Vince Tizzio
Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead
Thank you, Miranda and good morning. Thank you for joining us. I'm now 90 days in to seat as AXIS' new CEO and I'm excited to share our results and priorities as we look to the future, including generating consistent profitable results and growing book value per share. As reported, the second quarter was very strong across multiple measures. We grew gross premiums written to $2.3 billion, a company record for the second quarter and an 8% improvement year-over-year. This was driven by our specialty insurance business which produced 15% growth its largest ever quarterly premium volume of $1.7 billion, a record new business of $500 million and a combined ratio of 86%. Our group combined ratio also saw improvement of nearly two points to 91.5%. We produced operating earnings per share of $2.23, making 2023 our best first half operating EPS record -- on record excuse me. And finally, our investment portfolio performed well, producing net investment income of $137 million, up more than 48%. Let's now discuss our second quarter performance in more detail and within the context of the broader market environment. We produced these results in a market that we believe is vibrant and will continue to hold favorable conditions in the near and intermediate term. Some of the key actions we led in advancing our business were bringing more products to our North American market by leveraging our global specialty knowledge; continuing to make investments in our dedicated lower middle market units in wholesale and retail within North America; and, of course, attracting new talent and leadership roles to support our business. These actions are just a start. Across the organization we are pursuing profitable growth and unlocking new opportunities to meet our brokers and customer needs. Let me now provide more color on the insurance segment. We continue to see generally favorable market conditions across our specialty lines with rates holding at 9%, putting us ahead of loss cost trends. Our wholesale business grew 35% and produced strong growth particularly in property and excess casualty while producing an average rate increase of 17%. Our international business, including our Lloyd's syndicate, grew premiums by 23% with strong momentum evidenced in marine, aviation, and renewable energy, all the while yielding an overall rate increase of 7%. Within Property, we continue to see upon favorable market conditions. Across our North America and International businesses, we produced premium growth of 33% and an average rate increase of 22% unlocking property a bit further. Our Wholesale and E&S Property business grew 66%, while achieving an average rate increase of 28%. Our Onshore Renewable Energy business, produced premium growth of 71% and rate increases of 11%. Our London open market property book, produced premium growth of 61% and rate increases of 26%. As respect Cyber, we delivered premium growth of 5% with rates up 6%. And I'll add, that with rate increases slowing, we are repositioning our book to deemphasize the small commercial accounts that may no longer meet our risk or return threshold. Moreover, our underwriters are practicing discipline, in the wake of increased price competition driven by new and existing companies in the market and the recent debate surrounding the LMAs war exclusion wordings. As respects professional lines, premiums were down 9% or $29 million with rates down just under 3%. As in prior quarters, a key driver was the repositioning and reduction of our US Public D&O business where pricing remains inadequate generally as well as the reduction of transactional liability opportunities. Looking across other lines, our Marine and Global A&H businesses, generated premium growth of around 30% with rates up in both lines in low-single digits. For Aviation, we delivered premium increases of 59% with rates up 14%. In Liability, we saw premium growth of 7% and with rates up close to 9%. Now, let's turn to our Reinsurance segment. We produced $600 million in gross premiums written. This is 7% lower than the prior year. However, when excluding exited lines we grew 4%. The second quarter gave us further evidence, that our repositioning efforts to shape AXIS Re into a more focused, specialist re-insurer are taking hold. Our premium growth within reinsurance was driven by new business writings of $169 million, a 47% increase over the prior year. We continue to lean into targeted, specialist reinsurance markets including Credit and Surety and Cyber to name two. Our operating margins are performing as expected. In particular, our attritional loss ratio increased, but this was more than offset by our market improved cat loss ratio. On the pricing front across our Specialty Reinsurance Book, we saw average rate increases of just over 5%. During the July one renewals which make up about 12% and of our reinsurance portfolio, we continue to demonstrate strong retention and new business generation across our targeted specialist lines. Now when stepping back, and looking across all of our businesses, during the second quarter and indeed the first half of 2023, we have demonstrated that we are delivering on our strategy to elevate AXIS as a specialty leader, in the specialty underwriting arena. Let me now tell you, about how I see our future and why I believe there is ample opportunity to further enhance our business. Key to our success will be to continue advancing underwriting and performance-oriented mindsets within AXIS and a structure designed to take advantage of the marketplace dynamics. Let me be clear, we see plenty of opportunity to grow our business in the Specialty markets where we have deep expertise and existing leadership positions. How will we get there? Our approach will include, leveraging existing product capabilities across more of the geographies that we compete and accessing new customer segments. We'll deepen our distribution relationships and build upon the strong partnerships that we have in place, enabling our partners to leverage the full breadth of our product capabilities. As noted earlier, we will continue to add talent wherever it is necessary to bolster our specialty proposition and enhance our value proposition generally. We will increase our pace of play and enhance our operating infrastructure and execution, so that we can further take advantage of the opportunities in our chosen target markets, while benefiting from pricing that again is generally ahead of loss trends. By example we recently launched an internal program called, How We Work. The program is focused on enhancing how we operate and how we go to market. Through this initiative, we are increasing our agility and speed to market so that we can better pivot and adapt to shifts in the market, addressing changing customer needs. This includes simplifying our operating structure, leveraging our data and digital capabilities, enabling quicker decision-taking and enhanced collaboration across the company. Further, we are focused on improving efficiencies and monetizing our productivity gains. Internally our colleagues across AXIS are energized by the positive momentum in our business evidenced through the first half year mark, the progress that we're making towards our strategy and the future that stands before us. Our team is focused on optimizing AXIS' strengths to realize its full potential and I believe the measure of our success for our shareholders lies in our ability to consistently deliver profitable results and exhibit outstanding cycle management acumen and produce increased book value. In summary, there's a lot to be excited about at AXIS. We look forward to sharing our progress as we further execute on being a leader in specialty underwriting. I'll now turn the call over to Pete for more color on the financial results.