Marita Zuraitis
Analyst · KBW. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks, Ryan, and good morning everyone and welcome to our call. Last evening we reported second quarter operating income of $0.02 per share. This result reflects another quarter of elevated weather volatility for the entire P&C industry and does not reflect the underlying earnings power of our business. The convective storm activity we saw in Colorado, Texas, Minnesota and other areas of the Midwest created unprecedented levels of hail and wind damage. In fact, the Colorado storm has been estimated as the costliest hail event in the state's history. And while these storms clearly affected our bottom line, it also underscores why we are here. At Horace Mann we help educators protect what they have today and plan for a successful tomorrow. As a result of this significant amount of adverse weather in the quarter, we've delivered on that promise for thousands of customers. I'm confident that the significant efforts of our entire claims team continue to provide industry leading customer satisfaction. After all this is why we are in the P&C business to help educators put their lives back together after the unthinkable. That said, the earnings impact for the quarter was significant. The volatile weather impacted both our second quarter catastrophe losses, which were the second highest in our company's history, as well as non-cat weather impacting our underlying auto and property loss ratios. Given the significant weather related loss impacts, I think it's important to note that our prior year loss experience also contained heavier than normal weather related losses. But even with those impacts we still have a profitable book of property business that ended 2016 with a 90.1 combined ratio. This is a strong profitable result given the significant impact weather had on the entire industry last year. As a P&C insurer that writes [ph] property exposure, we know there is an inherent volatility in quarterly results. It's important to analyze and react to quarterly volatility appropriately. But what is important is the some of the tapes and despite it is difficult start to the year we remain optimistic that our property book will have a reported combined ratio around 100 in 2017, provided third and fourth quarter weather follows historic patterns and is similar to what we saw over the past few years. In addition, we are encouraged that when you look past the weather impacts in the quarter our underlying auto results are moving in a right direction. Our life and retirement business continues to grow. These two divisions contributed $17.4 million or $0.42 per share to this quarter's results, underscoring the earnings diversity of our multi-line business model. Looking more closely at the P&C results in the quarter, we experienced 16 catastrophe events which resulted in $32.4 million or $0.51 per share of catastrophe's losses. In May, the Denver area experienced baseball sized hail which generated $8 million in losses. And in June, a series of large convective storms hit the upper Midwest, mainly Minnesota which alone generated another $10 million in losses. I think it's important to note that there were 29 PCS declared catastrophes in the first half of 2017. This is the largest amount in the first half of the year since we've been tracking PCS catastrophes. In addition to significant catastrophe losses there was also historic level of non-cat weather events in the quarter. We have consistently used a strict PCS definition for named storms and specific states impacted to determine our catastrophe losses. As a result, in the quarter where you have record levels of smaller, but still potent convective storms you would expect to see an increase in non-cat weather related losses. And we like other carriers that use a similar catastrophe definition clearly have seen these impacts. Non-cat property losses increased nearly 10 points compared to a favourable experience we saw for non-cat weather in the second quarter of the prior year. To put this in perspective, based on our historic loss patterns we typically see around 25 points of non-cat wind, water and hail. In 2016, we had one of the lowest level of losses related to these perils in recent history at 20 points. This year that trend leapt [ph] to one of the highest quarters at 30 points. This 10 point increase is worth $0.08 of earnings and was a significant contributor to the results in the quarter. Unfortunately much of the weather related loss activity across the country this quarter occurred in geographies where we have a strong market presence. Based on broader industry data, we believe our losses are in line with our market share in these impacted geographies. For example, Minnesota is our fourth largest state in terms of premium volume. As a result when there is a significant weather event that affects this entire state, we're going to have a sizable weather related loss and you saw that dynamic this quarter. But it doesn't mean that we're over penetrated in Minnesota. We always monitor exposure maps and review sub zip code concentrations. But when an event is so large it's hard to avoid the widespread damage. As a personal lines carrier with a national footprint, it's also important to have a wide spread of exposures across many states, including those states that historically have low catastrophe exposure. We have been working on building our premium base in markets where we have historically been under represented. For example, we have identified target growth states such as Pennsylvania that have strong P&C profitability, lower than average weather related volatility and educators with higher than average disposable income that can support greater levels of retirement savings and larger life insurance purchases. In addition to targeting marketing campaigns, we have prioritized the agent recruitment in these markets. We're confident that over time this intense focus on a more diversified geographic mix and a deliberate focused on the most profitable educator segments will help reduce the quarterly volatility that we do see in periods with heavy convective storm activity. But spread is one component of managing a profitable P&C book. The others include strong product management, disciplined underwriting and an appropriate rate action that outpaces loss cost. Over the past few years, we've increased the use of higher deductibles in markets prone to convective storm activity, implemented sizable property rate increases to account for weather related volatility and tightened our underwriting appetite in certain markets. And these efforts are what drove the strong property performance last year when we achieved a 90% combined ratio. Given the peril mix that drove property results in the quarter, we did see a similar uptick in weather related losses in auto. The frequency of weather related claims increased and similar to last quarter we attribute one to two points of the increase in this underlying loss ratio to weather related causes. Looking at underlying auto results through the first six months of the year, the combined ratio of a 105.7 is running about 2 points higher than the previous year. This is entirely attributable to an increase in the frequency of weather related claims. Non-weather related frequencies and severities have stabilized in the low single digit range consistent with our pricing models. Unfortunately this quarter's weather related results will pressure our ability to generate a one point improvement in the underlying auto loss ratio for the full year of 2017. We remain laser focused on moving our auto book back to the high 90s and are taking even further rate and underwriting actions as we continue to grow in profitable markets. We responded early to elevated auto frequency and severity trends in 2015 taking decisive action to increase our rate plan, tightened underwriting and improved our clams operations. And over the course of 2015 and 2016, we continue to increase or exceed our rate plan. Moving from an annual plan of 4% in 2015, 6% in 2016 and setting a 2017 plan of 8%. Given the additional weather volatility, an unprecedented level of industry wide auto catastrophe losses, we continue to take even more rate beyond our original plan and are on track for an 11% rate increase in 2017. While this additional rate will impact written premium in 2017, it will take some time to earn in. As a result, we now expect margin improvement in auto to emerge in 2018, which is a few quarters longer than we originally anticipated. Our confidence is strengthened by the improvement that we already see in our underlying auto loss results when you exclude the historic weather related impacts. Despite these rate actions, our retention is holding for preferred educator business. That said, we are seeing modest retentive impact as we are shedding business that no longer meets our profitability targets. Auto business with lower policy limits, non-educator auto or auto and states that are challenging from a regulatory or loss cost trends perspective can be placed with a partner carrier either progressive or through our Horace Mann general agency relationships and therefore we can retain the customer relationship. Through June, the Consumer Price Index Data indicates auto rates have increased by nearly 8% for US customers compared to the prior year. This is a meaningful increase and illustrates we're not alone in our rate actions. Clearly the combination of distracted driving, higher miles driven and an increase in the frequency and severity of convective storm activity has resulted in an industry wide need for continued rate increases. ‘ With average auto insurance costs increasing at rates higher than inflation, it is critical that our educator customers understand the drivers behind the rate increases. In order to maintain strong customer satisfaction and retention, on that front we launched a multi-channel rate change education campaign to advance the dialogue about how macroeconomic trends and consumer behaviours are affecting auto insurance rates. We believe these customer centric efforts will mitigate the potentially disruptive impact of double-digit rate increases may create. But more importantly, we believe this discussion will be critical in changing perceptions and attitudes around distracted driving. Before turning to Life and Retirement, I want to reiterate that improving P&C profitability is our number one priority. We like the broader industry are experiencing historic levels of weather related losses and are clearly seeing troubling weather trends, more severe convective storms continue to increase in frequency. While this data will work its way into pricing over time, we are keenly focused on ensuring our rate plan includes adequate increases to account for this volatility and incorporates recent trends in our pricing models. Our 2017 rate plan for Auto and Property was influenced by the heightened weather volatility in 2016. But given the results for the first half of 2017, as I said, we will clearly push more. We will continue to take rate, further tighten our underwriting in certain segments and geography, while also doubling down on growth initiatives in target states with accrete of loss ratios. And while the expense ratio was modestly lower in the quarter due to the timing of certain expenses, we continue to look carefully at expenses and we'll take targeted actions where appropriate. Life and Retirement results were a bright spot in the quarter. Insurance in force for life business continue to grow. Sales were solid and earnings were up 20%. Earnings benefited from favourable mortality in the quarter, as well as solid investment income. In April, we launched our new suite of individual annuity products, Personal Retirement Protector, as well as the new Custodio [ph] IRA platform. In addition to the product launch, we also launched our proprietary educational tool called Wise [ph] in June. This tool which is administered by our agency force aggregates the customer's household and financial information and helps our agents make product recommendations that will allow a customer to achieve their financial goals. It will also review P&C and life insurance coverage levels, given household income, assets and retirement goals. For those customers with more sophisticated financial planning needs, we also launched an internal team that can partner with our agents to provide financial planning services and recommendations for those educators who have wealth planning needs that are more clearly aligned to the emerging and mass affluent markets. This multi-pronged approach will provide a level of consistency to the Horace Mann agency experience and replicate the sales practices of some of our most successful financial services agents. We have been training our agency force on the new products and sales process and agent reaction has been favourable. This new approach combined with the compensation changes in product redesigns allows us to provide consistent, holistic solutions to all of our educator clients and significantly advances our products distribution and infrastructure. We have been making good products and progress on PDI enhancements for quite some time. Last year we launched our open architecture 403(b) group platform, then modernized our individual product offerings. And this year, we have moved to a fee based compensation model and refined our sales processes to better align with providing customized recommendations and solutions. We also overhauled our infrastructure to offer simple, user friendly online phone and agent led enrolment opportunities. Our institutional team continues to make headway introducing our innovative Horace Mann Group retirement advantage product to more and more school districts. The sales pipeline for institutional business is longer than our retail products and we expect our investments in this team to produce meaningful increases in assets under management in 2018 and beyond. Overall, the innovations we've made over the past few years in our retirement business were the required investments to transform Horace Mann into a nimble, customer centric solutions provider that can serve the needs of both school districts and individual educators, regardless of their channel preferences and well planning needs. We're confident these investments will accelerate our asset gathering abilities, attract more agents and advisor to our unique value proposition and allow us to continue to take share in the 403(b) retirement space. While this quarter's reported results were disappointed – disappointing, I remain confident we are on the right path. Looking past the sizable weather related impacts, our auto profitability improvement initiatives are taking hold and we are seeing strong results in Life and Retirement. Those are strong results provide ballast in what has turned out to be a historic level of weather related losses in the first and second quarters of 2017. By focusing on the educator and putting their unique needs at the center of everything we do, we are differentiating ourselves in the marketplace and are establishing Horace Mann as the preferred insurance and financial service provider to educators. Our unique value proposition is sound and we're making the right investments to attract more school districts, educators and agents to Horace Mann, which will over time accelerate profitable growth. Thanks. And now I’ll turn the call over to Bret.