Old Republic International Corporation

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 the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Joe Calabrese with the Financial Relations Board. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Old Republic Conference Call to discuss first quarter 2024 results. This morning, we distributed a copy of the press release and posted a separate financial supplement. Both of the documents are available at Old 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 financial supplement dated April 25, 2024. 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 Craig Schmitty. Please go ahead, sir.

Okay, Joe. Thank you. Good afternoon again, everyone, and welcome to Old Republic's first quarter 2024 earnings call. With me today is Frank Sedaro, our CFO of ORI. and Carolyn Monroe, our president and CEO of our title insurance business. Well, during the first quarter of 2024, we produced $231.5 million of consolidated pre-tax operating income. That's up from $222.9 million in 2023, despite the challenges that we'll talk about that we're seeing in title insurance. Our consolidated combined ratio was 94.3, a bit higher than the 92.7 last year, and primarily that's because of the higher combined ratio we're seeing in title insurance. General insurance's strong underwriting results continued into 2024, producing $220 million of pre-tax operating income, and that's a 14% increase year over year. The general insurance combined ratio was 90.3 in the quarter. In title insurance, higher mortgage interest rates and a slow real estate market presented us with some challenges. And that led to much lower pre-tax operating income of $2 million and a 102.5 combined ratio in the quarter. Our conservative reserving practices continued to produce favorable prior year reserve development in both general insurance and title insurance, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. Our balance sheet remained strong while we returned capital to shareholders through both dividends and share repurchases. Focused on the long term, we are investing in our new general insurance underwriting subsidiaries as well as in technology, and that goes for both general insurance, and title insurance. So with those introductory comments, I will now turn the discussion over to Frank Sodaro. And then Frank will turn things back to me to cover general insurance, followed by Carolyn, who will discuss title insurance. And then, as usual, we'll open up the conversation for Q&A. So with that, Frank, I turn the discussion over to you.