Assurant, Inc.

Welcome to Assurance Fourth Quarter and Full Year 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 Francesca Luthi, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Marketing Officer. You may begin.

Thanks, Christina, and good morning, everyone. We look forward to discussing our fourth quarter and full year 2019 results with you today. Joining me for Assurance Conference Call are Alan Kohlberg, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Richard Giorgio, our Chief Financial Officer. Yesterday, after the market closed, we issued a news release announcing our results for the fourth quarter and full year 2019. The release and corresponding financial supplement are available on Assured.com. We'll start today's call with remarks from Alan and Richard before moving on to Q&A. Some of the statements made today are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are subject to risk uncertainties, and other factors that could 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 reports. 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'll now turn the call over to Alan.

Thanks, Francesca. Good morning, everyone. We are pleased with our operating results for both the fourth quarter and full year 2019, as they illustrate our ongoing ability to deliver superior value for our customers, employees, and shareholders. For the full year, net operating income, excluding reportable catastrophes, increased 11%. while earnings per share grew 6% reflecting the shares issued for the warranty group acquisition. After adjusting for certain non-recurring items, which Richard will detail later, net operating income increased 15% and earnings per share grew 10% at the high end of our expectations. These results primarily reflected the stronger than expected performance of our mobile business and full year contributions from the warranty group. Overall, We continue to evolve our mix of business with about three quarters of our segment earnings now coming from non-catastrophe exposed businesses driven by strong growth and connected living. We believe this allows us to generate more diversified earnings and cash flow. In 2019, our operating segments contributed a total of $748 million in dividends to the holding company. This allowed us to raise our common stock dividend for the 15th consecutive year since our IPO and return $426 million to our shareholders. This positions us to deliver on our Investor Day objective to return a total of $1.35 billion to shareholders by the end of 2021. We delivered strong earnings and cash flows while also taking actions to strengthen Assurant for the future. We added or renewed more than 60 valuable client partnerships across our lifestyle and housing segments, and launched several new product offerings to drive even greater value for our customers. Our targeted investments in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and other capabilities, will ensure that we continue to deliver a superior experience for the 300 million consumers we serve worldwide. These investments also were made possible by the $100 million in gross expense saves we've now realized since 2016. Our performance wouldn't be possible without the unwavering dedication of our 14,000 employees across the world. They continue to serve not only our customers, but their local communities as well. With our assurance foundation during 2019, we provided support to nearly 1300 charities focused on helping our local communities grow stronger. Most recently, this included relief for the Australian wildfires and the earthquakes in Puerto Rico. In March, we will publish our next Assurance Social Responsibility Report to share our progress on multiple environmental, social, and governance priorities, which we believe are key to the execution of our strategy. Now let me provide additional highlights from the year for each of our business segments. Within Global Lifestyle, 2019 was a record year as we increased earnings 37% to $409 million. Connected Living was the major contributor, as the segment benefited from several long-standing partnerships and the market success of 10 new mobile programs added since 2017. As of year end, we now protect over 53 million mobile subscribers, an increase of 15% year over year. Importantly, we cemented several key partnerships, including securing a long-term extension of a major client relationship in Japan, where we've increased the number of covered devices by over 50% just in the last year. Key to our success has been our ability to drive additional value for customers by expanding our fee-for-service offerings beyond traditional device protection to include value-added offerings like Personal Tech Pro and PocketGeek. These platforms allow customers to help solve technical issues, optimize the performance of their devices, and connect to live technical assistance, all of which delivers a better experience as tracked through our strong net promoter scores. In the year ahead, we will look to further expand our services to include new offerings such as ID protection. In global automotive, we protect over 47 million vehicles worldwide, up by almost 3 million since 2018. This growth is the result of the strength of our relationships with global OEMs, national dealers, and TPAs, and the scale and expertise we acquired with the warranty group. In 2019, TWG contributed an estimated $130 million to Global Lifestyles earnings after accounting for intangibles and synergies. As we announced in the second quarter, we've delivered operating synergies beyond our initial goal of $60 million pre-tax since the close of the acquisition. While 2020 earnings growth is expected to moderate from a record 2019, it supports our view that we can grow net operating income by at least 10% on average from 2019 through 2021 and continue to produce strong cash flows in global lifestyle. Moving to global housing, we generated operating return on equity, including CATs, of almost 17%, which we believe continues to surpass the P&C industry average. We benefited from a relatively mild CAT year and continued growth within our multifamily housing business. While we incurred higher losses within our specialty housing portfolio, we have taken actions to limit our go-forward exposure and improved results this year. Within our lender place business, we renewed 16 clients representing approximately 60% of our track loans, a testament to our superior offerings. As we look to sustain our leadership position, we will continue to invest in our more efficient and customer centric single source platform, where we've now onboarded multiple clients and have plans to onboard others in the pipeline. In multifamily housing, we grew our renters policies to 2.2 million, up 10%, while also growing revenue by 6%. Our focus remains on driving a superior experience for both our clients and renters. We continue the rollout of our integrated billing and tracking platform, which provides substantial value to renters and landlords to allow us to increase attachment rates going forward. Overall, We believe the actions we've taken within global housing positions the business for profitable growth in 2020 and enables us to further generate above average returns and strong cash flows. In global pre-need, we delivered $52 million in net operating income after the one-time DAC adjustment in the third quarter. During the course of the year, we continue to leverage our strong long-term partnership with SCI, an industry leader, while also growing our final need business with new distribution partners. This has allowed us to create a more profitable sales mix as we continue to generate strong cash flows. The unique characteristics of this business, including low mortality risk relative to other life insurance products, steadily growing earnings, and strong cash flows, provides us with confidence that we can sustain operating ROE of 13% in global pre-need long-term. To summarize, 2019 was a strong year for Assurant. We deepened our relationships with many leading brands, delivered superior value for end consumers, and strengthened our bench of talent. All of this helped us generate a more diversified base of earnings from which we expect to continue to grow. For full year 2020, we expect operating earnings per diluted share, excluding catastrophe losses, to increase by 10 to 14% from $9.21 in 2019. The range includes a 1% negative impact related to convertible shares being diluted for 2020. EPS growth will be driven primarily by higher net operating income across each of our segments, as well as continued share repurchases. We believe our 2020 outlook builds off a larger and more diversified mix of businesses. Overall, it gives us confidence that we can meet our financial objective of 12% annual EPS growth on average for 2020 and 2021. As we enter the connected decade, we believe we'll create opportunities for assurance as consumer lifestyles will increasingly intertwine with their connected ecosystems. For example, with the rollout of 5G and major enhancements to vehicle technology on the horizon, we look to address consumer needs in both the connected home and connected car. We believe that investing in our people, customer experience, and innovation should allow us to continue to expand earnings and cash flow over the long term. To prepare, we will drive investments, both organic and through targeted acquisitions, to scale our operations, develop new offerings, and launch new client programs, while strengthening our infrastructure to support future growth. I'll now turn the call over to Richard to review fourth quarter results and 2020 outlook in more detail. Richard?