Ambac Financial Group, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the AMBAC Financial Group second quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Should anyone 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 turn the call over to Charles Zabaske, head of investor relations.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to AMBAC's second quarter 2025 call to discuss financial results. Speaking today will be Claude LeBlanc, President and CEO, and David Trick, Chief Financial Officer. They will discuss the financial results for our business and the current market environment, and after prepared remarks, we'll take your questions. For those of you following along on the webcast, during prepared remarks, we will be highlighting some slides from the investor presentation, which can be located on our website. Our call today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under the forward-looking statements in our press release and our most recent 10Q and 10K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also, in our prepared remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to those non-GAAP measures are included in our recent earnings press release, operating supplement, and other materials available in the industrial section on our website, AMBAC.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Claude LeBlanc.

Thank you, Chuck, and welcome to everyone joining today's call. We are very pleased to report that last month the Wisconsin OCI recommended the approval of the sale of our legacy financial guarantee business and set September 3rd as the hearing date for the Form A application submitted by Oak Tree Capital Management. Approval of the sale by the OCI remains the last closing condition to be satisfied, and we stand ready to close following receipt of such final approval. With near-term visibility into the closing of the AAC sale, we would like to share a series of strategic initiatives we plan to launch in the first 120 days following the close. We believe these initiatives are key steps in completing our business transformation and will materially accelerate the growth of our P&C business into 2026. These include, one, an organizational rebrand, two, a new executive comp program aligned with the new business. Three, expense realignment at the holdco. Four, implementation of a new target operating model to improve our organizational efficiencies and reduce expenses. Five, progressing our capital management plan. Six, continued investment in data and AI technologies. And lastly, executing on a strong pipeline of organic and strategic opportunities many of which are already well advanced we believe these initiatives will drive strong growth and profitability for our businesses in both the short and long term looking at our quarterly results our operating businesses deliver strong growth producing 346 million of premium up 110 percent and generating 54 million of revenue up 20 percent both from the prior period last year. BEAT continues to be a significant accelerator of our overall growth, up 26% from the second quarter of 2024. David will cover the financial results in more detail in just a moment. Turning to our insurance distribution segment, Serata generated $250 million in premium for the quarter, up 368%. A key driver for the expansion of our platform will be organic growth via new MGAs and the continued scaling of recently launched MGAs. And we are very pleased with our results to date. The growth and development of our 2024 class of de novo MGAs has been in line with or exceeding our expectations. We generally expect new MGAs to attain profitability in 18 to 24 months on average. Two of the six Class of 2024 startups achieved profitability within 12 months, and we expect four of the six to be profitable in 2025. As we previously noted, de novos will have an earnings drag impacting true run rate EBITDA until they achieve the needed scale and profitability. Given the significant number of de novo launches in 2024, we are well positioned to continue driving strong organic growth. One including B, organic growth would have been over 12% in the quarter compared to the slight pullback reported, which stemmed almost entirely from the continued industry turbulence in the ESL and short-term medical markets. We now see the ESL markets beginning to stabilize and showing early signs of improvement. We remain bullish on the overall A&H sector, which has continued with strong performance and growth. As part of our strategic initiatives in A&H, last quarter we partnered with a team and secured a controlling interest in a San Francisco-based AI business by the name of Hammurabi, focused on A&H products. We believe Hammurabi's proprietary technology will enhance the growth and performance of our A&H businesses for the foreseeable future. We have already received very favorable reactions from the market on Hammurabi's capabilities and secured new capacity to begin binding business in the fourth quarter. Turning now to Everspan. From a growth perspective, Everspan continues to manage through the underwriting decisions made late last year, which had an impact on gross premium production in the quarter at $96 million, down 13% from the prior year. Overall, we are encouraged by the direction of Everspent's underwriting performance and capital management improvements. As we indicated over the last several quarters, Everspent has been focused on rebalancing capital allocation for expanding primary affiliate and market opportunities with a de-emphasis on assumed programs. Consistent with this strategic realignment, During the last quarter, Everspan progressed the underwriting of various new programs, including from Serata MGAs, which we believe will be accretive to both businesses going forward. I will now turn the call over to David to discuss our financial results for the quarter. David.