Selective Insurance Group, Inc.

Good day and welcome to Selective Insurance Group first quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Brad Wilson, Senior Vice President. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Thank you for joining Selective's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we posted our earnings press release, financial supplement, and investor presentation on the investor section of Selective.com. A replay of today's webcast will be available there shortly after this call. Joining me are John Marcioni, our chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Patrick Brennan, executive vice president and chief financial officer. They will discuss results and take your questions. During the call, we will reference non-GAAP measures used by insurance and investment professionals to evaluate financial and operating performance, including operating income, operating return on common equity, and adjusted book value per common share. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in our financial supplements on our investor relations page. We will also make forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements and projections about future performance are subject to risks and uncertainties that we disclose in our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Now, I'll turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Brad, and good morning. We delivered a solid start to the year, demonstrating the strength and consistency of our operating model in an increasingly competitive market. Our reserves remain stable across all insurance segments and lines of business, and our underlying profitability reinforces our confidence in achieving our full-year guidance. As the industry continues to wrestle with elevated commercial casualty loss trends, we believe our efforts over the past two years have us well positioned moving forward. We generated an operating ROE of 12%, consistent with our long-term target. This was our seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit operating returns. which reflects discipline execution across all our operations. As we've emphasized in prior quarters, we continue to prioritize underwriting margins over top-line growth. Our pricing posture on commercial casualty in both standard commercial and excess and surplus lines fully reflects our view on current loss trends. Despite ongoing industry-wide reserve pressure in this segment, market pricing, particularly in other liability occurrence, has not adjusted upward. As a result, our premiums declined 1% year over year, with E&S up 1% and standard commercial lines down 1%. In standard personal lines, premiums declined 6%, while our target mass affluent market business grew by 1%. We believe heightened discipline is essential in today's environment. Across the industry, social inflation continues to pressure recent accident years, particularly in general liability, commercial auto liability, and umbrella. Based on historical patterns, this could imply further deterioration in run rate industry profitability. In contrast, we believe our planning and reserving processes have been responsive to these trends, and we have taken meaningful action to ensure our assumptions remain aligned with emerging data. Our view of loss trends is integrated into our pricing strategies and underwriting decisions. This allows us to have conviction about where we write business and where we step back. In general liability, for example, we've delivered renewal pure price increases in the 10% range over the past seven quarters, even as industry surveys show mid-single digit rate increases. In commercial auto liability this quarter, we delivered renewal pure price increases approaching 12%. This discipline is impacting our competitive positioning on certain casualty-oriented accounts but we do not believe pursuing inadequate casualty returns will create long-term value. While taking these deliberate, disciplined actions amid increased competition, we are fully committed to a long-term opportunity to meaningfully expand our market share. We continue to execute on expanding our standard lines geographic footprint, and we remain focused on growing with existing agency partners and strategically appointing new agency locations within our existing footprint. We are also seeing positive shifts in our portfolio mix. Our relative exposure to contractors has declined within our new business mix, reflecting our efforts to diversify and improve margin durability. Contractors remain an important industry vertical for us, and we maintain differentiated expertise in serving them. However, a more diversified portfolio positions us better for long-term performance. On renewals, we have the tools and operating model to continuously improve portfolio quality taking appropriate and granular rate actions. This results in lower retention on underperforming cohorts and stronger retention on well-performing accounts. The expected loss ratio benefit of these mixed improvement actions accelerated over the course of the quarter as we leveraged this capability more meaningfully. We believe these actions, combined with the continued earning of strong renewal pricing, are appropriate given our market context and will drive improved underlying margins over time. We continue to invest in capabilities that support scale, diversification, and profitable growth. Artificial intelligence strategically enables these efforts. Early AI achievements in claims underwriting and risk management are delivering measurable outcomes in accuracy, speed, and productivity, positioning us to responsibly scale AI across the organization. A significant portion of our strategic technology investments in 2026 is focused on improving risk selection pricing accuracy, and productivity. While we have deployed many AI tools and are evaluating more, I would like to highlight two that are having a meaningful impact in driving better, more consistent outcomes while also improving productivity. Our AI claims ingestion tool has processed more than half a million documents, letting our adjusters focus on higher value work. We also have deployed automation to support evaluation of contractual risk transfer adequacy, a key element of the underwriting process for contractors, with over 90% of results returned by the tool within two minutes. These tools are supported by a governance program with a cross-disciplinary AI and model governance committee and a focus on human in-the-loop engagement for AI outputs. These safeguards help us drive accuracy, quality, and trust as we scale AI responsibly across the enterprise. We are excited about the opportunities ahead and confident in our ability to execute with discipline. Now I'll turn the call over to Patrick.