Old Republic International Corporation

Good day. Thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Old Republic International Second Choir 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. Thank you. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Joe Calabrese. The floor is yours.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the All-Republic Conference call to discuss second quarter 2021 results. This morning, we distributed a copy of the press release and posted a separate statistical supplement, which we assume you have seen and or otherwise have access to during the call. Both of the documents are available at All-Republic's website, which is www.oldrepublic.com. Please be advised that this call may involve forward-looking statements as discussed in the press release and statistical supplements dated July 22nd, 2021. Risks associated with these statements can be found in the company's latest SEC filings. This afternoon's conference call will be led by Craig Schmitty, President and CEO of Old Republic International Corporation, and several other senior executive members as planned for this meeting. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Greg Schmidte. Please go ahead, Joe.

Greg Schmidte Okay. Thank you, Joe. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome again to Old Republic's second quarter earnings call. With me today, we have our CFO, Frank Sedaro. Frank's joining us for the first time on this call following Carl Miller's retirement, but Frank has been working alongside Carl for several years as Deputy CFO. So, Frank, welcome. And we also have Carolyn Monroe, the President of our Title Insurance Group. So, I'll kick things off here. uh or i produced another terrific quarter with general insurance and title insurance each posting exceptional results that drove the strong consolidated results that we posted compared to the second quarter of 2020 total net premium and fees increased to just under 2 billion up almost 30 percent uh pre-tax operating income increased to 275 million And that's up 80%. And the consolidated combined ratio improved to 90.6%, a 5.5 percentage point improvement. Again, comparing to the second quarter of 20, general insurance saw growth return with net written premium increasing by 13%. And in title insurance, we grew net premiums and fees earned by 57%. So our specialty strategy with our diverse portfolio of specialty products in both the general insurance and title insurance groups continue to deliver strong growth and strong profitability. So with that introduction, I'll now turn the discussion over to Frank to discuss some of the per share figures along with our investment portfolio. And then he'll turn things back to me to cover general insurance. And that'll be followed by Carolyn, who will discuss title insurance. And then, of course, we'll open it up to Q&A after that. So, Frank, I hand it over to you. Thank you.