Swiss Re AG

Good morning or good afternoon.

Welcome to Swiss Re's half-year 2023 results conference call. Please note, today's recording is recorded. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christian Mummentaler, Group CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you. Thank you for joining our call. I'm here with John Dacey, our Group CFO, and Thomas Bohun, our Head of Investor Relations, to talk you through the half-year results. As usual, I will make a few remarks at the beginning, which try to summarize a little bit my view on the results before we open up for Q&A. So, we are reporting a solid H1 result today, which put us, let's say, in line to achieve our 3 billion net income target for 2023, which continues to be our top priority. There's two main structural factors helping us vis-à-vis the previous years, of course. The first one is interest rates. The increase in interest rates is very, very significant. The asset side is contributing much more than it was in the past. While at the same time, the negative effects of this phase, which was the inflation, which we put up a reserve of more of a billion last year, is holding up well and if anything it looks like we have been a little bit conservative with that one so the negative effects of of this phase have been absorbed last year while the positives are coming are are here and are coming in the future years second structural benefit of course is renewals so we have we're very satisfied or i'm very happy with the renewals and where we have come to You have seen in the slides that in 1.7, which is more focused on the US, we have continued to cut some of the lines, some of the MGAs that were not performing, some of the liability covers that we're not happy with. We certainly encouraged the new leadership team in P&C RE to be very open and focused on shareholder return and cut if they think it needs to be cut. Overall, we're very pleased with the renewals and the results are better than what we've seen over the last few years, cumulative. And overall, this creates a very positive environment for P&C REIT, obviously on the back of some very difficult years. So with these two factors that are underlying a lot of things, I just say a few words to the different businesses. Corso, I don't think I need to say much. They continue to perform extremely well. There's really not much to say there. What I'm pleased to see is that we continue to see risk-adjusted price increases. A year or two ago, we might have not expected that, but I think that the increase in reinsurance prices is finding its way through inflation, of course, some of the uncertainties, the climate change, et cetera, the different factors that play a role. But I'm pleased to see that a year today, we were about 4% up in terms of risk-adjusted which is good for this market. Life nursery had a better quarter than the first quarter. The first quarter was affected a lot by the excess mortality in Q4 and Q1 this year due to the flu season and probably also part of COVID. Q2 was still affected by that. We were at the end of the value chain. Some of the data is very detailed, but some of the data comes more in bulk format. And so also in Q2, there was some effects, some negative effects from this Q4 and Q1 phase. This said, if we look at CDC data in the US, so population mortality data, there's a reason to be cautiously optimistic about the future. The excess mortality at the population level has gone down quite significantly since that time. But of course, as a reinsurer, we're at the end of the value chain, and there's always a bit of a delay in terms of when it comes to us, and there's always the risk that our population, which is different to the overall population, could have different characteristics. But overall, with where we are, we believe we can make the target of 900 million. And in PNC RE, after a difficult Q1, which was, of course, hit by the earthquake in Turkey, which was one of the biggest, actually, in our history in terms of amounts, we had a light NACAT Q2. I have to say, we and probably other reinsurers Because overall, it was a heavy NACAT Q2. Overall, the estimate is that it's about 50 billion of market loss by half year. So this will be a heavy NACAT year. It's just that many of these NACAT losses were relatively small, like the convective storms in the US, and haven't hit the retention levels of reinsurers. So from my perspective, I'm really happy about all the re-underwriting we did, the moving up of retentions. All of that seems to work out as expected. On the reserves, the reserves are flat in Corso and P&C RE. Of course, we publish also some of the line of business views, so this has caused some questions today. I can understand that. The pattern we saw over the last few years is continuing in the sense that we had to strengthen, wanted to strengthen the casualty reserves. There were some negative filings from clients, plus, of course, some of our assumption changes while at the same time we could compensate that with P&S reserves, which had enough conservatism in them for us to release some of these reserves. We published the triangles once a year, so of course you saw the triangles in April or May, so I think there's a significant level of transparency over the reserves, and you can see there also some of the stronger parts of the reserves, some of the weaker ones, but overall, again, the result is flat. When it comes to casualty, it is, of course, the big question how to interpret that. We had a few quieter quarters. This is all due to the closing of courts in the U.S., and so now they have reopened. And the difficulty, of course, for everybody, this is an industry-wide issue, obviously, is to estimate how much is it a trend and how much is it an acceleration or compression of timeline because the courts were closed and probably focused when they reopened on more criminal cases. And then you would have a pent-up demand, so to say, on that side. So this distinction, I think nobody can give it, but we will, of course, see that over the next quarter. So that's on the business units. What I also want to mention, of course, the capital position remains extremely strong with around 300% SFT ratio. Shouldn't be a surprise, but this is probably one of the highest levels we've had in a very long time. So that's good. With this half year, we continue to be totally focused, of course, in the second half of the year on achieving our goals, our targets. And with that, I hand over to Thomas.

Thank you, Christian, and hello to all of you from my side as well. Before we start, as usual, if I could just remind you to limit yourselves to two questions, and if you have a follow-up, please rejoin the queue. So with that, operator, could we have the first question, please?

The first question comes from Andrew Ritchie from Autonomous. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. The first question is actually on Corso. I was just trying to get to the bottom of the fairly weak casualty result in Q2. When I read the actual report, it talks about prior year development related to 2019, pre-2019. So as I understood it, pre-2019, 80% ceded to RE, just to reinsurance as part of the ADC. So is there noise here in both? I mean, the fact then that it still impacted Corso would imply it's quite a large underlying movement, and maybe some of the Corso development is what's showing up in RE. It could just clarify what exactly is going on on some of that old Corso casualty business. Thanks. First question. Second question. On mid-year renewals, why did the lost cost inflation assumption tick up from 13 to 16? Is that just a mixed effect or a large effect because it includes a lot of U.S. property, Australian property, so it's just a geographic effect, or is it, again, a more conservative view of lost cost?

Hi, Andrew. It's John. Let me start with the first question. Yeah, of course, prior year development was related to especially FinPro lines. And as you say, some of the losses, a number of the losses were probably before 2019. They did share some of that loss with... they actually absorbed quite a bit themselves. So I think you saw the casualty combined ratio up for Corso at 110. That reflects the parts that they retained. And as you say, a little bit of that moved over through the ADC into the prior year development in casualty for PNC RE. I think... this related to a couple actual claims and some adjustments and assumptions of what ultimate claims costs might be that were put in place here. The other issue and the current year's manmade losses related to some large number of industrial losses, some fire-related properties, some other casualty losses that would have dropped into the accounts. And then the second on mid-year?

I can take the second one. Not that I know all the details, I have to say. And this is not a top-down number, of course. This is a bottom-up number. And before every renewal, all the parameters are reset, including all the inflation parameters. So You have a review of all the models, so they could be changed in different parts. And then there is the review of the inflation assumptions, which is broken down into different types of inflations that we would expect in different lines of business. So I don't have a spreadsheet in front of me to reconcile it, but I trust that this is basically the output or the team had from all of these thinking. And this is how it then applied to every single costing. We have a big database of all that, and we extracted and said that's where these numbers come from.

The next question comes from Kamran Hossein from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hiya. Afternoon. Two questions for me. The first one is just on the life business. I guess you're running a little bit behind your kind of halfway point at these test results in the 900 million target. What's the kind of, is there some kind of natural tailwind that you should expect in the second half in the life business? Just interested in kind of how you catch up to that 900. The second question is just on the, I guess, on the plan in P&C RE. To what extent do you think you're actually running ahead of plan? You're below 95 in the first half. Your kind of assumption for the second half should be a little bit better than 95 because you've got more cap premium. So to what extent do you think they're actually running ahead of kind of better than 95 at the half one stage, given kind of what you've achieved so far? Thanks.

So, Cameron, maybe I'll ask Christian to do the life side, and I'll come back on the P&C.

Yeah, the life side is not like P&C, where I'm sure John would explain some of the benefits we might have in the second half of the year. And the life side is more the current business that we write, of course, and some large transaction that might help. There is always work on some specific transactions on the Inforce book that we work on. There's natural volatility. And then, of course, the biggest question is in terms of COVID or excess mortality, to what extent will we see a research at the end of the year and how big will that be? And I guess if you use past pandemic to look at that, you see decreasing humps down to the level which is normal. Every winter has a bit of a hump, but this one was still pretty severe. It was much, much less than during COVID, but pretty severe. I think it's certainly to me a relatively logical assumption to assume that next winter we'll have a hump, but it will be, again, further decreased. So between all these factors lies the belief that we can make the 900 million. Of course, if there was a new wave or a new resurgent of COVID or something like that, it would make it difficult, but I don't think that's plausible at this stage.

Maybe the other thing I'd say, both for Life and Health, but also for PNC, is we continue to reinvest our portfolio at these higher rates, and the investment income should systematically be going north quarter by quarter. One of the things that you probably saw that we've done is some de-risking in the asset portfolio with the sale of some listed equities. towards the end of the second quarter, and those will be reinvested in fixed income, both in PNC, but to some degree also in life and health. On the PNC recombined ratio, I mean, you're right. We would have expected a... to meet the target of 95 for the full year. Sorry, not that we expected, but it would not have been a surprise if we found ourselves with a reported number like 96 in the first half and still be very comfortable that we can come down to the 95 for the full year. And the earn out of more than 60% of our NACAT premium in the second half the continued impact of the price increases we received not only in January but April and obviously in July will all support a continued improvement in the technical result for PNC Reeve. So I think there's reason to be pretty optimistic about our ability to deliver against that target as we go forward.

Of course, always assuming no big NACATs or unforeseen consequences. We all talk in terms of normalized looking forward.

Absolutely. Having said that, we've got a budget which can absorb more than a billion dollars of NACATs in the second half of the year and still meet those targets.

Thank you. Carmen, could we have the next question, please? The next question comes from Ivan from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you very much. I've got two questions, both related to casualty and reserving. Firstly, on the casualty, I think if I sum up the development specifically in the first half, there was almost $900 million taken in. Maybe you could shed some light of, within that number, how much would relate to actual case reserves and how much would be ABNR changes and assumptions, et cetera, et cetera. And the second question, I think somewhat related, is Would you be open to the idea of building reserving buffers, much like now one more of your peers have started suggesting? Of course, you will have some opportunity, I guess, as a part of the IFRS 17 migration, but conceptually, what would be your pushback to having a more explicit buffer? Thanks.

Let me try both of those. Christian may jump in with a little bit of nuance, but You know, I think across the business in the first half of the year, yeah, we found redundancies in our reserves in multiple pockets, both in property, specialty, and frankly, we saw a reason to think it would be wise to reinforce some of the casualty reserves that we have on our books. There were some case developments which were clearly indicating that we would have, and this is obviously coming from our primary clients, that we would almost need to put some positions in, but there was also a considerable amount of assumptions and extrapolations which brought us to a number which for PNC REIT was about 800 million round numbers. We also reinforced some of the casualty reserves in Corso as well. And again, that was helping to drive that casualty combined ratio to 110. In that case, again, some experience and assumptions. So I think we've got those in place. We also have in place the inflation IBNRs that Christian referenced at year end. That was $1.2 billion. We've made some adjustments during the course of the first half of the year, including some additions for potential inflationary impacts in 2024, which leaves us just above $1 billion at June 30th for that IBNR. So I think we're just recognizing the reality that U.S. liability in particular remains problematic. It's affected our appetite now for a number of years on how much new business we're prepared to write. And specifically, Christian also mentioned our proportional property casualty book on the July 1 renewals is down 30% on renewals. And that's just consistent with our limited appetite for that US exposure. The large corporate risk exposure is down 70%, more than 70% over the last three years. With respect to your question on reserving buffers, I think our goal is to have very solid reserves overall. In any one quarter, you might see some movement or as you saw here in the half here, but funded with redundancies, we've got other place. I can't guarantee that that will always be the case in every quarter. in every position. But I think what we see is a ability for us to manage over the recent past to say these things will even themselves out and not get particularly excited when we're 30 million above or 30 million below in any one period. So I think we've got almost 40 billion of casualty reserves in place between corp solutions and obviously the majority in PNC REIT. We're comfortable with our overall PNC reserving levels. We think they're very more than adequate and we'll continue to view this. As we migrate to IFRS 17, like most of our competitors have done, we'll evaluate what that means for multiple dimensions of our business, but I don't think you should expect us to deviate dramatically from a best estimate view of the world.

I might add, obviously, this is a question we get a lot, that there's no concept of buffers in US GAAP. It all has to be best estimates, but there's confusion because best estimate itself is obviously not a clear number. So what we typically do is we calculate or our actual control function calculates the range that they see as reasonable for a best estimate. And then we try to pick a conservative pick within that, but it's not called a buffer. It's just technically within the best estimates. There's also the concept of management best estimates. So if you feel that there's too much optimistic bias or so, we can add reserves So in the end, it might be similar, but we'll never talk about buffers or something like that. What is clear in my view is for the whole industry, everybody, reinsurers, insurers, in the time of hardening rates after some bad experience in the soft cycle, everybody gets a bit more conservative. I think that's inevitable and that's not necessarily explicit, but it's probably happening everywhere.

Thank you, Yvonne.

Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Freya Kong from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you. Two questions, please. Firstly, on the casualty strengthening, would you be able to give us some steer on, you know, of the strengthening, what was actual case reserves developing poorly versus increased reinforcement? And is this theme of reinvesting redundancies from property and specialty into casualty going to be an ongoing thing we should expect? And you also touched on the outlook for court cases being somewhat uncertain, whether it's catch-up or not. What is your assumption here? And then secondly, just on solvency, which is well above target, could you just remind us of some of the negative impacts you had flagged at the start of the year in terms of hedges unwinding, and what is your plan here? Can we just get an update on the plans here? Thanks.

Let me try both of those. On the first one, I actually think it's probably the same question that Yvonne asked, and I'll give it the same answer. Yes, there were some case adjustments based on reports up from our primary clients, and there were some related to extrapolations and assumptions. And we're not giving the specific breakdown between the two, but they were focused on I think U.S. liability and motor as well. And on motor, less with respect to physical damage. There's obviously been an inflationary kick to that side of the industry, but more related to bodily injuries and deaths associated with commercial motor in particular. On solvency, we are materially above the top end of the guidance that we have for the sort of mid to long run. We explained that we were relatively under risked on the asset side at year end and that was coherent with the 294 that we published. We've remained under risk and actually one of the challenges we had, especially in the second quarter, was that we've left on a number of hedges, including for the equity portfolio, listed equity portfolio. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a basis risk where the hedges were related to indices and the actual investments were specific positions chosen by our investment managers. those did not necessarily overlap. And what we found is a bit of a mismatch in larger losses actually out of some of the hedges than we saw gains out of the actual equities. And reviewing that during the course of the quarter, we made the decision to simply reduce materially the listed equity positioning. And so again, at June 30th, you'll find a relatively risk-off position both in terms of the exposure to equities as well as in the high-quality credit that we're focused on. And so that's contributing to the relatively high SST ratio that we'll be showing at six months. We haven't finished that calculation, but the guidance we're giving is you should expect something in or around 300% as a July 1st SST ratio. Thank you, Freya. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from . Please go ahead.

Oh, hi. Thanks for taking my question. The first one is on investments. I appreciate you sold out completely out of equities, but you still have a sizable sort of 3.6 billion private equity exposure, even when you exclude your strategic investments. So can you maybe give us some color on your thinking when it comes to the space overall? I noticed that you also had some valuation gains in private equity. So presumably you haven't seen much pressure here yet. Do not expect any pressure going forward. And the second question is on the topic of PFAs and potential related liability exposures there. I was wondering if you have set aside any specific reserve for potential exposure to this. And I was wondering the casualty strengthening could possibly relate to that. And maybe I was also hoping to get your thoughts on whether there have been any exclusions that were brought in in some of these policies that could potentially alleviate some exposure further down the line. Thank you.

Thanks for the questions. With respect to the asset side, you're right. We do have a curated portfolio in private equity. What I can say is this has performed surprisingly well in spite of the market volatility we've seen in the last, frankly, 15 months. And while we expected some revaluations and potential write downs around year end, maybe with a leg coming into 2023, they did not materialize in any significant way. So we're staying very much on top of this. We've got a policy whereby if we're convinced that there's bad news coming on this particular portfolio, but it may not have been reported because of the lagging. We're prepared to go ahead and estimate a write-down. We've not seen the need to do that at Q2 for anything that might be coming in Q3. A subsequent event, which I can reference because it is actually available, if not easily, in the public domain, is we did make the decision to reduce to close to zero our strategic investment in CPIC. We'd made that investment in the London-based GDRs. we decided that the volatility that we'd seen in the A share price in the last six months was probably more than we wanted to hold on to. And so a very friendly action with the company. They were grateful for our initial investment. And we always were expecting to hold this for a period of time. I think We're in fine shape. The company itself, we're very strongly of the belief it's performing very well. This is nothing to do with any insight that we have on CPIC, but rather simply the volatility in the asset portfolio was a challenge for us. Your question on PFAS, look, I just rolled this into the broader issue of U.S. liabilities and our view that the mass tort system in the U.S. is going to continue to be problematic for the insurance industry. And so when you see us increasing reserves in casualty, you should assume that we're thinking about all the different vectors and different specific items that might be responsible for increased claims payments. I think the, you know, this is not a new issue for us. We've seen this developing over the last five, maybe even 10 years. And so you should not be expecting that either we're surprised or that we're unprepared for what might be some real losses here. How big those losses will be to be seen, and we'll continue to evaluate this over time, and if we see the need to make any adjustments, we will, but at least right now, we're okay with the reserves we've got set up. Thank you, Chris. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Will Harcastle from UBS. Please go ahead. Mr. Harcastle, your line is open. Maybe you are on mute.

I was indeed. My fault. Sorry. Hey, everyone. Hope you're well. Just first of all, touching on that inflation IBNR that you inserted, it looks like it's been absorbed sort of 15, maybe 20%. You mentioned in the comments that some allowance for the 2024 inflation assumption, I guess that's new because it's extended from the end of 23. Any more colour on the change in assumption you can give? Does this extrapolate a quarter or is it for the full year? Is there a specific country that that is driven by or it's more generic assumptions? And then just thinking about that motor component of the strengthening outside of the bulk IBNR, can you verify that that was US specific commercial or is it more broad based? And finally, just a quick one on reinvestment yield. It seemed to go down quarter on quarter in PNC, still at a very high level. It just seems strange given the dynamic in the quarters. Is there anything abnormal in either quarter? I guess what I'm trying to get to is what's the better one to use for a run rate? Thanks.

Okay, I'm pretty sure you managed to squeeze three questions in, but I'll do my best. On inflation, the adjustments we made for 2024 at this point are small. Again, when you think about short tail lines, our view is we've made our lost cost picks in the last 12 months, understanding that there is considerable inflation coming through on property, on motor, and other places. And so I think that's in pretty good shape. And then secondly, with respect to longer-term lines of lease and casualty, we've also made those material price adjustments. So the delta that we saw necessary for 2024 has been pretty modest overall. compared to what were much more significant positions in the 2022 reserving, where both short tail and some longer tail lines were hit, not just with the challenges of CPI-related inflation, but wage inflation, medical inflation, all having contributing factors to the way we thought we needed to to build that IBNR. Your 1A question on motor is largely US and largely commercial motor. Again, on private auto, it was cost more to repair and replace, but those price adjustments have largely been made both in the primary as well as by reinsurers already last year. What's continuing to be problematic, as I say, is large dollar settlements for serious accidents that involve individuals either being badly hurt or killed in a commercial position. And the third question, I'm sorry, I stopped writing.

Maybe I can take it. So the reason why it dropped slightly is mostly based on the mix we invested in. So it was less in corporate. And that's the reason why it came down a bit. So not because of interest rate levels.

So it was on a going forward basis, probably a half year. Yeah. number rather than Q2 would be the right way to go for it.

Thank you, Will. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Darrell Goh from RBC. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Two questions from my side, please. This first one, I'm just thinking about your P&C rate, 95% combined ratio. Now that you've completed all the main renewals to date, how do you think those have turned out relative to the expectations that you had during the year. So did it turn out better or worse? And also within that, so you flagged three points of improvement from rates. Are you getting any benefits from the exchange? And the next question, I'm sorry to go back to the federal P&C additions, but I'm just thinking about on the P&C side of things, Can you say if these are mostly from excess of lost type of contracts, and are you looking close to your coverage limit, or is there a chance that maybe you're close to tapping out those limits already? Thank you.

So let me give these a try. The first question, yeah, I mean, over time we expect these price increases to be valuable to us in the technical results, Again, the right way to think about this is not the 18% increase, but the 5% marginal improvement, which I think is what you've got. We anticipated some of that when we put out our targets for this year. And so I guess what I'd say is with the July renewal, we probably are at the upper end of what we thought was going to be a range of potential improvements. We're also probably at the upper end of what we thought was going to be the range of required price improvements, the 13%, you know, materially higher than anything we've seen in the last five years. So overall, this should help us going into 2024 with the technical result of P&C, and that's where I think you should see it. We're far away from being in a position to start talking about a 2024 combined racial target. But obviously, that will be under IFRS 17 anyhow. So we'll have to show you the transition. And we will give you some indications on our investor date on December 1. With respect to casualty, again, sorry, specific focus was on the, could you, if you could repeat, could you just repeat the casualty specific question?

Absolutely, absolutely. I'm just thinking for the key and theory exposures that you've added. Were these coming from mostly excess of loss type of contracts or a photo share? I'm just thinking about the risk of potential additions. Thank you.

Yeah, so it's a mix and You know, with individual clients, we're clearly in very different positions. And I think we're not in the position to say that we're reserved up to absolute maximal exposures. Any place, I think that would be nearly impossible for any reinsurer to do. What I can say is we've evaluated systematically where we think exposures are and feel pretty comfortable with the position we've got on June 30th. And as new information comes in, either positive or negative, we'll evaluate that and think through what that means for total reserves as well as the allocation across lines.

Harold, on your FX question, on the combined ratio, there's a small negative impact that we faced in the first half. So the operating part of the combined ratio got worse. You can see that on slide 23. And a small part of that is because of unfavorable FX. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Vinit Malhotra from Mediobanca. Please, go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon. Thank you. I hope you can hear me. Yes. So my... Yeah, thanks, Mike. Two questions. First is on the market outlook because I think compared to at least one of your larger or large German peers, you seem to be a bit more optimistic about the whole supply-demand equation. You know, and I'm just curious to hear what you think. Do you think flat next year is good enough or you think more can be had from this pricing cycle? So that's the First question. The second question is on renewals, please. So, you know what, I'm just looking at the slide seven and the 0.1 billion economic tax earnings increase. I'm just curious, does it not sound a bit lighter than what could have been expected because you got 0.2 in April, which is a smaller renewal. July, you know, you've got a 5% price increase on roughly $4 billion of premiums. And then you have the 0.1. I mean, is there something else going on here that should or should not be, or maybe it's not even important? I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that number. Thank you.

I'll try to take those. So maybe the second one versus more specific. Price increases were already there a year ago in July quite significantly. So I think what we write is that with the portfolio, even though we cut it quite a bit on an economic basis, we still continue to earn more. So I think it's probably mostly if it's versus your expectations, probably because it already went up quite a bit a year earlier. In terms of the supply-demand, I'm not sure we're more optimistic of what we are, but I think it's impossible at this stage to forecast what's going to happen at 1.1. What is clear is a function of where the year ends. So it's always a function of what has happened so far. And there's different factors that are going to play a role. I think one big role is how is the year developing. If there's very little NACAD, it's hugely profitable. It's a different situation. Then if you imagine another Ian coming this year, I think it's going to be panic and markets are going to go up significantly. So very different potential outcome. You have on the capital market side, you have less inflows than you used to have. There was a bit of bonanza the last few years. And with Ian, I think this has really cooled down. There's still some people coming in. They play more in the ILS space or they're very specific and go behind other reinsurers But with high interest rates, I think it's understandable that there's other opportunities for capital out there in the current year. And then another thing we don't know is the clients themselves, I think, as they set a budget last year, which was probably already set by the time Ian hit and the price increases were much higher than they thought, a lot of those clients decided to stick with the budget they had, which is in terms of premium. They think it has a premium in profits they give away. And so some of them didn't fill their programs or couldn't react completely to the market change. So what will be interesting this year is to see now that it's time to think and also we see Q2 obviously with a lot of smaller NACATs, how will they buy? What will be the buying behavior by the end of the year? And is there a higher demand this time, more than last time or not? These are all questions to consider. I'm not giving the answer, but I would be surprised if prices go down at the end of the year. I mean, the whole reinsurance market comes out of several years where it had to absorb very significant losses. And so over the long term to make the returns necessary for shareholders, the reinsurance market needs more.

The next question comes from Ashik Musadi from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, Christian. Good afternoon, John. Just a couple of questions I have. First of all, with respect to reserving in casualty, I mean, is it possible if you can give us some color about property and specialty? I mean, in combination, property and specialty in the P&C read business was just stunning at 70%. So how much of that is attritional? How much of that is reserve releases? So some color on that would be helpful. And what are the sources of those reserve releases? For example, in first quarter, I guess, a big part of the reserve release from property cat was Hurricane Ian release. So any color on what's going on on the reserving side would be helpful. Second thing is, again, sticking on that proper casualty business. I mean, combined ratio of 119%. Now, you gave reasonable color about... some of the reserve additions is to do with case reserves, something is just adding prudence, et cetera, but any color you can give as to what is the underlying number without reserve changes for the casualty business. Is it above 100%, is it below 100%, any color on that would be helpful, thank you.

Sure, let's see if we can do some real time Matt, on your second question. On the first question, yeah, in property for PNC Reeve, the numbers were flattered by the releases we had, especially the flood-related position on Ian. But I think that there's some other pieces that we're able to come through as well. I think specialty at 76 also received a benefit, and we're not quantifying the amounts, but I think, you know, in both cases, the underlines are performing very well, and they're flattered by these releases that came through. On corporate solutions, what I can say is the specialty line, which looks okay at 94.6, was actually running materially better than that. We've made an adjustment in the first quarter for the Ukraine war losses, and that would have dropped into the specialty combined ratio as well. And so if you remove that, the specialty looks materially better than that 94. And again, the casualty was the addition of these 200 million roughly on reserving for FinPro and some other pre-2019 losses. On the CASD, if we back out the position, I'm guessing we're probably very close to 100 maybe not below it, taking out those positions. And there's one of the reasons why on the renewals we were saying, one, we need the price increase, and two, we need to continue to reduce our overall position. Having said that, on many of the casualty lines, the duration will give us a lift with the higher investment income on a going forward basis. So it's not that it's necessarily uneconomic at 100, but we expect more at this point.

Thank you, Ashik. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Phil Roth from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. The first question is on the 70 bits of NATCAT in Q2 in PNC-RE. What's your assessment of how much of the low number is due to re-underwriting and higher attachment points, etc.? ? and how much is due to just good fortune or maybe the shape and size of losses in Q2 that you saw or didn't see. And then second question, it's back on the Corso relationship with PNC RE. We're now through another renewal season. I wondered if you could give us a flavor of how much reinsurance Corso has been able to find on the open market or maybe how this has changed the dependence on PNC RE over the last 12 months. Thank you.

So on the first one, you know, as Christian said, it was not a light first half for net caps. We estimate approximately $50 billion of insured losses, and best guess is you can do almost a 50-50 split between the two quarters. So, you know, Q2 at $25 billion plus or minus is is a significant quarter. It's a very significant second quarter. And our view is that, in fact, the systematic re-underwriting of our book, removing ourselves from high-frequency layers, aggregate covers, and some of these secondary perils, which we've been talking about now for a number of years, has been material in reducing our exposures and the losses associated with that. What we've not tried to do is the scenario recreation of if we did our 2020 exposures with these losses, what it would have looked like. But I can say they hit the insurance industry. They would have hit us in some more material ways in previous years. And I'm actually very pleased by the underwriting in places like Canada where you saw primary companies report very sizable losses from the fires there. In the U.S. where the windstorms, hail, floods, you know, were material in second quarters to some important primary companies. And even in Australia where our New Zealand losses were significant. somewhat contained between the Cyclone Gabriel and the other floods there. So I don't assume that's all good luck. I think this is some real underwriting discipline that's delivered there. On Corso, the NatCat experience was de minimis in, actually in the first half, but also in the second half. second quarter truly zero in terms of any large NACAT losses. They're probably a little bit of luck. I'm willing to suggest the path of a hurricane and in which factory it obliterates is not within our control. But we did not have that loss in spite of significant property books.

On the reinsurance side, maybe this is a really important point because about 10 years ago, some of you might remember everything was reinsured with reinsurance out of the thought that why give economics away? But we have changed that dramatically starting 19 because reinsurance is a really important pricing signal and we don't want Kosa to benefit in any way or not be a responsible player. The mandate is to go up to 50%, and I think they have more or less reached that point, so 50% of external buying, so that we have pricing points from the real market, even though in the beginning that was tough because it was a new player, if you want, buying reinsurance. But by now, of course, it has its own relationship with some reinsurance partners, and we're very happy about that. And if anything, we're going to push to increase that further.

Thank you, Phil. Could we have the next question, please?

The next question comes from Surabh Kulkami from Societe Generale. Please go ahead.

Hi, yes, thank you. This is Surabh from SOCGEN. Just one question from my side. It's actually a clarification I need. Does the casualty reserves trending done in 1H sit on top of the inflation IBNRs you did in year-end 2022? at least some of it which is not driven by case reporting and is specific to inflation-driven reserving? Or in other words, would it have been feasible for you to allocate some of these IBNRs to these casualty lines where you did reserves training in 1H?

So let me try. That extra reserving done in the first half is in addition to the inflationary IBNRs we've got in place. As I mentioned, we've... allocated some of those inflation reserves. So we, at December 31st, there were 1.2 billion, but at June 30th, there's still over a billion of IV&Rs for inflation. And some of that's in Corso, but the vast majority of that is in PNC Re. And I think, yeah, over time, you may see some of that migrating into casualty-related inflationary impacts, also the motor portfolio that we said has been problematic for us?

I think to be more precise, the way I answered the question is when we set up the 1.1, 1.2 billion of reserves IBNR for inflation, it was specifically, we had a thought around all the different line of business and how they would be affected by inflation in which underwriting year and by when we would see it so that we basically have conceptually there's a writing down of this um liability that we build is this asset in line with when the underlying inflation should become visible which means that this year in in h1 uh the releases we have from this uh ibnr reserves are more in the shorter line so there's no benefit yet for casually casualty would come later and we would also expect the the effect of inflation to hit the casualty lines later. So eventually it will come, but not in H1.

Thank you, Sourabh. Could we have the next question, please?

The last question for today's call comes from Thomas Fossard from HSBC. Please, go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon. Two questions. The first one would be related to casualty pricing momentum that you've seen in the July 1 renewals, especially in the U.S., Can you say a bit more about the trends? Because it seems to be that a lot of people in the market, a lot of players are getting back exposure and still the segment seems to be very prone to large losses and still we don't see much price reaction so far unless I'm mistaken. So can you tell us a bit more about the dynamics you're seeing on the ground? And the second question will be related to your 300% SST ratio. I know that everything is not cash, but it's also difficult to believe that you're going to deploy significantly more capital into the market to write business than you did this year. So how to think about your 300% when it comes to capital deployment and capital reallocation? Thank you.

Thomas, thank you for the question. On casualty, this is actually quite interesting from our perspective, but of course every player will have their own perspective in the market. The really bad underwriting years are 2013 to 2018 mostly. We also see 2019 a little bit deteriorate, but that's the bad underwriting year. It took several years to find out that they are bad because first you had to wait for court cases to come through. When this happened, we reacted and we started to wind down our exposure. But of course, the case has continued because first it hit the earlier years and now it's moving forward towards the later years of that period. You remember that from then on, when we dug very deep to try to understand what's actually going on in the U.S., it made us very pessimistic. We've been pessimistic now for years. because this is a bit out of control. This is a, this is hedge fund finance, the plaintiff bar, highly organized using digital data, using human psychology to influence juries, et cetera. There's a whole industry around that. And how do you want to model that? And how do you want to foresee the price increases that are necessary for this social inflation? Because that's what it is. It costs the society. And we see very little signs of this stopping. There's, early, very early signs in some jurisdictions where there's some limitation being put up, but there's nothing comparable to tort reform in the US yet. And ultimately, in my view, it will have to come because it cannot grow to endless, you know, proportions. So in that skepticism, we cut and as some players, you know, decreased their NACATs, exposure, I think, oh, that's my feeling, my interpretation, many. So this is probably the best time to enter casualty. You know, of course, you can make a bet that with all the increases that we saw in the primary market, that this will be enough to cover it. But I just think it's very hard to quantify. It's not a neck cat. It's sort of a human cat that's happening. And it's very hard to predict. And so there was indeed a lot of people going in, and the prices haven't gone up as much as we think they should, and therefore we have continued to cut. The movement was particularly strong at the 1.1 renewal this year. Since then, it has cooled down a little bit, so I think more people are getting a bit nervous about what this means. Of course, those who have entered now will probably only see the real results come out in four years or so. This is, of course, the challenge of this line of business. We're actually astonished that in our view, the rates are more going down than up net in casualty. So when we talk about hard market, we talk about NACAT and not about casualty. But of course, I appreciate that somebody else might see it differently. It's really all about your future outlook of this line of business and whether you think the price increases are higher than, let's say, long-term social inflation trends.

And maybe just a final thought on that before I get to your SST question. We've seen impressive discipline, I think, by the reinsurance industry on NatCat in 2023. And while there's been some people willing to do some of the higher frequency layers, generally speaking, I think people have understood the need for rate and the need for an appropriate sharing of risk between the primary industry and the reinsurance industry. I don't think we've seen that discipline in the casualty sector yet. And I'm not sure what it's going to take, but it's very clear that we're going to continue on our path and contain the exposures that we write going forward and manage the risk we currently have on our book. With respect to SSD capital, I think, you know, we will look for opportunities to deploy underwriting risk where we think it's appropriately priced and where we don't run into problems with some big exposures. So you should expect, you know, the 10% premium growth that you saw in 2023, a year to date, is not accidental. And Corso's growth, I think, We'll see where we might be able to continue putting capital to work there. The more likely place for a deployment of risk capital would be on the asset portfolio when we get comfortable that we're in a situation where, in fact, we can take more asset risk. We don't see that today, and we won't be making any giant leaps to a risk-on position, but I think you can imagine the now in year end or sometime in 2024, that we would be more comfortable on that. Other than that, what I would say is our capital priorities remain in place. And we are determined to be one of the best capitalized participants in the marketplace. We also see the need to be responsive to shareholders to increase or at least maintain the dividend to put the the funds to work in our core businesses. And if, at the end of the day, we find ourselves with truly excess capital that we're not able to deploy, then we'll have a different conversation. But that's a February conversation with our board of directors once we've closed the year with the targets achieved.

Thank you, Thomas. With that, we've come to the end of the call. Should you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to contact the IR team. We'd like to thank you for all the questions and your interest, and we wish you a nice weekend. Thank you all.

Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.