Merriweather & Williams Insurance Services - San Francisco

Ingrid Merriwether, CIC
President & CEO / Client Advisor
San Francisco, CA

President and Chief Executive Officer Ingrid Merriwether has over 25 years of insurance brokerage experience. Under Ingrid’s leadership, in addition to offering traditional property and casualty insurance, surety and risk management services, the firm has developed a unique “aligned risk management” practice; this area of specialty includes contractor development, bonding and contract financing program consulting and administration on behalf of public entity clients seeking greater public contracting inclusion for small, minority, women and veteran-owned firms. Most notably, Merriwether & Williams Insurance Services (MWIS) has administered successful contractor development programs for the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Metro, County of Los Angeles, Alameda County, and the City and County of San Francisco – the latter for over two decades. These programs have facilitated in excess of $1 billion in bonding for small local contractors and have delivered over $22 million in contract savings to their public entity sponsors as a result of program participant low bids.

Ingrid has also spearheaded the firm’s contracting inclusivity consulting for public agencies seeking to change the paradigm to better engage small, minority, women and veteran-owned businesses. Agencies such as Los Angeles World Airports, the City of Los Angeles’ Public Works Department, and the Port of San Francisco have ushered in impactful new practices to increase participation of these targeted groups through innovative contracting strategies. The public entity sponsors of MWIS’ contractor development and bonding programs have enabled our firm to offer surety bond guarantees for contractors enrolled in the programs, allowing many of them to secure bonding for which they would not otherwise qualify.

With a track record of having less than a 1% surety bond guarantee default rate for program-enrolled contractors, Ingrid envisioned being able to also facilitate access to contract funding for these contractors once they had been successful in winning contracts with the program’s public agency sponsors. Launched in 2019, MWIS’ Contract-Based Financing Program (CFP) is essential to mitigating the structural and financial barriers that have historically prevented small local and diverse contractors from participating in public works contracting,

Ingrid’s expertise and achievements in insurance and bonding, risk management and supplier diversity, equity and inclusion have earned her numerous awards and honors, including Top 100 Women Entrepreneurs (S.F. Business Times), Fastest Growing Businesses in the U.S. (ICIC), Minority Advocate of the Year, Minority Business of the Year. She is an eloquent speaker, teaches insurance and bonding courses for entrepreneurs, and frequently lectures at nationwide conferences, seminars, and events focused on strategies for greater diversity, equity and inclusion in public contracting. She was born and raised in California and is passionate about supporting and serving the diverse communities which contribute to making the state unique, successful, and forward thinking.