Donegal Group, Inc.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. This morning, Donegal Group issued its second quarter 2023 earnings release outlining its results. The release and a supplemental investor presentation are available in the investor relations section of Donegal's website at www.donegalgroup.com. Please be advised that today's conference was pre-recorded and all participants are in listen-only mode. Additionally, we requested and received questions in advance of today's call and have worked answers to these questions into our prepared remarks as appropriate. Speaking today will be President and Chief Executive Officer Kevin Burke, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Miller, Chief Underwriting Officer Jeff Hay, and Chief Investment Officer Tony Viazzi. Please be aware that statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements and necessarily involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially. These factors can be found in Donal Group's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The company disclaims any obligation to update or publicly announce the results of any revisions that they may make to any forward-looking statements to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events or circumstances after the date of such statements. With that, it's my pleasure to turn it over to Mr. Kevin Burke. Kevin?

Thank you, Karen, and welcome, everyone. I'll begin with a few comments on industry market conditions that will provide some perspective before we discuss our quarterly results. A number of larger industry peers have announced significant impacts from catastrophic weather events, with some categorizing the industry impact of the quarterly CAT losses as historic, or at least the highest for any second quarter since 2011. The timing of that elevated weather impact was particularly challenging in light of ongoing inflationary pressures on auto and property loss costs, with a continuation of elevated claim severity as the costs for auto repairs and replacement vehicles remain historically high, in spite of some indications that those pressures are beginning to ease. While we are far from pleased with our quarterly results, some underlying factors provide a level of optimism. that we are making progress towards our objective of sustained excellent financial performance. First, total weather-related losses contributed to 9.1 percentage points to our second quarter loss ratio, which was actually lower than the 9.6 percentage points for the second quarter of 2022, in spite of the significant increase in catastrophic events throughout the country. We attribute the reduction in our ongoing data-driven strategy to manage and refine our geographical spread of risk across our regional operating footprint. While there is much work to accomplish, we are pleased with the advancements in data analytics that we've made in the last few years, and we're beginning to see the benefits in our enhanced risk evaluation and underwriting decisions. While lost cost inflation remains a challenge, we aggressively began taking rate actions in late 2021, and accelerated the level of rate increases throughout 2022 and continuing into 2023. Jeff Hay will cover the details in a few minutes, but we were pleased to see improvements in our core loss ratios across all of our major lines of business during the second quarter. We view those improvements as the indicators of recovery we expect will accelerate as the year continues and earned premiums begin to reflect the benefits of rate increases we implemented over the past 18 months. In addition to the rate increases, we have numerous profit improvement initiatives in flight. Many of those initiatives are defensive in nature and have resulted in lower levels of commercial premium growth than we had targeted in 2023. Again, Jeff Hay will speak to those details, but I want to convey that we are focused on the long term and positioning ourselves to grow profitably in 2024 and beyond. With the successful rollout of our new small commercial business agency portal, along with new and enhanced commercial lines products, we are now live in 22 states in which we offer commercial lines, and we are well positioned to work with our agency partners to grow that segment of commercial business. We are pleased to have the ability to compete effectively for small commercial accounts, which have historically performed well for us. Our agents are now fully trained in actively quoting new business on the new platform, and I am pleased to report that early agency feedback has been very favorable. We have developed comprehensive dashboards to monitor incoming quote and issuance levels to ensure that we are achieving straight-through processing levels that will lead to higher agency engagement and new business growth. As those monitoring routines mature over the next few months, our commercial underwriting team will ramp up activities in preparation for development of our last major commercial systems initiative. That will include a new commercial lines package policy and modernize our other commercial products remaining on our legacy systems. We expect the work on the major software releases to continue throughout 2024 with deployment in early 2025. In the meantime, our project team is actively engaged in the conversion of several legacy Personal Lines products to the new platform, which is the beginning of a process that will continue on a parallel track with commercial releases over the next few years. We look forward to our state strategy sessions, which are occurring in early August, when our home office and regional marketing, underwriting, and claims leadership team will get together for several days to review our performance and develop detailed action plans for each state in which we operate. We have refined and enhanced the data and analysis we will utilize to develop action plans for each state support our 2024 business plan while we have taken intentional actions to slow our overall growth we are committed to achieving rate adequacy and meeting our targeted loss ratios for each line of business and we believe we are well on our way to accomplishing those goals at this point i'll turn a call over to jeff miller for a review of our financial results thank you kevin

Net premiums earned increased 5.9% to $216.3 million for the second quarter of 2023. Net premiums written increased by 3.7%, with accelerating premium rate increases and strong retention offset partially by lower new business volume and planned attrition in states we are exiting or have targeted for profit improvement. In addition, net premiums written and earned in the second quarter of 2023 included a reduction of $3.6 million related to reinsurance reinstatement premiums that resulted from our utilization of reinsurance for several large commercial property losses. Due to the challenging reinsurance environment when we renewed our contracts for 2023, we reduced the number of prepaid reinstatements within our property per risk reinsurance program compared to the 2022 contract terms in order to reduce the cost of our property reinsurance. The combined ratio of 104.7% for the second quarter of 2023 was comparable to the 105% combined ratio for the prior year quarter. with both periods reflecting elevated weather-related losses. Our core loss ratio decreased by over two full percentage points from the prior year quarter, but that improvement was more than offset by lower net favorable reserve development for prior year losses. As Kevin mentioned, weather-related losses were $19.7 million, or 9.1 percentage points of the loss ratio for the second quarter of 2023, compared to $19.6 million, or 9.6 percentage points for the second quarter of 2022. Homeowners' impact was $9.5 million, and commercial property impact was $4.3 million, with the remainder in the auto and other lines. In spite of the fact that our insurance subsidiaries did not incur losses from any single event that exceeded their $3 million catastrophe reinsurance retention with Donegal Mutual, the frequency of smaller storms drove the total second quarter weather claim impact higher than the previous five-year average for the second quarter of 8.9 percentage points. Large fire losses, which we define as over $50,000 in damages, contributed 5.9 percentage points to the loss ratio for the second quarter of 2023, which was lower than the 6.6 percentage points for the prior year quarter. A modest increase in the frequency of commercial fire losses was more than offset by decreases in the severity of both commercial and home fire losses compared to the prior year quarter. Our insurance subsidiaries experienced virtually no net development of reserves for losses incurred in prior accident years for the second quarter of 2023 compared to net favorable development of $7.9 million or a 3.9 percentage point reduction in the loss ratio for the prior year quarter. Diving deeper into the line of business impact, we had favorable development of $2 million for commercial auto, $1 million for homeowners and $500,000 for personal auto that was offset by unfavorable development of $1.8 million for workers' compensation and $1.5 million spread across other lines of business. We attribute the modest unfavorable development in workers' compensation and other lines primarily to the timing of a small number of case reserve increases for 2021 and 2022 claims. Outside of that unusual timing, prior period reserve development for the second quarter of 2023 generally fell within our expectations. The expense ratio of 34.2% for the second quarter of 2023 declined sequentially from 36.4% for the first quarter of 2023 and was slightly lower than the 35% expense ratio for the prior year quarter. The decrease from both of those comparable periods was primarily due to lower underwriting-based incentive costs for our agents and employees. In summary, the underwriting loss we incurred offset investment income earned for the second quarter of 2023 with net income of $2 million equal to after-tax net investment gains in the value of equity securities we held at June 30, 2023. That modest decline of net income compared favorably to an $8.2 million net loss for the second quarter of 2022 that primarily resulted from net investment losses due to a decline in the value of equity securities we held at June 30, 2022. Last week, our Board of Directors declared a regular quarterly cash dividend of 17 cents per share of our Class A common stock and 15.25 cents per share of our Class B common stock. The dividends are payable on August 15th to stockholders of record as of the close of business on August 1st. With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff Hay to provide more details about our commercial and personal line segment results.