John W. Keogh - Chubb Ltd.
Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead
Sure. As Paul noted, we've been observing in many classes our D&O business where rates simply aren't keeping pace with loss cost trends. And I guess we're now doing surprise interviews and we're finding more and more instances where our underwriters are not finding instances where rates are adequate to the exposure that we're looking at. So this has led to, as a result, shrinking our business. And, in my view, I think it's a pretty good example of good underwriting, and that is trading growth for adequate pricing. So, in fact, if you look at our North American (sic) [America] Commercial P&C business year-to-date, that business has grown 3.6%. However, within that business is our substantial financial lines business. That business has actually shrunk 3.5% year-to-date. So if you look at North America Commercial P&C without the financial lines business, we're actually up a 5.5%. So, again, an instance where we are trading because of inadequate rates to loss cost trends in that business. As respect to the actual loss cost trends in D&O, we've been talking about this for a better part of the year, and here we're seeing an increased frequency really starting in 2016 of suits against boards and directors. If you look at security class actions, they're running roughly in the last two years double historical averages. And there's a lot of drivers behind that, but the three that I would note that are the biggest drivers that we observe, one would be merger objection cases. This is where in a majority of merger transactions, there's a suit against the board, whether you're a seller or a buyer. It leads to a D&O suit. We've seen that drop a little bit in frequency as Delaware courts have taken a bit of a tougher stance against these claims, but it's definitely a problem. Emerging plaintiff bars. There's firms out there that didn't exist 10 years ago that are finding this is a great opportunity to make money. And so, here, we're seeing innovation. I'll call it creative series of liability in terms of suits being against the boards and the management teams. And then, lastly, a driver that we're observing, I'll call event-driven litigation against boards. So imagine the traditional general liability and property claims. Think of mass tort, a dam bursting and people being hurt, a cyber breach where you get property claims, you get liability claims. Well, guess what, more often than not today, you also get allegations and claims being brought against management and boards of directors. So there's the loss cost trends that we observe.