RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd.

Good morning. My name is Thea, and I will be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Renaissance Re's third quarter earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute 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 star and the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw the question, press the pound key. Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Keith McHugh, Senior Vice President, Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for joining our third quarter financial results conference call. Yesterday, after the market closed, we issued our quarterly release. If you didn't receive a copy, please call me at 441-239-4830, and we'll make sure to provide you with one. There will be an audio replay of the call available from about 1 p.m. Eastern time today. through midnight on November 26th. The replay can be accessed by dialing 855-859-2056, U.S. toll-free, or 1-404-537-3406 internationally. The passcode you will need for both numbers is 744-0669. Today's call is also available through the investor information section of www.renry.com. and will be archived on Renaissance Re's website through midnight on November 26, 2021. Before we begin, I'm obliged to caution that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those discussed. Additional information regarding the factors shaping these outcomes can be found in Renaissance Re's SEC filings to which we direct you. With us to discuss today's results, are Kevin O'Donnell, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Bob Qutub, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Kevin. Kevin?

Thanks, Keith. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. Regarding our financial results, this was a difficult quarter and a continuation of what we have been experiencing in the PEC industry over the last five years. That said, We believe that the market will continue to experience significant rate increases, which will accrue to the benefit of our shareholders. Let's start by discussing the third quarter. Given the large catastrophe losses, I will focus my comments primarily on our property business, where climate change, social inflation, and other loss drivers have caused elevated losses. As you'd expect, reinsurers have absorbed a significant share of this volatility. Absorbing volatility is an important component of our value proposition to our customers. Over the past five years, we have delivered on this promise. Ultimately, however, we need to be paid adequately for the risk that we assume, and the returns for our shareholders over the recent five-year period were not sufficient for capital they have deployed. Our industry that has experienced more change recently than at any time since our founding in 1993, In response, we set out to build the capabilities and scale needed to generate superior returns in this marketplace. We began this journey by forming our Lloyds Syndicate, continued with the acquisitions of Platinum and TMR, accelerated with the expansion of our capital partners business, and culminated with last year's capital raise, which afforded us the ability to lean into one of the best reinsurance markets we've experienced in a long time. We are now at an inflection point in our evolution. We have built an organization that will succeed in an industry impacted by low interest rates, abundant third-party capital, social inflation, and climate change. It is now time to monetize what we have built. Our fortress balance sheet will help us achieve this goal as it easily absorbs this quarter's losses. Our shares have been trading at attractive levels, which provides us more options to deploy excess capital than probably at any other time in recent history. As you saw, we continue to repurchase our shares in the fourth quarter, and thanks to our strong excess capital position, expect to continue to do so in 2022. The attractiveness of our shares versus other opportunities places an increasingly higher hurdle against deploying excess capital into our business. We have achieved competitive scale and will only pursue future growth to the extent new business is expected to clear stringent profitability hurdle rates. This will allow our underwriters to focus on building efficient portfolios through pricing discipline and strong underwriting. We will continue to engage with our clients, discussing our developing view of risk and the pricing and structures that are needed to provide fair returns to absorb the volatility. At times, these discussions may prove difficult or challenging. I'm comfortable reducing on any business that we do not believe will create superior returns for our shareholders. This results in additional excess capital. We have more tools than ever to manage it effectively. That said, I expect that we will write a larger and more profitable portfolio in 2022. To begin with, the property market has enjoyed material rate increases over the last five years, which we'll continue to earn through. Rate increases have been similar if not steeper in the casualty market over the last three years. Going forward, we believe rates will continue to rise across the industry for several reasons. First, due to continuing volatility, realized results have lagged expected returns in the industry at large for several years. As a result, substantial proportions of the reinsurance industry, in particular third-party capital, have failed to earn their cost of capital. Investor patience is wearing thin, and they are requiring increased return profiles to accept volatility. We expect retro capacity will shrink due to poor performance and substantial trapped capital. Any retro that is available will likely move up an attachment level, so it will shift protection from earnings to capital. If there is less retro at lower attachment points, reinsurers will be more exposed to income statement volatility. Since the cost of accepting volatility has risen, the supply of reinsurance will decrease and further push rate. Third, social inflation will continue plaguing the industry, and price inflation will increasingly push up loss costs. And fourth, persistent losses and the fear of climate change will likely raise primary carriers' demand for hedges against their own volatility. We expect these various dynamics will reduce the supply of, and increase the demand for the products that we sell. This will result in further rate increases and improved profitability. I should also note that our casualty business is now beginning to reflect the substantial rate improvements of the last three years. As a result, this quarter we reduced our initial expected loss ratio by three points. We absorbed the casualty segment's share of CAD losses and still made an underwriting profit. I will discuss this further in the second half of my comments. But suffice it to say that we anticipate casualty will increasingly contribute to our bottom line in the future. So when I look forward to 2022, I'm very excited about our prospects. Our fortress balance sheet allows us to maintain our current underwriting portfolio or even grow it if desirable. Increasing rates across our business will add to the portfolio's profitability. Finally, prudent capital management will leverage our potential to generate bottom line profitability on a percentage of equity basis. That concludes my opening comments. I'll provide more detailed update on our segment performance at the end of the call, but first I'll turn it over to Bob to discuss the financial performance for the quarter.