Stewart Ellis
Analyst · JMP. Please proceed
Thanks, Rick. The first half of 2022 has gone well for Hippo. Our growth loss ratio improved substantially versus the prior year period with indications of more to come. Our TGP growth rate remained strong despite significant underwriting action, and our confidence in our financial position is higher than ever. We ended the first half of the year with cash and investments of 732 million and believe we can achieve profitability without raising additional capital. TGP with 204 million in Q2, up 29% from 159 million in the prior year quarter. And our Hippo homeowners premium retention rate of 87% remains high. As we have worked to accelerate our timeline to profitability, we have become more selective in our underwriting. This has shifted the mix of customers toward our most attractive segments but has slowed our TGP growth slightly. Moving forward this potential policies are on the margin between a profitable and unprofitable expected loss ratio, we will continue to lean toward profitability when choosing whether to write the business on our Hippo program. As a result, we are slightly reducing our TGP guidance from 800 million to 820 million offered previously to 790 million to 810 million. We plan to go into more detail about our future growth plans at our Investor Day in September. Geographic expansion has been a key driver of our growth as we develop a balanced portfolio of risk exposure. With the recent additions of New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina, we are now live in 40 states. We estimate that our current geographic footprint covers approximately 94% of the U.S. population. But our share of the overall homeowners insurance market is still less than 1%, indicating ample room for share gains and long-term growth even while optimizing for a profitable underwriting results. Revenue in Q2 was 28.7 million up 37% over the prior year quarter. As a reminder, revenue includes net premiums earned growing and steady streams of feeding, MGA and agency commissions paid to us by other carriers and reinsurers as well as service and fee income. Also, we're expanding our third-party program administrator business at Spinnaker and taking advantage of higher, low risk yields on our cash balance to grow our investment income. The volume impact of our increased focus on nearer term profitability, and the increased cost of certain kinds of reinsurance, which directly reduce our earned premium have resulted in a short-term headwind on the earned premium portion of our revenue. As a result, we expect the risk bearing premium, we will earn to come in a little lower than our initial forecast in favor of lower dollar, but non-risk bearing and higher margin commission revenue. Therefore, we are lowering our guidance for 2022 revenue to 119 million to 121 million. Our gross loss ratio in Q2 was 78% an 83 percentage point improvement over Q2 last year. Q2 is typically when our customers face adverse weather events, particularly hail, but our increasingly balanced risk exposures have helped to blunt the overall impact of this kind of weather on our results. Given the progress we are making in this area, we are comfortable offering improved guidance for full year gross loss ratio. And now I believe we will be under 90% for the year down from our previous guidance of 100%. Breaking down the loss ratio a bit, losses from PCS catastrophic events represented 22 points of our Q2 loss ratio net of 12 points of prior periods favorable development on PCS events driven largely by hail and storms in the Central Plains states and northern Texas. I'd like to highlight the benefits of our recent focus on geographic expansion here. A year ago, we were more overweight in this geography and would have likely been impacted to a greater degree by this same weather. Q2 also benefited from 10 percentage points of favorable loss reserve development on attritional losses from prior years. Another key driver of our loss ratio improvement is our continued improvements to our rate adequacy and accuracy through the filing and implementation of segmented rate changes. An additional five states and 11 product rate changes went live in the quarter, bringing our year-to-date changes to 15 states and 34 products. On a premium basis, over 80% of the book has seen a rate change filed, approved and pushed live in 2022. The speed and nimbleness with which we have been able to affect these changes and the substantial improvements to our loss ratio as a result is one example of the power of our technology platform. We were often asked by investors about the challenge of inflation, we would highlight that the very core of one of our value propositions to our customers. The prevention of losses helps avoid these installation and supply chain problem. Second, our pricing matches price to real risk, which implicitly considers inflation factors. And finally, we rerun our underwriting and rebuilding cost models automatically at each renewal, incorporating all accumulated data since the last renewal including the impact of inflation on estimated rebuilding costs, which allows our premiums to be resilient to these factors without additional rate filings. We look forward to sharing more about our underwriting and technological strength at our Investor Day in September. Sales and marketing expenses for the quarter decreased to 19.4 million from 22.2 million in the prior year quarter. As we focused on the execution of rate adjustments in the first half of 2022, we were conservative with our marketing spend. In the second half of the year, and now that many of the planned redactions are live, we expect to lean more into customer acquisition. We've recently launched a new brand campaign to better inform our target customers about our unique value proposition. Technology and development expenses for the quarter increased to 16.5 million from 7.5 million in the prior year quarter, in part reflecting recent investments in our claims processing to achieve efficiency and improve service capabilities, as well as additional stock-based compensation. General and administrative expenses increased to 18.2 million from 8.8 million in the prior year quarter, reflecting additional stock-based compensation and the higher costs of being a public company. Our cash and investments at the end of the quarter are 732 million. While our investment strategy remains very conservative with high liquidity, we now hold 454 million in investments, including UST bills and high rated corporate bonds to capture the benefit of increasing short-term yields. We expect investment income to contribute more towards our bottom line in future years. Net loss attributable to Hippo was 73.5 million, or $0.13 per share in Q2, compared to a net loss of 84.5 million in the prior year quarter. And adjusted EBITDA was a loss of 55.8 million, versus a loss of 42.3 million in the prior year quarter. To summarize our updated guidance for 2022, we expect a gross loss ratio of below 90% improved from our previous guidance of 100%. We're lowering our estimate for full year total generated premium to between 790 million and 810 million, down slightly from between 800 million and 820 million and we're reducing our revenue estimate to a range of between 119 million and 121 million, down from 140 million to 142 million. Thank you very much for listening. We would now be happy to take your questions. In addition to posing questions to the operator, you can also email questions to investors@hippo.com. Thank you.