Kingstone Companies, Inc

Greetings and welcome to the Kingstone Company's third quarter 2020 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Amanda Goldstein, Investor Relations for Kingstone Companies. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you very much, Jesse, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday afternoon, the company issued a press release detailing Kingston's 2020 third quarter results. On this call, Kingston may make forward-looking statements regarding itself and its business. The forward-looking events and circumstances discussed on this call may not occur and could differ materially as a result of known and unknown risk factors and uncertainties affecting Kingston. For more information, please refer to the section entitled Factors that may affect future results and financial condition in Part 1, Item 1A of the Company's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, along with the commentary on four looking statements at the end of the Company's earnings release issued on Friday. In addition, our remarks today include references to non-GAAP measures. For a reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to the GAAP figures, please see the tables in our earnings release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Kingston CEO, Mr. Barry Goldstein. Please go ahead, Mr. Goldstein.

Thanks, Amanda. Good morning to everyone listening in today. We're pleased that you can join us for our third quarter 2020 conference call and congratulate our country and our Pfizer company for delivering us a vaccine that's going to take us out of this mess we've been living through. Joining me on today's call will be Meryl Golden, our Chief Operating Officer. Meryl will review with you the detailed quarterly results, but let me start with the fact that apart from the previously announced full catastrophe retention of $8.125 million due to Tropical Storm Isaias, we had an excellent quarter. Without catastrophes, our combined ratio was an excellent 80.4%, a big swing back from this time last year when we posted a very ugly 108.5. Over the past year, we've gone through a lot. I want to walk you through the issues and the remedies. Our commercial liability results were poor and getting worse in spite of the various underwriting actions we'd taken. We made the very difficult decision to exit this commercial liability business. and we've done that. It is now complete. And at the end of Q3, we no longer have any commercial liability policies on our books and the volatility that it brought to our company is now gone. We needed to strengthen our reserves to account for the adverse development, much of which came from this commercial liability business. And we did that by taking up reserves $11 million in 2019. We saw our personal lines loss costs rising but hadn't adjusted our rates in too long a time. We did that. We raised rates in all states in the last year and will continue to address rates for each state each and every year. Our auditors felt there were internal control issues that needed to be remediated and we did that. We built our claims organization added people systems and better processes and we are seeing the benefits. Attorneys with nothing better to do decided to make us a target because our stock price declined due to the items I just mentioned. But I told you we would aggressively defend ourselves and that I had a high degree of confidence in our winning the suit and we did just that. Their baseless lawsuit was tossed out almost immediately after being heard by the court. Those issues are now in the rear view mirror. We are in a really good place. I'd like to say that we turned the corner, but the last guy who was saying that, I'll stop you. We're seeing some hardening in the Northeast homeowners market. In New York, we've raised our rates an average of 9% last November. and as a result, our new business slowed. But we're now seeing a pickup in quoting and binding as many of our competitors have raised their rates or tightened their underwriting guidelines or both. Our top competitors include Florida domiciled companies, both public and private. The impact of reinsurance pricing is far more profound than Florida. couple that with the dysfunction in that market and a record number of storms this year. It is taking a severe toll on their balance sheets and their competitiveness elsewhere is declining. We have rebuilt our company to address the market needs of today. We've right-sized our core staff and added the advanced skill sets that we needed. Our focus for the past five quarters has been squarely on enhancing Profitability, and that continues. Meryl's used this past year preparing for our future with Kingstone 2.0, and along with that, an enhanced ability to grow our top line while maintaining and hopefully even enhancing our profit margins. Let me now turn the call over to Meryl. Meryl?