Conduit Holdings Limited

Good day, everyone. Welcome to the Conduit Re-Trading Update call for Q3 2024. Joining me on the call today are Trevor Carvey, CEO, Elaine Whalen, CFO, and Greg Roberts, CEO. Please note our disclaimer language on slide two. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Trevor Carvey.

Thanks, Brett.

So, turning to premium volume first, for the nine-month period, our gross premiums written were £957 million, which is an increase of 25.2% year-on-year. Solid business opportunities continue to present to us with good technical margins, and this growth level we are showing for the nine months year-to-date is broadly in line with our 2024 expectations. As regards to the split of business, as we have stated previously in these calls, we currently see the greater margin opportunities within the property and specialty classes. And as you can see, that's where we have again been focusing our attention. In particular, the property non-CAT space, including the non-admitted and E&S arena, continues to deliver up areas for continued growth The underwriting team have been able to develop here again with specific client types and classes that we've been targeting. Casualty too plays an important part in our overall offering and the general portfolio balance more broadly. Although as can be seen from the more modest 2% growth year over year, we continue to exercise significant patience and discipline here in choosing where and when to deploy capacity into the market. Risks presented to us vary considerably in the margin adequacy being offered, and the underwriting team have done a great job of risk selection in building the Cashti book in its current shape and style. Turning to loss events, general industry loss activity has picked up during the third quarter, with the occurrence of what we would refer to as a higher frequency of smaller to mid-sized NATCAT losses, and also several large man-made risk events. As regards the natural peril losses, these would include Hurricanes Beryl, Hurricane Elaine, and also the Canadian hail flooding and wildfire events which occurred through the third quarter. In the aggregate and on an undiscounted basis, we've recorded approximately $50 million of net losses after reinsurance recoverables and reinstatement premiums related to these events in Q3 2024. And whilst we don't report full financials at the third quarter, we can report that at this level of large-size activity, it has shifted up our year-to-date underscanned combined ratio into the mid-90s. Moving past Q3, Hurricane Milton made landfall in October, and whilst still at a relatively early stage, with a very wide range of industry loss estimates out there we currently estimate a range of net losses from this event to be between 30 million and 50 million dollars and that's after reinsurance recoverables and any reinstatement premiums more detailed loss information from clients has started to flow to us in recent days and particularly on the quota share side we will be updating our estimate of net losses in the fourth quarter there's more details level of claims emerge. Turning to pricing, Greg Roberts will go into this in more detail for each division. But as an overall commentary here, we continue to see a positive uptick on a risk-adjusted basis. And through the end of September, we saw a plus 1% risk-adjusted increase across the whole portfolio, with property and specialty running positively and casualty turning marginally below the line at negative 1%. As a general comment, it is worth reflecting again that rating levels generally have trended upwards over recent years, and our underwriters continue to see technical pricing currently at attractive levels. And whilst rates in individual classes, of course, rise and fall to varying degrees, in our view, the recent heightened loss activity, along with the longer term industry legacy trends, still serve to support a generally stable outlook going forward. A slide showing the progression of gross written premium since 2021 and the relative split between the three divisions. The overall portfolio balance is always important and how the business profile develops over time. Given our approach is to allocate and skew capacity where returns are best at different points in the cycle, property and specialty lead here in 2024 with the highest growth rates. The current balance in the portfolio at 56% property, 23% casualty and 21% specialty gives us a great blend and diversification. Also, as an additional commentary here and across the entire business specs, we continue to write approximately two thirds of all premium at Conduit in the non-CAT related classes. Overall this year, we've continued to add scale with nearly $200 million of premium growth year to date, and our cumulative basis since our inception in 2021, gross written premiums are now approaching $3 billion in total. On that, I will hand over to Greg, who can talk more around the class specifics and the rate environment within each division.