James McKinney
Analyst · Raymond James
Thank you, Joe. I will begin on Pages 4 and 5 with our consolidated financial results. For the quarter, we generated a net loss of $0.87 per diluted share and an adjusted consolidated net operating loss of $0.41 per diluted share. This included unfavorable prior year reserve development of $8 million and $9 million of catastrophe losses in the quarter. The ongoing environmental challenges facing the P&C and life insurance industries continue to impact Kemper's financial results. Significant factors include severity trend inflation, seasonality and modest adverse development and while moderating elevated mortality. Our energy and efforts remain concentrated on restoring the business to profitability and the inputs that will enable us to achieve our target returns. These include filing for additional rate, implementing further underwriting actions and reducing expenses. The combination of profit actions earning in -- at an accelerated pace, improvements in expense run rates and reduced mortality in our Life business will lead to continued improvement in our financial results. Turning to Slide 6. To enable greater insight into our underlying results we have included an underlying reported to normalized combined ratio walk. It details the biggest items impacting our P&C ratios. This includes seasonality and modest reserve development. Normalizing for these items, we saw approximately 1 point of sequential improvement in Specialty's underlying combined ratio and approximately 3.5 points of improvement in preferred P&C. Moving to Page 7. This quarter, we had modest prior year and intra-year development. It was driven by elongated settlement time lines for third-party claims, additional defense costs driven by an increase in litigated PIP claims and a decline in salvage values relative to used car prices. Consistent with our reserving philosophy, we react quickly and provide operating transparency into trend changes. Despite the challenges today's environment creates, we are able to accomplish this due to the quality and speed with which we gather and act upon information. This allows us to maintain appropriate reserves. Recall that for the year, we had favorable prior year development of approximately $17.4 million. Moving to Page 8. Last quarter, we announced several operating model enhancements to improve productivity and growth including expense reductions. These initiatives are on track, and we expect to deliver on each of our commitments. During our fourth quarter, we secured approximately $61 million in run rate savings. This included 0.6 points or $34 million improvement in our LAE ratio, approximately $18 million in enterprise expense reductions and $9 million in savings from real estate optimization. Turning to Page 9. We highlight the strength of our balance sheet. We have appropriately capitalized insurance businesses and a healthy liquidity balance of $1.3 billion. Further, we continue to have the capital needed to navigate this environment and appropriately invest in the advancement of core capabilities. In addition, as previously disclosed, we are committed to reducing debt outstanding by $150 million and bringing our debt-to-capital ratio back to our long-term target of 17% to 22%. Moving to Page 10. Net investment income for the quarter was $106 million. New investment yields are up 250 to 300 basis points over the prior year, leading to a pretax equivalent annualized book yield of 4.6%. We estimate $275 million to $325 million of our fixed income portfolio will be subject to reinvestment in 2023. This will provide incremental improvements to future investment income. On Page 11, we provide an update on our strategic initiatives. During the quarter, we submitted our initial filings with the Illinois Department of Insurance to establish a reciprocal exchange. We also formed Kemper Management LLC to serve as the reciprocals attorney-in-fact. The project is on track, and we expect to write premium in the structure during the third quarter of 2023. Additionally, we completed the sale of Reserve National Insurance Company and its subsidiaries otherwise known as Kemper Health to Medical Mutual of Ohio on December 1. Finally, as indicated on our third quarter call, we initiated a strategic review of Kemper Personal Insurance, our preferred home and auto business. We continue to explore options and we'll share additional details when available. I will now turn the call over to Matt to discuss the Specialty P&C business.