, has acquired the retail cannabis insurance business of Frontier Risk Group, a specialty insurer focused on cannabis and other regulated-products clients. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Frontier Risk built its business around insurance placement and risk management advisory work tailored to the operational and regulatory demands of the cannabis industry.
As part of the deal, Eric Schneider, senior vice president at Frontier Risk, joins NFP in the same role, reporting to Scott Foster, who leads NFP's healthcare and life sciences practice.
Following the sale, Frontier Risk will shift its focus to Strata Specialty, its separate multi-program manager business serving critical infrastructure and other emerging specialty categories.
Tom Gillingham, president of commercial risk at NFP, said the acquisition builds on a business Frontier Risk had already established with clients.
"We're excited to welcome the Frontier Risk team to NFP and begin building on the strong business they have created to serve clients with distinction," Gillingham said. He added that cannabis operators face a risk environment shaped by shifting regulation, changing market dynamics and highly specialized insurance needs, and that pairing Frontier Risk's expertise with NFP's broader risk management capabilities should let the combined team deliver more tailored solutions.
Scott Foster described the fit with NFP's existing life sciences work as a natural extension of that practice.
"Frontier Risk's cannabis business is a natural fit for our Life Sciences practice," Foster said, noting the deal adds regulatory depth to how NFP serves clients operating in other highly regulated sectors.
Eric Schneider framed the move as an opportunity to scale what his team had built while keeping its client relationships intact.
"NFP's national platform, broad specialty expertise and extensive resources will enhance our capabilities, while allowing us to continue providing the personalized service and deep industry knowledge our clients have come to expect," Schneider said.
The deal lands at a moment of unusual movement in federal cannabis policy.
In December 2025, the White House signed an executive order directing the rescheduling of cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III substance under the Controlled Substances Act, and by the spring of 2026 the Drug Enforcement Administration had stood up a formal dispensary registration process reflecting that shift.
Congress has also been working through legislation aimed squarely at the insurance side of the market. In July 2026, a bipartisan Senate bill known as the CLAIM Act was introduced to shield insurers from federal penalties for writing coverage on state-legal cannabis businesses, while New Jersey lawmakers introduced a state-level bill in March barring regulators from penalizing insurers or producers simply for serving cannabis clients.
That legislative activity addresses a problem insurers in the space have flagged for years. Cannabis's federal status as a controlled substance has historically kept many mainstream carriers on the sidelines, leaving capacity concentrated among specialty and surplus lines insurers willing to accept the regulatory ambiguity.
The Frontier Risk deal is not an isolated move for NFP's specialty growth strategy. In June 2026, NFP acquired Signature Personal Insurance, a Kansas City agency serving high-net-worth clients with coverage for luxury homes, fine art and rare automobiles, folding that team directly into its existing Private Client Group under the same acquire-and-integrate approach now being applied to Frontier Risk's cannabis book.
Brett Woodward, president of personal risk at NFP, said at the time that the deal strengthened the firm's ability to deliver integrated solutions to a client segment other specialty carriers and brokers had also been actively building around.
That same pattern, acquiring an established specialist team rather than building a practice from scratch, has now been extended to cannabis, a segment where regulatory clarity is improving in real time rather than already settled.
If the CLAIM Act or similar state-level protections advance further, the cannabis insurance market could see broader mainstream carrier participation that has been slow to materialize despite years of state-level legalization.
Firms that already have specialized underwriting relationships and regulatory know-how in place, like the Frontier Risk team NFP has now absorbed, would be positioned to benefit first from any resulting increase in available capacity.
