Assurant, Inc.

Welcome to Assurance First Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following management's prepared remarks. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. We ask that you please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. Lastly, If you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Suzanne Shepard, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Christina, and good morning, everyone. We look forward to discussing our first quarter 2019 results with you today. Joining me for assurance conference call are Alan Kohlberg, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Richard Jajo, our Chief Financial Officer. Yesterday, after the market closed, we issued a news release announcing our results for the first quarter of 2019. The release and corresponding financial supplement are available on Assurant.com. As noted in both documents, we updated our key financial metrics for the enterprise and our operating segments to align with the company's strategic focus and the financial objectives shared at our recent investor day. We believe these metrics will be a better indicator of performance going forward. We'll start today's call with brief remarks from Alan and Richard before moving into a Q&A session. Some of the statements made today may be forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Additional information regarding these factors can be found in yesterday's earnings release as well as in our SEC report. During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are important in evaluating the company's performance. For more details on these measures, the most comparable GAAP measures, and a reconciliation of the two, please refer to yesterday's news release and financial supplement. I will now turn the call over to Alan.

Thanks, Suzanne. Good morning, everyone. Overall, we are pleased with our results for the first quarter. Performance across our three operating segments was strong, especially mobile and global lifestyle. Our results reaffirm our belief that we are well positioned to sustain our performance long term. Our leadership positions and innovative offerings should continue to support double digit earnings growth with a more diversified and higher quality mix of business. During the quarter, we continue to execute on our strategy. In global housing, we repositioned the segment for growth. First, by beginning to stabilize underplaced, and second, by continuing to drive profitable growth within multifamily housing and our other specialty property offerings. In multifamily housing, we grew revenue 7% from both our affinity and property management partners, now protecting 2.1 million renters across the U.S., Our focus remains on investing in our key capabilities to deliver even more value for our clients and their renters. To that end, we continue to roll out our new point of lease tracking capability to seamlessly integrate our products and services and gradually increase attachment rates. With our vertically integrated capabilities, broad product suite, and emphasis on the customer experience, we built a leading position in the PMC channel. We continue to expect strong top and bottom line growth going forward. We've also further strengthened our leading lender place franchise by renewing three key partnerships in the quarter. And over the past five months, the renewals completed represent nearly one-third of our loans tracked. This bodes well for the future as lender place earnings have started to stabilize after years of market declines. Over the next three years, we believe we will generate a 17% to 20% operating ROE, including an average expected catalog. In global lifestyle, we are aligned with leading brands to bring innovative products and services to market. In connected living, this includes services like our premium tech support, which creates greater value for the end consumer and adds new and important profit pools. We now protect more than 47 million covered mobile devices, up 26% year over year. As we highlighted at our Investor Day, our new partnerships with companies like Verizon, Comcast, Charter, KDDI, and the renewal and expansion of our T-Mobile relationship to include Metro by T-Mobile demonstrate that our vertically integrated capabilities continue to drive value for our customers and serve as a significant differentiator for Assurant. We made additional progress integrating the warranty group acquisition, realizing operating synergies as planned, and finding ways to unlock additional value from our stronger, more scalable global automotive business. For example, this quarter we introduced Pocket Drive, our new technology platform that will expand our offerings beyond service contracts. We expect to launch pilot testing in the second quarter with select dealer partners. We are pleased by the continued strong revenue growth and innovation in this business for the 48 million vehicles we protect worldwide. This all supports our long-term view that we can continue to grow a global lifestyle net operating income at least 10% annually on average over the next three years. Turning to global pre-need, we produce solid, consistent earnings and cash flows in the quarter, supported by our growth from pre-funded funeral policies and favorable mortality trends. Base sales were also strong with a 7% year-over-year increase from new distribution partners within our final need product. Over the next three years, we believe we can achieve a sustainable operating ROE of 13% in global pre-need. In addition to setting these long-term segment targets at our investor day, we also provided several key enterprise financial objectives. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, we expect to grow earnings per share on average by 12%, with double digit expansion of net operating income. In addition, starting in 2019, we intend to return $1.35 billion to shareholders over the next three years in the form of share repurchases and common stock dividends, illustrating the confidence we have in our future cash flows. We recognize that executing against our plans for 2019 will be an important step in delivering on these long-term targets. For this year, we continue to expect to grow operating earnings per share, excluding catastrophe losses, by 6% to 10% from the $8.65 we reported in 2018. This will be driven by double-digit earnings growth and disciplined capital deployment. Looking at results for the first quarter of 2019, we reported net operating earnings per share, excluding catastrophes, of $2.33, an increase of 9% from $2.14 in the prior year period. This was driven by earnings growth, partially offset by shares issued last year related to our TWG acquisition. Net operating income, also excluding catastrophes for the quarter, was up 30% to $149 million due to TWG contributions and organic business growth. At the end of March, holding company liquidity totaled $354 million after returning $51 million in share repurchases and $37 million in common stock dividends. Overall, we're pleased with our performance in the first quarter. We're confident in our ability to continue to expand earnings and cash flow. This will allow us to continue to invest in our business and sustain our track record of returning excess capital to shareholders over the long term. I'll now turn the caller to Richard to review segment results in our 2019 outlook in greater detail. Richard?