Old Republic International Corporation

At that time, if you have a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Thursday, January 25th, 2024. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Calabrese with the Financial Relations Board.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Old Republic Conference Call. This is Scott's fourth quarter, 2023 results. This morning, I distributed a copy to the press release and posted a separate financial supplement, which we assume you have seen and or otherwise have access to during the call. Both of the documents are available at Old Republic's website, which is www.oldrepublic.com. that this call may involve forward-looking statements as discussed in the press release and financial supplement dated January 25th, 2024. Risk associated with these statements can be found in the company's latest SEC filings. This afternoon's conference call will be led by Craig Smitty, 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 Craig Smitty. Please go ahead, sir.

Okay, Joe, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome again to Old Republic's fourth quarter and year-end 2023 earnings call. With me today is Frank Sedaro, our CFO of ORI, and Carolyn Monroe, our President and CEO of our title insurance business. So, our focus on specialization and diversification across title and P&C Insurance enabled us to produce a consolidated combined ratio of 93.3 and 237 million of consolidated pre-tax operating income in the quarter. For the full year, the consolidated combined ratio was 92.6 compared to 91 in 2022, and consolidated pre-tax operating income was 938 million compared to $1,059,000,000 in 2022. In general insurance, we continued to produce strong underwriting results with a 92 combined ratio and 195 million of pre-tax operating income in the quarter. For the full year, the general insurance combined ratio was 90.2, just slightly higher than our 89.5 in 2022. And pre-tax operating income was $788 million, up 14% from the $690 million we produced in 2022. And despite the headwinds from mortgage insurance rates and a soft real estate market, Title Insurance produced profitable underwriting results with a 95.5 combined ratio and $44 million of pre-tax operating income in the quarter. For the full year, title's combined ratio was 97.1 compared to 93.2 in 2022. And pre-tax operating income for title was $134 million down from the $309 million in 2022. So our conservative reserving practices continue to produce favorable prior year losses. development in all three segments, which, by the way, marks our ninth consecutive year of favorable prior year development. Our balance sheet, it remains solid, even as we continue to return capital to shareholders through both dividends and share repurchases, while we continue to invest in new underwriting subsidiaries, people, and technology, all with a focus on the long term. So with those introductory comments, I will now turn the discussion over to Frank, and then Frank will turn things back to me to cover general insurance, followed by Carolyn who will discuss title insurance, and then we'll open up the conversation as we always do to Q&A. So with that, Frank, I hand it to you.