Lancashire Holdings Limited

Hello and welcome to the Lancashire Holdings Limited Q3 2023 earnings call. Throughout the call all participants will be in a listen only mode and afterwards there will be a question and answer session. Please note that this call is being recorded. Today I am pleased to present Alex Maloney, Group CEO, Natalie Kershaw, Group CFO and Paul Gregory, Group CUO. I will now hand over to Alex Maloney.

Thank you, operator.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. I will just give you some brief highlights of the progress that we've made in the quarter. We'll then focus on the underwriting highlights, and then Natalie will cover the financials, and then we will go to Q&A. So during the third quarter, we continued to maintain the excellent momentum across our business, which has been a key thing for us throughout 2023. As we've stated before, our only strategy is to make sure we maintain we manage the underwriting cycle to maximize the opportunity for the benefit of our shareholders. We have now underwritten record amounts of profitable premium versus our capital base and expect to be able to grow our premiums during the rest of 2023 and beyond. The underwriting conditions are the best we have seen in a decade and we have grown our product offerings over recent years as we attract more talented people to our business. We are building a more diversified, resilient business for the future, which means our capital usage is more efficient. We have a conservative view of the capital we require to run our business, but due to the profitability and diversification we are now benefiting from, we find ourselves in a healthy excess capital position. Therefore, I'm pleased to announce our special dividend of 50 cents a share and a $50 million share buyback program in line with our long-term capital return policy. We have sufficient capital to grow into 2024 and fund the underwriting opportunity we see, whilst remaining within our own conservative view of the capital we need to run our business. We see little change to the underwriting opportunity, therefore we believe our growth extends through 2024, where we see a disciplined market with abundant opportunities for Lancashire. Some of that 2024 growth in premiums will come from our newly formed US platform, Well, I'm pleased to report that we've now started to recruit high-quality individuals and expect to be underwriting for the second quarter of 2024. We have enjoyed a profitable 2023, which has not been without lost experience, but our business continues to perform well. Our strategy of diversifying our underwriting portfolio is delivering efficiencies so that we're able to return some of the capital generated this year to our shareholders. on their handover support.