Hamilton Insurance Group, Ltd.

and welcome to the Hamilton Insurance Group earnings conference call. As a reminder, this call is being webcast and will also be available for reply with links on the Hamilton Investor Relations website. I'd now like to turn the call over to John Levinson, group treasurer and head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome all to the Hamilton Insurance Group third quarter earnings conference call. The Hamilton executives leading today's call are Pina Albo, Group Chief Executive Officer, and Craig Howey, Group Chief Financial Officer. We are also joined by other members of the Hamilton management team. Before we begin, please note that Hamilton financial disclosures, including our earnings release, include important disclosures regarding forward-looking statements, management comments regarding potential future developments, are subject to the risks and uncertainties as noted in these disclosures. Management may also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These items are reconciled in our earnings release and financial supplement. With that, I turn the call over to Pina Albo, Hamilton CEO.

Thank you, John, and hello, everyone. Let me start by extending my warm welcome to all of you joining us for Hamilton's third quarter 2024 conference call. Before we discuss our results for the quarter, as you know, there have been a series of natural catastrophes these past three months that have impacted the lives and livelihoods of many people. We want to address all of those who suffered these catastrophes. Our heartfelt thoughts go out to you. You know, as I reflect on these tragic events, I have to say that I'm proud to be part of an industry that helps individuals and communities rebuild when such devastation takes place. Moving forward with today's call almost a year ago today we launched the initial public offering for Hamilton, which marked our transition from a private company to the New York Stock Exchange listed firm we are today. In addition to raising capital, which we successfully and quickly deployed into our underwriting operations. The IPO also afforded us the opportunity to refine and share with you a detailed set of objectives to guide our business into the future. The most important of those objectives was and remains producing sustainable underwriting profitability. By this we mean achieving underwriting profit throughout market cycles. We strive to reach this goal by focusing relentlessly on underwriting discipline and by having a shared accountability for results across our organization. The third quarter of 2024 was a real-world test of our commitment to this objective, not to mention the resilience of our balance sheet. I am happy to report that we passed with flying colors. We had net income of $78 million, despite $38 million of net losses from Hurricane Helene and other large loss events around the world. And turning to underwriting results, Hamilton had $29 million of underwriting income and a group combined ratio of 93.6%. In other words, we were comfortably able to absorb the significant losses of the quarter and still produce a very solid underwriting result. Our international segment posted a combined ratio of 97.6%, and our Bermuda segment posted a combined ratio of 89.4%, commendable results given the loss activity in the quarter. On a year-to-date basis, our combined ratio is 89.9%, and our annualized ROE is 22.4%, points of pride as we celebrate one year as a public company. These results are a testament to the quality of our team, our portfolio construction, and our disciplined underwriting approach. On this latter note, our underwriting results this quarter reflect our underwriting philosophy and the intentional actions we have taken and continue to take in our business. I've mentioned our Group Underwriting Committee, or our GUC, in the past. This committee meets regularly for in-depth discussion of our business performance by underwriting platform and by line. We discuss emerging risks, our risk appetite, our view of the market conditions, when to lean in and out of certain classes or geographies. Our analyses and discussions are robust and inform underwriting decisions and portfolio construction and also ensure we maintain our high underwriting standards. The GUC is representative of the discussions that take place regularly at Hamilton, also between meetings, amongst members of our executive team and frontline underwriters. I see engaging with, and in some cases challenging our team, as one of my main responsibilities as CEO. What are they seeing in pricing and rate adequacy? How is the market moving? What opportunities are we pursuing? And what risks are on our radar? I credit this regular dialogue and our underwriting culture for our vastly improved book of business and our strong underwriting results. Turning now to the overall market environment, the third quarter also marks an important time in both insurance and reinsurance renewals. It's when our industry begins discussions with clients and brokers regarding a number of items, including demand, appetite, opportunities, pricing, and terms and conditions. Hamilton participated in a number of these events, starting with the annual reinsurance rendezvous in early September, moving to the Wholesale and Specialty Insurance Association meeting, or WSEA, continuing through the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers meeting, Baden-Baden, and the Professional Liability Underwriting Society conferences in October and November. Hamilton Re, Hamilton Global Specialty, and Hamilton Select were well represented at these events. The benefit of our active participation at these conferences is the opportunity to meet face-to-face with our customers and brokers, to better understand their needs and goals for the upcoming renewals and to discuss how we can partner with them to meet these needs. Let me share a few takeaways from those meetings. First, Hamilton is seen as a valuable and reliable partner, not only for our capacity and responsiveness, but also for our creativity and ability to provide solutions. This has proven particularly valuable when other markets make broad brush decisions, for example, to back down or exit completely from a certain line of business. Our ability to step up and provide solutions matters a great deal to our customers, helps us win business, and develop broad, long-standing relationships, some of which are now over 10 years old. The second key takeaway is that market discipline continues to remain strong. The underpinnings of the market reset that took place in 2023 are intact as we continue to grapple with the realities of climate change, geopolitical turmoil, and inflation. The catastrophe events of the past few months only serve to uphold attractive market conditions. A third observation is that the concerns over economic and social inflation are real, affecting many lines of business, but particularly casualty classes. We have been wary of this development for several years now, building what we believe to be cautious assumptions into our pricing and reserving and reviewing development regularly, a topic which Craig will provide more detail on in a few minutes. Many of our peers who leaned into casualty during the softer market years continue to pull back. The fact that we were, until very recently, underrepresented in this class, coupled with our recent rating upgrade has created opportunities for Hamilton, which we are selectively pursuing. A couple of comments related to the growth in our business before I hand over to Craig. The punchline is that growth has remained strong in the quarter. up 17% year over year. Bermuda had a particularly strong quarter, in part driven by the AM Best upgrade to A, which has led to meaningful amounts of new business, as well as the ability to increase our line size on targeted accounts. International growth also continues apace, albeit at a more measured clip, but within our expectations and reflecting our focus on maintaining pricing and underwriting discipline. As a reminder, international includes both Hamilton Select, our domestic U.S. E&S operation, and Hamilton Global Specialty, which houses our Lloyds Syndicate and our Irish Carrier. While we continue to see very strong double-digit growth in Hamilton Select, as you will have heard from others, the level of competition in the London market has been heating up for certain classes of business. Cyber is a perfect example where we at Hamilton have stood firm both on coverage terms and price, which has consequently led to a reduction in premium written in this line. Having said this, given that we write specialty insurance across all three of our underwriting platforms and that we have a very diversified book, we continue to expect double digit growth in specialty insurance, including in the international segment. In closing, I'd like to say a word about how proud I am of our results this quarter, particularly in the face of meaningful catastrophe losses. As we noted when we went public, we have built Hamilton for the long term. We aim to be a resilient and reliable partner, providing valuable solutions and meaningful capacity. This will ultimately benefit all of our stakeholders, namely our clients, our brokers, our shareholders, as well as the individuals and communities we serve. Craig, now over to you.