Progressive Corporation (The)

Welcome to the Progressive Corporation's fourth quarter investor event. The company will not make any detailed comments related to quarterly results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K and the letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website. And we will use this event to respond to questions after a prepared presentation by the company. The event is available via a moderated conference call line and a live webcast with a brief delay. Webcast participants will be able to view the presentation slides live or download them from the webcast site. Participants on the phone can access the slides from the events pages at investors.progressive.com. In the event we encounter any technical difficulty with the webcast transmission, webcast participants can connect through the conference call line. The dial-in information and passcode are available on the events page at investors.progressive.com. Acting as a moderator for the event will be Julia Hornack. At this time, I will turn the event over to Ms. Hornack.

Thank you, Jason, and good morning. Today we will begin with a presentation about Progressive's home business. Our presentation will be followed by Q&A with our CEO, Tricia Griffith, and our CFO, John Sauerland. Our Chief Investment Officer, Jonathan Bauer, will also join us for Q&A by phone. This event is scheduled to last 90 minutes. As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during the event. Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our 2019 annual report on Form 10-K, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our businesses, safe harbor statements related to forward-looking statements, and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investors page of our website, investors.progressive.com. It is now my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Tricia Griffiths. Good morning, and welcome to Progressive's fourth quarter webcast. Well, we wrapped up 2019 with another banner quarter and banner year. We're very excited to start 2020, and obviously you've seen January's results, so we continue to be really excited about our opportunities around growth and profitability. As Julia said, today is about property, and so we're very excited to tell our story, both where we've come from and where we're going. Before I get into that, I've got three quick items. The first one, we heard you. Many of you asked for us to give the loss ratios associated with catastrophes, and as you'll see in the January earnings, we started to do that for each line coverage. So hopefully that will be more transparent for all of you to understand the effect of our underlying loss ratios in any given month with any given catastrophe, especially in the more volatile line coverages like property. Second, as you likely read in the 10-K, Progressive and the minority stakeholders of ARX decided to conclude the acquisition a year early. So we're spending $242 million to acquire the remaining shares of ARX. And we will close that, if all things go well, which we expect that to happen, in 2020, April of 2020 versus 2021. It was funny, I was talking to Dave Pratt right before this, and he said he had so many emails from people at Progressive Home saying, didn't this already happen? So this is really something where we've been, you know, dating forever. People assumed we were married. Let's just get it done early. And we're really excited to move forward and really execute on our plan. And then the third item, which I'm sad about but happy for her and happy for Progressive, is Julia Hornack has decided to take her talents down to St. Pete with Progressive Home. All of you have gotten to know her very well over the years. She is really our investor relations guru, and she's fielded a lot of your questions over the years, and we're going to miss her. But we're excited for her in her next stage of her career. She's been a controller, she's been a product manager, and now she's moving on to work on specialty products, some vendor management, and some process management. Again, we're sorry to lose her from here, but so excited for Progressive. Congratulations, Julia. Thanks, Tricia. Thanks a lot. And to all of our shareholders, portfolio managers, and analysts, it's really been a pleasure getting to know you and to do my best to represent Progressive and the facts that we provide you. and all of our public disclosures. It's been a pleasure serving our executive team that's truly extraordinary and a wonderful partner. our wonderful partners, and I'm really excited to take my talents to St. Pete, hopefully. I'm sure I'll be back to Cleveland quite a bit to see my friends here, but I look forward to making friends with all my extraordinary colleagues down in St. Petersburg. So thank you. I imagine you will be very diligent of when you come to Cleveland versus when you stay in St.

Pete.