Conduit Holdings Limited

Good morning and good afternoon everyone and welcome to Conduitree's Q1 2023 trading update.

With the disclaimer now relegated to the appendix, I give the floor to Neil Eckert, Executive Chairman of Conduitree. Hi everyone, just a few words from me before giving the floor to Trevor, Greg and Elaine. Capacity constraints in the market has been more acute as the year has progressed. The current pricing environment creates opportunities for improved margins for 2023. It will take a while to fill the imbalance between supply and demand for reinsurance, and that supply and demand is something we expect to continue. Inflation remains a key driver of rate, as we have frequently discussed on previous calls. I'm very pleased with the team's performance and the operating model that Trevor has put together. He will present you shortly. We are continuing to deliver strong growth ahead of IPO expectations.

Thanks, Neil. Our first quarter was a very pleasing one, with ultimate gross premiums written of £443.2 million, being up just over 50% on the first quarter of 2022. On a written basis, gross premiums were £278 million, being up 59% year over year, And growth came in all of our three divisions of property, casualty and specialty. Turning to property and specialty first, these were up 90.2% and 72.3% respectively, compared with the same period a year ago. And we've said several times over the last few quarters that in our view, these two classes were likely to evolve as presenting particularly attractive opportunities. And we indeed saw that through this quarter. New business written in property and specialty continues to add to the significant 2022 renewals as they come through in this, our third year of operation. On casualty, gross premiums written were up 8.7% in the quarter, and on those deals bound, we saw very good renewing terms presented, including some new business additionally added to the book. The low premium growth on the casualty class in the quarter was largely due to a couple of major contracts being extended by our clients into April, which had the effect of basically transferring the renewing premium out of this first quarter and into the second. We have some numbers in the deck coming up where Greg has more detail around our busy April activity across all three divisions and the impact of this casualty transfer can be seen there. On rate change, That continues to be very healthy at a risk-adjusted year-on-year positive of plus 19%, and through Q2, this is basically in line with what we saw at the Jan 1 renewal season. No surprise that property continues to lead the way there, and Greg will give some more colour on this later across the three divisions. On loss activity in the quarter, the industry saw significant impact in the CAT space with a series of events, in Turkey, Syria, floods and cyclones in New Zealand, and in the US, there are a number of lower level tornado hail and straight line wind events. These regions are in the main where we definitely have a lower footprint. And whilst the session today is purely a trading update around premiums and market conditions generally, we can report that none of these events specifically or in total had an outsized impact on our performance during the quarter. A final word around the general market conditions. On the casualty side, we spend much time evaluating the rate adequacy versus inflation conundrum, and we can report that our casualty deals being bound still reflect that clients are behaving generally responsibly in pricing the business to stay ahead of these underlying inflationary trends. We spend a lot of time on this topic And we would also comment that areas such as D and O have certainly been on our watch for some time now and get our specific attention as one would expect. On the property side and to some extent on specialty, the supply demand imbalance continues to drive sentiment there. And as we sit here in May, we are seeing the mid-year renewals coming in from the US with healthy high double digit rate increase. And this is something we expect to take advantage of as we move forward. As I said already, we have planned for an increase weighting towards the property and specialty sectors, and signs are that the market is definitely in a healthy state and there for us to grow and optimize the book again through 2023. This slide here is one which we have shared previously. It's on the total cumulative premium evolution of Conduit since the inception of the company and on a gross premiums written basis. The growth path continues, as you can see. and as we expected in our original plan. And we have written cumulatively $1.27 billion since January 2021. It's a reminder that the outset of the business, we saw the value predominantly in skewing capacity towards the ground-up quota share space, where the premium versus exposure balance was best for us in our view. And this business mix continues to be a driver of the increasing written pattern of premiums coming through from the prior years. These are, of course, adding to our growing 2023 year bound business and the 2023 premiums will continue to come onto the books as we work our way through this year. On that, I will pass over to Greg for more detail around the underwriting numbers.