AMERISAFE, Inc.

earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Catherine Shirley. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the AmeriSafe 2025 First Quarter Investor Call. If you have not received the earnings release, it is available on our website at AmeriSafe.com. This call is being recorded. A replay of today's call will be available. Details on how to access the replay are in the earnings release. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements intended to fall within the safe harbor provided under the securities laws. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in these statements if the underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect or as the results of risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including factors discussed in the earnings release, in the comments made during today's call, and in the risk factor section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. I will now turn the call over to Janelle Frost, AmeriSafe's President and CEO.

Thank you, Catherine, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased with this quarter's results, both financially and operationally. We continue on our track of adding incremental growth with an attractive underwriting margin. Importantly, we have done so within our existing geographic footprint and risk appetite and building on the power of relationships with our agents, policyholders, and injured workers. Before I discuss the results for the quarter, I will comment on the environment in which we operate. There is a strong competition now driven by declining workers' compensation rates and turmoil amongst other property and casualty lines. Then there's the economy. News headlines lately highlight the level of uncertainty. Tariffs, inflation, recession, interest rates. I will not be so bold as to predict what will happen, but we, like most companies, evaluate the risk to our business directly and to our customers. In the most simplistic of terms, those economic conditions which impact payrolls have the potential to influence our premium. Examples are unemployment, general economic slowdown, project delays, wage inflation. If history were my guide, our niche industries fared well in prior mild-shallow recessions. This is something we monitor closely, but does not change the course we are currently pursuing. Now back to our results. Gross written premiums grew 4.6% over the first quarter of 2024, which was driven by consistent new business gains and strong premium retentions. Premiums on policies we wrote in the quarter grew 7.1% over the prior year quarter. We continue to see strong retention in policies for which we offer renewal with 93.1% retention in the first quarter, as well as further policy count growth. Premium growth was partially offset by slowing payroll audits and other premium adjustments, which contributed $5 million to top line in the quarter versus $6.4 million in the year-ago quarter. This was not unexpected as we've discussed in previous quarters with the moderation in wage inflation. As indicated in our last earnings call, our current accident year loss ratio was in line with the prior accident year at 71%. Looking forward, we expect frequency to remain favorable, which we experienced this quarter, and severity trends to be relatively modest. The company experienced $8.7 million in favorable development on prior accident years, primarily from accident years 2020 and 2021. We attribute our favorable case development to our proactive claims handling. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Andy to discuss the financials.