Accelerant Holdings

Thank you for standing by. My name is JL and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Accelerant first quarter 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ray Iardella, Head of Investor Relations, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Accelerant's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are Jeff Radke, Accelerant's Chairman and CEO, Linda Huber, CFO, and Ryan Schiller, Head of Strategy. The remarks will be followed by a Q&A session. Yesterday, we issued a press release related to our first quarter 2026 financial results, filed our Form 10-Q, and have also posted our updated investor presentations. All of these can be found on our IR website at www.investor.accelerant.ai. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, expected performance, and in particular, guidance for second quarter and full year 2026. Actual results may vary materially from today's statement. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results to differ is included in our SEC filings, including those stated in the risk factors section of our filings with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. Additionally, today's discussion will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures related to both our consolidated results as well as our operating segments. reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is set forth in our earnings release. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for GAAP measures. Finally, today's conference call is being webcast and recorded. Now I will turn the call over to Jeff.

Thanks, Ray, and good morning, everyone. Before we dive into our discussion, I'd like to welcome Linda Huber, our new CFO, to her first earnings call at Accelerant. Linda joined us about two months ago, and her impact across the finance organization can already be felt. Welcome to the call, Linda. Moving to my comments about the business. We had a fantastic first quarter, reflecting strong momentum across our platform. Once again, we exceeded the midpoint of our quarterly guidance across exchange-written premium, third-party premium, and adjusted EBITDA. We also continued to compound and deepen our data moat during the quarter. adding an additional 22 million rows and 4,000 incremental risk attributes. Our mantra from the very beginning of Accelerant has been no data left behind. We capture and ingest exposure characteristics, price per exposure, policy provisions, geospatial information, public sentiment vectors, and environmental features, just to name a few. Today, we have 156 million rows of information across more than 62,000 unique risk attributes, further widening our position as having the largest usable decision-ready specialty insurance data set. You might be asking, so what? And I think that's a fair question. The so what for Accelerant is higher growth with better loss ratios and minimal churn from members or risk capital partners. How's that? We leverage this proprietary data through closed-loop AI native system to enhance underwriting decisions. The accelerant risk exchanges position in the insurance value chain allows us to quickly link underwriting submission and exposure data with claims outcomes. Thus, our underwriting models are updated in very short cycles, nearly continuously. That feedback loop today influences tomorrow's underwriting decision. When members can out-select risk versus the market, it clearly drives profitability. But what's less obvious and more impactful is that better risk selection also drives growth in premium volume across the accelerant risk exchange. And growing profitable and predictable specialty insurance risk is exactly what our risk capital partners are looking for. We discussed with you last quarter how artificial intelligence is the architecture of our business. and how its use benefits members and risk capital partners alike. Another important benefit of artificial intelligence is the productivity gains Accelerant is generating internally. We are using the latest AI capabilities to augment cumbersome workflows and are already developing beta version solutions that we believe may reduce our reliance or even replace expensive third-party software systems. Additionally, we've seen significant improvements from AI within our product and technology team of engineers. They're focused on the core operations of the accelerant risk exchange. And AI has become a meaningful execution enabler for us. This has led to higher output per engineer and a productivity lift of more than 24%. We think that being able to do more with less is going to become table stakes in tomorrow's world. The ultimate winners will grow their technical workforce and deploy AI augmented teams to solve the most complex problems. Thus, our higher output allows us to move faster and faster, fund new areas of investment, and deliver on our strategic priorities. In 2026, we plan to invest productivity gains into AI-enabled teams across priority areas. For example, we endeavor to cut the member onboarding cycle from three months, which we believe is already three to four times faster than the industry, to a matter of days. Additionally, we will be building 24-7 AI-enabled claims monitoring, agent-driven actuarial support, and early profit signals directly into our members' underwriting workflow. We are excited about our AI-driven productivity, but as we scale, greater efficiency will lead to more investment and better outcomes as we continue our journey to transform the specialty insurance marketplace. Next, let me move to the six KPIs that track the health of our business. These metrics balance both sides of the Accelerant Risk Exchange, including three on the supply side and three on the demand side. All six of these metrics were in line with or better than we expected for our first quarter. Beginning with the supply side, exchange written premium was $1.14 billion in the first quarter, above the high end of our expectations. This translates to headline year-over-year growth of 16%. Now, importantly, That growth would have been 22%, excluding the large premium low margin member that we terminated at the end of Q2 last year. Our second KPI is our member count. We added 16 new MGAs during the first quarter, similar to our average over the past four quarters of 2025. That brings the total to 296 member MGAs. These new members were added across numerous geographies, including the US, Canada, UK, and EU, and offer specialty insurance coverages that run the gamut from management liability to captives. The third and final supply-side KPI is net revenue retention. We define net revenue retention as the trailing 12-month exchange-written premium growth of our pre-existing members year over year. That includes terminated members. First quarter net revenue retention was 116%. That continues to demonstrate the edge that our proprietary data, tools, and platform provide our members. Again, it's worth noting that the net revenue retention would have been 122% if we excluded the one-off terminated members. Moving to the other side of the platform, the first of our three demand side KPIs is gross loss ratio. The gross loss ratio is a key profitability measure of the business produced for our risk capital partners. And for the first quarter of 2026, the gross loss ratio remained very attractive at 52.1%. That increase of 80 basis points over the full year 2025 figure is primarily due to seasonal differences in businessmen. The second demand side KPI is third party direct written premium. This metric measures our ability to attract non-accelerant insurers to participate on the risk exchange. We continued to make progress during the first quarter with 41% of exchange written premium going to third party insurers. That's up from 19% in last year's first quarter and up from 30% for the full year of 2025. Over the medium term, our goal is for third-party insurers to represent two-thirds of the total exchange-written premium. Additionally, we continue to mix away from Hadron during the quarter. Ryan will comment further on this in his remarks. The third and final KPI on the demand side is our net retention. That's defined as the trailing 12-month ratio of premiums we retain in relation to total exchange-written premium. This ratio was 10% for the trailing 12 months, which is in line with our expectations and where we expect to be for the full year of 2026. Our objective is to pass along the favorable underwriting economics to our risk capital partners in exchange for fees, not to grow our share of net premiums. In summary, we had an excellent quarter performance against all six of our KPIs. This continues our positioning to be the rails on which specialty insurance runs and delivering long-term value to our shareholders. I'll turn it over to Ryan to cover accelerants risk exchange metrics in more detail. Ryan?