Assured Guaranty Ltd.

Good morning and welcome to the Assured Guarantee Limited fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Becky and I will be the operator for the call today. All participants will be in a listen only mode. Should you need any assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing start then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press start then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Robert Tucker, Senior Manager and Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for joining Assured Guarantee for our full year and fourth quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference call. Today's presentation is made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The presentation may contain forward-looking statements about our new business and credit outlooks, market conditions, credit spreads, financial ratings, loss reserves, financial results, and other items that may affect our future results. These statements are subject to change due to new information or future events. Therefore, you should not place undue reliance on them as we do not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise them except as required by law. If you're listening to a replay of this call or if you're reading the transcript of the call, please note that our statements made today may have been updated since this call. please refer to the investor information section of our website for our most recent presentations and SEC filings, most current financial filings, and for the risk factors. The presentation also includes references to non-GAAP financial measures. We present the GAAP financial measures most directly comparable to the non-GAAP financial measures referenced in this presentation, along with a reconciliation between such GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures, and our current financial supplement and equity investor presentation, which are on our website at assuredguarantee.com. Turning to the presentation, our speakers today are Dominic Federico, President and Chief Executive Officer of Assured Guarantee Limited, Rob Malenson, our Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Rosenblum, our Chief Financial Officer. After their remarks, we will open the call to your questions. As the webcast is not enabled for Q&A, please dial into the call if you'd like to ask a question. I will now turn the call over to Dominic.

Thank you, Robert, and welcome to everyone joining today's call. We significantly advanced Assured Guarantee's key business strategies in 2025, positioning us for sustainable long-term growth. Among this year's most important accomplishments, We again brought our key shareholder value metrics at year end 2025 to new per share highs of $186.43 for adjusted book value, $126.78 for adjusted operating shareholder's equity, and $125.32 for shareholder's equity. We earned adjusted operating income per share of $9.08 compared with $7.10 in 2024. and created significant future earnings from financial guarantee originations. Our present value of new business production, or PVP, totaled $286 million, with meaningful contributions from each of our three financial guarantee underwriting groups. We continue to be the leader in the new issuer market for U.S. municipal bond insurance, and our strategic efforts to expand our U.S. municipal secondary market business saw great success as we more than tripled our secondary market bond insured over last year's performance. Rob will provide details of our financial guarantee and production in a few minutes. In our capital management program, we repurchased 12% of the common shares that were outstanding on December 31st, 2024, while meeting our 2025 target of repurchasing $500 million of our shares. We also distributed $69 million to shareholders through dividends. And last week, we announced that we had increased our current quarterly dividend per share by 12% compared to November of 2025's amount. representing 14 years in a row of dividend growth. Our alternative investments continue to perform well, including funds managed by SoundPoint Capital Management and Assured Healthcare Partners. Alternative investments have provided an annualized and safety-to-date control rate of return of 13% through year-end 2025. As we mentioned on prior calls, we successfully defended our legal rights in litigation with Lehman Brothers International, resulting in a pre-tax gain of approximately $103 million in the first quarter of 2025. We also reached successful resolutions of several other loss mitigation situations that were accreted to our financial results. Then we'll discuss these further in a few minutes. Lastly, during 2025, we completed all the work required to leverage our decades of experience in life insurance securitization and investment management to enter the life and annuity reinsurance business. In January of 2026, we acquired Warwick Re Limited, which we have renamed Assured Life Re Insurance Limited, or Assured Life Re for short. This acquisition further diversifies our revenue sources and has the potential for significant synergies with our financial guarantee and investment activities. Assured Life Re's primary business focus will be reinsuring fixed-term annuities, specifically multi-year guaranteed annuities, known as and pension risk transfer annuities. The Assured Life Free platform combines Assured Guarantee's core strengths in credit and structure finance, management of a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, our 20-year track record of providing financial guarantee services to the life insurance sector, with the operational infrastructure and experienced life insurance professionals of Warwick. We believe we are well positioned for growth in 2026 and beyond since we commenced operations in 1985, the value and reliability of our guarantee and the resilience of our business model have been repeatedly demonstrated, especially during financial crises, global pandemic, and during other periods when it was difficult to proceed the direction of economic conditions. I will now turn the call to Rob to provide more details of our financial guaranteed production results.