The Travelers Companies, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the First Quarter Results Teleconference for Travelers. We ask that you hold all questions until the completion of formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on April 16, 2026. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abby Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers' discussion of our first quarter 2026 results. We released our press release, financial supplement, and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All of these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section. Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO, Dan Fry, CFO, and our three-segment president, Greg Teslauski of Business Insurance, Jeff Clank of Bond and Specialty Insurance, and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take your questions. Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10Q and 10K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also, in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release financial supplement and other materials available in the investor section on our website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abby. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to report an excellent start to 2026 with strong underwriting performance across all three segments and a strong result from our investment portfolio. We also continue to deliver on key strategic initiatives during the quarter. For the quarter, we earned core income of $1.7 billion, or $7.71 per diluted share, generating core return on equity of 19.7%. Over the trailing four quarters, we generated a core return on equity of 22.7%, driven by excellent underlying fundamentals. Underwriting income of $1.2 billion pre-tax benefited from strong levels of underlying underwriting income and favorable prior year developments. Each of our three segments generated attractive underlying and reported margins. Turning to investments, our high-quality investment portfolio continued to perform well after tax net investment income increased by 9% to $833 million, driven by strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio. Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return more than $2.2 billion of excess capital to shareholders during the quarter, including approximately $2 billion of share repurchases. Even after that return of capital and having made important investments in the business, adjusted book value per share was 16% higher than a year ago. In recognition of our strong financial position and confidence in the outlook for our business, I'm pleased to share that our board of directors declared a 14% increase in our quarterly cash dividend to $1.25 per diluted share. marking 22 consecutive years of dividend increases with a compound annual growth rate of 8% over that period. Turning to the top line, through disciplined marketplace execution across all three segments, we generated net written premiums of $10.3 billion in the quarter. In business insurance, we grew net written premiums to $5.8 billion. Excluding the property line, we grew domestic net written premiums in the segment by 6%. The declining premium volume in property continues to be a large account dynamic. Property premiums were higher in our small commercial business and about flat in our middle market business. We know premium change in business insurance was 5.8%. Retention increased a point from recent quarters to a very strong 86% and was higher or stable in every line. Reflecting deliberate execution on our part and a generally high level of stability in the market. We know premium change in our core middle market business was about unchanged sequentially, also with retention higher at 89%. In terms of the product lines, RPC in auto, CMP, and umbrella remained in the double digits. RPC in GL and workers' comp was stable, and RPC in the property line was positive. New business in the segment was a record $775 million, a reflection of our strong value proposition. In bond and specialty insurance, we grew net written premiums by 7% to $1.1 billion. In our high-quality management liability business, renewal premium change ticked up sequentially with excellent retention of 87%. In our industry-leading surety business, we grew net written premiums by 14%. In personal insurance, we generated net written premiums of $3.5 billion with solid retention and positive renewal premium change in both auto and homeowners. You'll hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff, and Michael about our segment results. The results we released this morning are part of a larger story. They reflect a set of advantages that we have developed and that have compounded over a long period of time. Over the course of many years, we've managed through a wide variety of challenging conditions. The 2008 financial crisis, dramatic changes in interest rates, a major inflection in liability loss cost trends, a global pandemic, severe natural catastrophes, and periods of heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainty. We didn't predict the full scope of any of those events, but by carefully balancing risk and reward on both sides of the balance sheet, we were positioned to manage successfully through all of them. We've consistently delivered growth in book value per share and earnings per share at industry-leading returns, averaging more than 1,000 basis points above the 10-year Treasury over the last 10 years, and with industry-low volatility. We've also built a strong capital position as we've ever had. That track record isn't a coincidence. It reflects a set of structural advantages that hold up regardless of the environment, starting with the breadth of the franchise. We're a market leader across nine major lines of insurance, serving personal and commercial customers across the country, and diversified across distribution partners, industry class, and customer size. That balance, which represents a bigger advantage than people sometimes appreciate, has resulted in our consolidated loss ratio being less volatile than the loss ratio of our least volatile segment. In an uncertain world, that kind of structural hedge is a meaningful source of stability. Where we operate also matters. More than 95% of our premiums come from North America. At a time of considerable geopolitical complexity, that concentration is a strategic advantage. And the domestic market offers substantial room for growth. With our broad product capability, our leading market position, and the execution you've seen from us over the years, we're well positioned to continue gaining share, as we have in our commercial businesses over the past five years. Equally important is our ability to navigate the loss environment. We have the data, the analytics, and the discipline to see changes in loss activity early and to reflect what we see in our reserves, our risk selection, our pricing, and our claim strategy. That capability is foundational, because until you have an accurate view of the loss environment, the many downstream decisions are working from the wrong inputs. Our early identification of the acceleration in social inflation is a good example. We adjusted before the market did, and since then, we've grown the business and significantly improved our margins. Our scale is also a significant and growing advantage. Our profitability and cash flows support our ability to invest more than a billion and a half dollars annually in technology, including in our ambitious AI strategy. Our size gives us the data to power AI and the resources to deploy it, creating a virtuous cycle of better insights, better decisions, and better outcomes. Our financial strength also enables us to absorb the increasing severity of weather losses And all of these benefits position us as a preferred counterparty in the reinsurance market. Beyond that, our product breadth, risk control, claim expertise, and other capabilities that benefit from scale make us more relevant to our distribution partners, deepening those relationships and our access to quality business. Over time, companies that can leverage scale effectively will have a meaningful edge in consolidating industry premium. As for our investment portfolio, the principles that guide us are the same ones that have served us well for decades. We consistently manage for risk-adjusted returns, not headline yield. More than 90% of our portfolio is in high-quality fixed income with an average credit rating of AA-. The issue of the day, private credit, is a non-issue for us. We manage interest rate risk by holding the vast majority of our fixed income securities to maturity and carefully coordinating the duration of our assets and liabilities. Our investing discipline has produced default rates that were a fraction of industry averages through every stress event of the past two decades. You can't gracefully reposition a portfolio in the middle of a dislocation. The time to build that resilience is before you need it. In short, whether we're talking about underwriting or investing, the advantages we've built are designed to deliver across environments, and they have. Before I wrap up, I'd like to share that a number of my colleagues and I have just returned from our Travelers Leadership Conference, a multi-day event we host each year for the principals and senior leaders of our most significant distribution partners. As we've shared before, the vision for our innovation agenda includes enhancing our value proposition as an indispensable partner to our agents and brokers. We continue to make significant investments to ensure that we realize that vision through best-in-class products, services, and experiences. What we heard consistently is that our deep specialization across a wide range of modernized, simplified, and tailored products, along with the broad and consistent appetite and extraordinary field organization, the ability to deliver exceptional experiences, and our industry-leading claim capabilities are major differentiators in the market. To sum it up, we're off to an excellent start for 2026, and we're highly confident that the advantages that have driven our success will extend our strong record of outperformance. And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.