Steve Johnston
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is open
Thank you, Dennis. Good morning. And thank you for joining us today to hear more about our first quarter results. The quarter included several areas of good performance including enhancing our balance sheet strength. We see incremental progress as we steadily execute our underwriting and pricing strategies. And our investment strategy and successful portfolio management produced our seventh consecutive quarter of investment income growth. Careful underwriting and disciplined pricing along with more favorable weather than the first three months of last year led to a first quarter 2015 consolidated property casualty combined ratio of 97.5%. While that ratio improved by 2.8 points compared with the year ago, it did not meet our expectations. Every major line in our property casualty segments except for commercial and personal auto order had lost ratios that translated into estimated combined ratios near or within the 90% to 95% range. We strengthened reserves for those auto lines of business, causing our overall combined ratio to rise above the sub 95% or seeking for year 2015. And we believe our balance sheet is now stronger than it was at year-end. We continue to further segment our business using pricing precisions and risk selection decisions that combine data models and informed underwriting judgment on a policy by policy basis. In the first quarter, we experienced strong retention and satisfactory renewal pricing, although premium growth continues to slow as we exercise pricing in underwriting discipline. As noted in the past, we tend to avoid drawing conclusions about trends based on a single quarter of data for certain measures including premium growth. We continue to earn quality new business from our agencies and we experienced the healthy pace of new business premium growth in our personal lines and excess and surplus lines segments. In addition to continuing to develop new products and services through our target markets department, we continue to make progress on expanding our current products and services aimed at high net worth policy holders offered through our personal lines insurance segment. We believe we are on track to begin offering a new suite of high net worth insurance products in the second half of this year through agents in the state of New York. Those products will include higher coverage limits than we offer today along with other new options. In addition to growth opportunities with our agencies on a direct written premium basis, we see long-term opportunities in assumed reinsurance. Last night, we announced with a separate news release an important initial step for realizing future opportunities, hiring Jamie Hole as Managing Director, Head of Reinsurance Assumed to lead this initiative. We recognize the current challenges in the reinsurance market and won’t be trying to grow that business quickly, instead we’ll take our time and maintain underwriting discipline as we develop relationships and expertise that we believe will benefit the company and shareholders over the long-term. Looking forward toward 2020, we’re in the early phases of establishing the vision of what’s to come. As always, that vision will include continuing to profitably grow the company with our successful agency centered model and focusing on our value creation ratio to measure long term value for shareholders. Over time, we expect to develop more specific objectives and plans and we’ll communicate them at appropriate times. For the first quarter, average renewal price increases for commercial lines continued their percentages near the middle of the low single digit range, very similar to the fourth quarter. That average includes the meeting effect of three new policies that were not yet subject to renewal pricing during the first quarter. For smaller commercial property, commercial auto policies that renewed during the first quarter, we continue to obtain meaningful price increases. Those commercial property policies experienced percentage increases averaging in the high single-digit range; in commercial auto, average increases in the mid single digit range. For our personnel auto policies, renewal price percentage increases averaged near the low end of the mid single digit range. Home owner policies were little higher in the same range. For our excess and surplus line segment, the first quarter 2015 average renewal price increases were also near the low end of the mid single digit range. That segment of our business turned in another outstanding quarter with the combined ratio of below 90% and net written premiums up 20%. Our life insurance subsidiary including income from its investment portfolio again contributed nicely to earnings, and again grew premiums in its largest product line, term life insurance. In conclusion, our primary measure of long-term financial performance, the value creation ratio was 1.3% for the first quarter with operating income leading the way. We feel we are well positioned for good overall financial performance for the remainder of 2015. I’ll now ask our Chief Financial Officer, Mike Sewell to add his insights about our recent financial performance.