Beazley plc

good morning and welcome to beasley's 2025 q3 trading update if you would like to ask a question during today's call please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad i will now hand over to chief executive officer adrian cox please go ahead

Thank you. Well, good morning everyone and welcome to Beazley's Q3 IMS. I will cover the key points of the quarter's performance and then move to questions. So our year-to-date growth is now at 1%, and the key drivers of this reduction have been in cyber and property. At the interim presentation in August, I said that in some important segments for us, and I was referring particularly to DNO cyber and property, markets were getting a lot less frothy, and this was anticipated to make it easier to grow in the second half. The evidence for this was that DNO rate reductions were beginning to ease after three years of very public softening, that we had successfully pushed for flat rates during the important North American July renewal season in cyber, which we believe is necessary given the increased levels of cyber crime and liability claims the market has experienced since 2023, and that property rate reductions had also eased following a very aggressive second quarter. However, that prediction did not come true. The DNR property markets are still very competitive. And despite the fact that we believe the US cyber market is now unprofitable, given that very active claims environment, it continues to soften. It is notable, I think, that premium growth in the E&S market as a whole has slowed. For example, E&S stamping premiums in California, Texas, Illinois and Florida were flat year on year in Q3, having been growing increasingly more slowly over the year. We therefore have reacted accordingly, maintaining our underwriting standards, and this has impacted our growth for the third quarter. As such, we are reducing our guidance for the full year to flat to low single digit. We remain confident that we can maintain our margin and seize the opportunity to grow when conditions improve, but we will not do so until then. Alongside the adjustment to our growth, we're also updating our combined ratio guidance to low 80s. Our attritional losses continued to develop favorably, though less so than in previous quarters, and the third quarter CAT activity was less than we had budgeted. The combination of these two factors has allowed us to improve our combined ratio guidance to that low 80s. Going through the teams then, in cyber premiums are now down 8% from 6% at the half year, but the rate reductions have eased from seven to six. As I mentioned just now, the team have been keeping rates flat in our renewal business in North America, and this has improved the year-to-date rate change, but our new business is down. We continue to grow well internationally, and I'll talk about that a little bit more, or rather, Paul will talk about that a little bit more at the CMD this afternoon. We do find the lack of market discipline in North America somewhat surprising, given the claims environment. This does need to adjust if we are to avoid the extreme swings in pricing that we saw in 2021 and 2022. Moving on to property, our year-to-date numbers are relatively consistent with the interims, indicating that the market remains competitive. The lack of hurricane activity during this year's windstorm season, whilst positive for this year's profits, will likely have an impact on market behaviour next year. Rates, though, are still adequate and we continue to eke out growth, and there remains further opportunity to do so in 2026 as we build out our business with the retail brokers there. Historically, our US property business has been exclusively through the wholesale channels. Moving on to MAP, that business continues to have a good year. Demand growth persists, particularly across our contingency political risk and political violence businesses, and that's reflected in the numbers. Moving on to specialty, as we flagged at the half year, growth in specialty risks has moderated in the second half, as we continue to de-risk the parts of the book that we believe are overly exposed through social inflation, particularly in medical malpractice. Encouragingly, the stronger financial markets have driven increased demand for our M&A and transaction business, which is growing nicely. As I mentioned earlier though, the DNO market remains very competitive. Looking forward, we are also planning to open a new venture in Bermuda in early 2026, subject to regulatory approval with $500 million of funding from the group. This business will be quite distinctive with four main elements to it. The first, captives insurance and reinsurance. The second, alternative risk transfer, including parametric products. The third is an ILS business, focusing on cyber reinsurance and insurance. And fourthly, specialty insurance and reinsurance. The first two, Captives and ART, are fast growing markets in which we participate, but currently do not have teams focused on them. And this will allow us to do just that. As we've discussed many times, we believe that a deep cyber catastrophe reinsurance market is essential for the health of the cyber insurance market and we've spent the last few years pioneering such. It is now beginning to blossom and we are well positioned to build a franchise around this and we'll be launching a fund to do so next year. And lastly, Bermuda provides additional access to risk for specialty insurance and reinsurance that we currently write. We believe this is an exciting opportunity for us and for business that is slightly off the mainstream, giving us that idiosyncratic growth in a way that allows us to maintain our underwriting margins. We will, of course, be discussing this in much more detail this afternoon, along with our other exciting plans at our CMD, but I thought it would be useful to outline here the main tenets of our Bermudan strategy. And with that, I'll pass over to Barbara to go through investments and our beloved IFI.

Thank you very much, Adrian. Brings us back to the numbers immediately. But just to remind you, as we've done in previous courses this year, we are providing the Q3 insurance finance income and expense balance, the IFI, to assist you with the modelling. Furthermore, we'll also be placing the yield curves utilised as at the end of Q3 on our investor relations website. The change in financial assumptions in the third quarter has produced an income. Yield curves have decreased in the quarter, creating an expense as well as the discounting unwind expense. The result of these three pillars is a total year-to-date expense of 169 million. When it comes to our investments, our asset portfolio has increased to 11.7 billion from the 11.5 billion we had at half year, returning 458 million year to date at Q3 or 3.9%. This is 1.43% or 146 million in the third quarter. An improvement in the macroeconomic conditions during the year and easing of trade related tensions created a favorable environment for risk assets. Equity indices have risen and corporate bond spread continues to compress. Expectation of a loosening of monetary policy have driven the short-dated treasury yields lower, which contributed positively to fixed income returns. As at the 30th of December, the average yield for fixed income investments is 4%, with an average duration of 1.7 years, which gives a positive backdrop for future investment income. With that, we will open for a Q&A on the current trading, but please remember that we have a capsule market session this afternoon at one.

Thank you, Barbara.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. And I'll take our first question from Vash Ghazalia of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity. Maybe one or two quick questions from me. So one is on the Bermudan platform. Obviously, you'll be investing $500 million, but could you give us a sense of how this will impact your capital position? Because I'm guessing it's not as simple as a one is to one. And second, could you then also give us a little bit of flavor of what growth could we expect from this?

uh this investment just because given you've already cut your guidance i'm just trying to find what are the levers that you have moving into 2026. thank you good questions barbara why don't you take the first one and then i'll do the second uh yeah i think uh obviously we see a a very exciting opportunity in in bermuda and hence investing 500 million of capsule is is the right thing for us to do because that will support as you point out future growth for for our company I think in specifics, we will come back this afternoon around how we see our capital in general. But just remember that we stay true to our commitment to returning capital if we cannot see opportunities to invest in our organic growth and the ordinary dividends as we ordinarily would pay. So coming back to capital this afternoon, but for now, just reaffirm that it is a great opportunity for us to invest in future growth.

Thinking about future growth, what we've consistently said in the past is that we believe across all market conditions, we should be able to do mid-single digits. And as we look ahead over the next three to five years, we think the Bermuda venture will help us get back to that sort of growth levels. There are a couple of other things that we're going to reveal this afternoon, which will also help. But we believe Bermuda will be a material part of being able to get back to the mid-single digits, which is our target. So hopefully that's useful.

Okay, good. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Will Hartcastle of UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. I'll try again slightly differently, maybe, just on the deployment. Just thinking about the ROI that is plausible and the sort of time drag to get to sort of a maturity of ROI is quite important in that, if that's possible. I'm just wondering if that capital requirement is sort of front-end loaded and then there's room to grow into it as such. And then it was really helpful you gave us the four sort of drivers there on on what it's going to be deployed in. But I'm sure there'll be lots of moving parts. But if we take a step back, how much of that 500 mil is likely to be sort of underwriting risk versus fee income risk, if that's possible? Very general is obviously what I'm looking for.

Yes. Thank you. Yes. I mean, the capital, of course, is front loaded. The regulatory requirements are going to be a lot less than that going into the first couple of years. but if we're going to be a credible market in Bermuda and make the security lists of the companies that we're looking to do business with, that entity will need to have at least 500 million. So that's sort of table stakes for Bermuda, which is why we've allocated that much. The vast bulk of what we'll be doing will be through underwriting we will be uh the plan is to develop a um a fee earning business within the ILS market um and uh we'll go through a little bit of that this afternoon We do believe that the ILS market for cyber and potentially cyber and property together is going to be a blooming market over the next few years. And we want to be ready for that. To a certain extent, the size of that venture will be driven by how fast the demand for that product grows. So I think it's safe to say that the bulk will be underwriting at least for the first few years as well.

And as you've ordinarily seen, well, it's also a question of the exact ROI, but this is again giving us new capability and a new access to risk compared to where we are today. So we see that as a strategic investment as well.

All the lines of business that we've outlined, we believe can make our 15% ROE hurdle. Thank you.

Thank you. And we'll now take our next question from Cameron Hussain of JB Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Morning. Let me try three. The first question is just on the top line guidance for the year. Obviously, the guidance has come down for the year. When you look to the flat to mid-single digits, how dependent is that on cyber renewals? I know there's a big renewal date coming up on the in about five days time how dependent is it on that and kind of do you see things changing um to maybe make that a little bit better in the fourth quarter um second question is just on the attritional kind of discussion here at the half you said potentially you would upgrade the guidance if attritional experience continued to be good like it had been in the first half I didn't have a double upgrade to kind of around 80 in my numbers, but I'm just intrigued why maybe that didn't play out. So it feels like NatCat was an upgrade, but attritional wasn't. So just intrigued kind of what's going on underlying there. And the third question I know we're going to talk about this afternoon, if you think about Bermuda versus the rest of the group and you look at premium leverage versus capital, maybe you're like two and a bit times premium leverage to your capital requirement. in the business how do you see Bermuda is that you know I think if I look at it they've tended to be like one times businesses just interested in kind of what that might look like I don't know that was probably an afternoon question

Thanks for those three questions, Cam. Yes, Q4 is actually quite a big quarter for us. Just under half our business is written in Q4. Just half, a quarter, sorry, of our business is written in Q4. It's big in D&O. As you mentioned, there's a big D&O, a big cyber renewal date coming up. It's quite big for parts of our map business. And properties actually got more in Q4 than you would think. So there's quite a lot going on between now and the end of the year. It's not particularly dependent upon cyber in and of itself because it's quite big across most of our divisions. So we will see. There is increasing talk about the cyber market and its lack of profitability in North America, particularly amongst the reinsurers, but we're not seeing that impact market behavior yet, which is why we've sort of called that out earlier in the call today. When we look at the loss ratios, yes, Q3 was light for CAT. Our attritional losses were still favourable, just less so than they have been in previous quarters. I think there are two main drivers to that. One is that we're not immune from the increase in cyber crime and liability issues. As we'll demonstrate this afternoon, we are outperforming the markets quite nicely, but we're not immune to that increased claims activity, which has impacted the attrition losses there. And we continue to be very cautious in how we reserve for business that we think is exposed to social inflation, because that's not getting any better. And those two have meant that our attritional losses are less favourable than they have been in previous quarters. As we look at the leverage ratio on our Bermuda business, because we're front-loading the capital, it is less efficient. I think over the medium to long term, our overall capital efficiency will remain relatively constant. Part of the discussions that we've been having over the last couple of years has been how our capital model would work in Bermuda. And I think we're fairly comfortable that it's not going to impact our overall leverage terribly much. Thank you.

Thank you. Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. And we'll now move on to our next question from Abid Hussain of Penmere Librem. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, morning. I think I've got three questions as well. The first one is on Bermuda and the alternative risk transfer space. Thanks for giving us some of your thinking on investing in Bermuda and the old space. Can you just give us a little bit more color, or perhaps this is later for this afternoon, in terms of how commoditized is that space and what are the margins like? If you can just give us some color on that. And how quickly can you establish your presence there in Bermuda and in those markets? So that's the first question. And then the second one is on growth and KPIs, you've sort of touched on growth of mid-single digits. But given that we're in cycle management stage, or it feels like we're in the cycle management stage here, what are the KPIs that you're running the business to? Is it growth or is it something else? And then just finally on the cyber insurance lines, you've obviously pushed through some rate in the last few months, and I suspect you're trying to push through some more rate in the coming weeks. But just wondering how sustainable do you think those rate increases are now that it feels like the US market is underpriced? When will that market turn? Thank you.

very good last question yeah i will uh yeah i'd love to answer the last question okay um so the uh the art question i think we're so it's business that we currently do so we do some alternative risk transfer across a number of bits of our portfolio so we write parametric business um We reinsure captives. We do do other forms of IoT, so multi-line, multi-year kind of structured insurance and reinsurance. So it's business that we're already in, but we're trying to focus and have a team directly concentrating on that business. We like it because it's slightly more complex the distribution is a little bit different particularly with with with captives so it's slightly out of the mainstream uh the underwriting is a little bit more technical but the margins are what we seek and i think the whole point of what we're trying to do in bermuda is to find avenues of growth in areas that do suit what we think we're good at and allow us to keep the margins that we currently have So we think we can we can ramp up relatively quickly. We've got some folk who are going to move over to Bermuda next year. We will be recruiting as well. And we're building on a base that isn't zero. So it's sort of, you know, it's business that we're already doing. So and we'll provide a little bit more detail about the sort of long term ambitions for Bermuda this afternoon. Our KPIs, moving on to cycle management, haven't changed. So we still, as we'll demonstrate, target the 15% return on equity. The way to think about it is that the business that we have currently, we should be able to maintain sort of flat, which is what we've done historically in a softening market. And then the initiatives that we'll be talking about this afternoon will allow us to grow because we've chosen areas where we think the margin is going to be good enough over the next few years.

But when looking at what to prioritize, as you can see also in the way that we have positioned us this year, we very much focus on the long-term profitability to be able to deliver sustainable results. So at the expense, maybe short-term on growth, but that's because we believe it's long-term the right thing to do.

And yes, we've been maintaining rates on our cyber business in the US since July. We've been successful in that. Our retention levels are down a little bit, but not very much. It's the new business that's been really impacted on that. We will continue to do that. It's important to us that we maintain the profitability of our cyber business. And if that means the US cyberverseness continues to shrink, then we will carry on doing that because we believe it's the right thing to do. It's not the first time we've had to do something in a cyber book that the market's taken a little while to catch up on. but you know it is relatively short-tailed business so the lack of profitability will uh uh will be fairly obvious i think so we are hopeful that the cyber market at some point uh will begin to correct but the longer it waits the sharper that correction will be which is really in no one's interest thanks for that thank you and then i'll take our next question a follow-up from real heart castle of ubs

The line is open. Please go ahead.

Oh, thanks. It's a really quick one, I hope. Just touching back on cyber, just coming back to it, it's clearly competitions going on a bit longer than maybe you anticipated. Is there major culprits to this? Is it widespread? Just trying to get an idea of the structure of competitive dynamics and give us an idea of how quickly that could change. Thank you.

Well, as I mentioned, it's fairly short tail. And so, you know, the lack of profitability is already big, is already obvious, I think, in the 2023 and underwriting and accident years, depending on how you account. It's a subject of much debate amongst the reinsurers, as we'll demonstrate this afternoon, though. I think the... The combined ratio spread of cyber insurers is relatively wide. And so I think there is a real difference in performers. And I think that's impacting how people are behaving. So I'm not going to call anyone out, Will.

No. It's worth a try. Thank you.

Thank you. And we'll now take our next question from Ivan Bohmat of Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I've got one question which you might not be able to answer straight away, but perhaps I'll try. When I think about the growth for this year, we're talking about pretty flat volumes. And I think we are also reading about you placing extra CAD bonds But then rates are lower. So I'm just wondering, looking towards the year end, how do you think about your solvency capital requirements? If we take the Bermuda bit aside, should we expect actually SCR inflation this year?

Yeah, I think very, very good question. This year is back to normal. If you look at 24, we saw a pickup in the solvency capital ratio at the end of the year. But that was driven by factors where you saw positive movements in the interest rates. You saw releases in some of the long tailed classes, which gave us a capital relief and so forth. But this year, you should expect an ordinary pattern. So where you would see the solvency capital ratio from the half year to go down for the full year. So that should be the expectations, Ivan.

Still healthy.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Sorry, but maybe I could follow up on this. So given the lack of growth in growth-ridden premiums and some extra risk transfer that I think you're trying to place, Is this number going up or down? It's very simple. I'm sorry. I'm not sure I understand.

I think when you look at the risk trams or the cat bonds, that's a renewal. So it's not adding. It's a renewal of some that are expiring.

Okay, I understand. Thank you.

What we may be doing is replacing some of the industry loss warranty that we have with cap bonds, which are more capital efficient, but it's relatively marginal.

Yeah. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. With no further questions on the line, I would like to pass to the management team for closing remarks. Thank you.

Great stuff. Thanks very much indeed. Well, thanks for dialing in, everyone. I know we're now relatively late, so we appreciate your time. And we look forward to seeing some of you this afternoon. Thank you very much indeed.