Crawford & Company

Was that just an incremental flow through from weather claims? Was there a GTS impact there as well?

International, as you know, has been an important push for us from both growth as well as profitability perspective, the main focus being on profitability. There was definitely weather. In Q3, we saw weather in Australia, we saw weather in UK, and then we had seen weather in Europe in the earlier part of the year. That is still sort of flowing through the system. Again, our target is to get international to a 10% margin in the medium to long term, and that is the journey we're on. As we've shared with you before, we will see probably quarterly fluctuations. because of weather and other cyclicality reasons in our business, but our trend is to keep moving international up.

Yeah. And then any more you can say about the business pipeline and Broad Spire? Is this your sales initiative? Is there just a little more movement in the market? What is contributing to that?

You know, we had actually seen a slowdown in the RFP activity in the Q2. We've kind of seen that pick back up in Q3. As you know, the sales cycles on this business are long, but we've been growing at a nice clip. I think this quarter we reported almost 4% growth. I think for the full year we're still looking at, or I should say year-to-date, the nine months we're looking at, you know, somewhere around that 3% to 4% as well. That's the kind of growth that we expect to continue seeing on an organic basis. But margins are healthy. margins improved this quarter, I think you'll recall that last quarter we had a discussion about a slight drop in margins. It was about 50 or 70 basis points, I think. And we had said that, you know, that's within the realm of tolerance. So we continue to invest in that business. We believe there is still a strong trajectory for that business and expect that business to continue growing as the months and quarters go by.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research.

Great. Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning, Kevin. Hi, Kevin.

I wanted to start off continuing this discussion on the insurance affordability. It sounds like you're not seeing that in your international markets. It's just kind of a US specific only at this point. Is that correct?

We believe that. It is a phenomenon that we are seeing more in the US market. We did see that in the international markets, but they recovered far more quickly than what we've seen in the US.

Okay. Thanks. And you talked about the broad spire margin there. You had a nice ramp up sequentially. Um, and yeah, you talked about last quarter, kind of the bandwidth that you would expect those margins to remain in, but, you know, I'm just wondering if there's anything specific that helped the margin sequentially in the third quarter versus second quarter, you know, if that was just more revenue ramping up or if there are any, uh, you know, cost items to call out there?

Not really, Kevin. I think we had mentioned that we always try to hire for broad spine in advance so that as the clients are coming on, we know when the clients are coming on. So sometimes, you know, they straddle quarter boundaries. So we will see that we've taken the cost on a little bit sooner than what the revenue is coming in just because of the straddling over those boundaries. We feel very good about the BroadSpire business and we believe that we will continue to see growth. I think the margin will remain in this band because we still believe there is room for investment in that business from a technology perspective. We believe that AI can be a major enabler in that business rather than a disruptor for us. And we are identifying opportunities where we can deploy AI. So in the short term, we might see some more capital expense going into that business and or some more investment going in that business, but longer term, I think it should just continue to help the margins and make it an important contributor to profitability for the company.

Okay, good. Yeah, I thought it was interesting or somewhat impressive that, you know, the last couple quarters, you know, particularly this quarter with the significant decline in platform solutions revenue related to you know, weather events and insurance affordability, despite that revenue decline, you actually improved the margin year over year for platform solutions. So can you kind of talk about how you were able to accomplish that?

You know, some of that, as we've talked about before, is a little bit of a mixed shift. We've got, as you know, that there are really three predominant businesses in there. We've got a catastrophe business, our subrogation business, which goes by the name of Praxis, and our contract and connection business. The catastrophe business is, as the name suggests, is to serve clients during the times of catastrophe. That usually creates big revenue, but the margin profile on that is not the same as the margin profile in the other two businesses. So when there's a mix shift, we tend to see the margin improve because of the mix shift. But ideally, we would like to see this business grow, and we believe that as normal businesses claims reporting patterns resume and normal weather patterns resume, we will start to see this business come back up.

Okay, great. Bruce, you had called out for international related to the fourth quarter, some one-time benefits in the year-ago quarter. I have in my notes here that you had a one-time tax benefit that helped you in the year-ago quarter on the the margin and international, but is there anything else that we should be aware of there?

Yeah, the tax benefit is one item. Last year, at the end of the year, we had some pretty significant revenue in our Middle East business related to floods that had occurred earlier in the year. We also had some higher revenues in Asia, particularly in Taiwan related to some earthquake claims and had some flooding losses in Latin America. So those kind of four items when you bunch in the tax benefit kind of equally contributed to the outperformance in last year's fourth quarter. We just don't expect that to repeat, notwithstanding the fact that we still expect the international results trajectory to remain strong.

and uh but it's just not going to be the same result as we had last year okay understood that's that's helpful um and in relation to the uh increase in the the sherry purchase authorization maybe just uh you know talk about um uh how active you expect to be there uh and uh and the rationale you see for continuing to repurchase shares?

Sure. So, you know, we we think of our our shares as trading well below their intrinsic value, and it's recognized by the by the board as well. We have kind of an open market share repurchase plan that we that we execute on, you know, kind of given the trading volumes that we have. You don't see, you know, hugely significant amounts that are being repurchased in this last quarter. It was 275,000 shares. And in the absence of any large blocks or significant changes in the trading volume, that's probably about the level that you would see. Again, kind of depending on the price as well. We're disciplined buyers. We're not buyers at any price. To the extent there are blocks that come up, we would certainly be interested in looking at those to the extent that our stock's trading significantly below what our assessment of intrinsic value is. I think it's something that you'll continue to see us active in through the end of 27, based on the current authorization.

Okay, good. That's helpful. I appreciate you taking the questions. I will turn it back over. Thanks.

Okay. Thank you, Kevin.

Carly, if you can check to see if there's any other questions. Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Verma for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Carly. And a big thank you to all our employees, clients, and shareholders for your continued commitment to Crawford & Company. We look forward to seeing you next quarter. Thank you and God bless.

Thank you for participating in today's Crawford & Company conference call. This call will be available for replay beginning at 1130 a.m. Eastern Time today. through 1159 p.m. Eastern Time on November 11, 2025. The conference ID number for the replay is 350-6432-POUND. The number to dial for the replay is 1-800-770-2030. Thank you. You may now disconnect.