W.R. Berkley Corporation

Good day and welcome to WR Berkeley's, Berkeley Corporation's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today's conference call is being recorded. The speaker's remarks may contain forward-looking statements. Some of the forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words, including without limitation, believes, expects, or estimates. We caution you that such forward-looking statements should not be regarded as a representation by us that the future plans, estimates, or expectations contemplated by us will in fact be achieved. Please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 and our other filings made with the SEC for a description of the business environment in which we operate and the important factors that may materially affect our results. WR Berkeley Corporation is not under any obligation and expressly disclaims any such obligation to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Rob Berkeley. Please go ahead, sir.

Emma, thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining for our third quarter call. So in addition to me on this end of the phone, you also have Bill Berkley, our Executive Chair, as well as Rich Baio, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We are going to follow our typical agenda where in a couple of moments, I'm going to hand it over to Rich. He's going to walk us through the highlights from the quarter. I will follow him with a couple of brief sound bites or reflections. And then in pretty short order, we will open it up for Q&A. Happy to take the conversation in any direction where people would like to. But before I hand the mic to Rich, I did want to flag with folks one sort of macro observation. We were chatting internally earlier and how it seems like the quarterly calls oftentimes turn into and every 90-day session talking about certain numbers which oftentimes go out a certain number of basis points. And while those discussions are worthwhile and productive from our perspective, it's also important that people not lose sight of the macro. And it is something that we spend a lot of time every day thinking about. And that is what is the goal of the exercise, what we are trying to do? And clearly, one of the cornerstone goals is building book value. Building book value is an important thing for a whole host of reasons, including building book value allows the organization to live up or meet the needs of the various stakeholders. When we think about building book value, we approach it with an idea that we'll refer to as risk-adjusted return that many of you have heard us talk about in the past. We take this approach and apply it to both our investing as well as our underwriting activities. And while you probably hear more companies than not in their own words talk about these concepts, I think one of the differentiating ways that we approach this idea is how we think about volatility as a component of risk. And again, this is something that we've discussed in the past but I think it's particularly timely, particularly relevant when we have a quarter for the industry, for society, like we saw in Q3. This idea of volatility as a component of risk-adjusted return, we certainly grapple with on both the investing and underwriting side of the business. You can see it on the investment side, for example, and how we have thought about durations. and how we have been willing to keep our duration short, and even though that comes at a cost, we do not think the risk-adjusted return is there to justify going out on the curve and extending that duration. We do not believe you get paid enough for that potential risk. In addition to that, again, as it once again crystallized in the third quarter, when we think about underwriting activities, And we think about volatility as a component of risk. Clearly, the industry is feeling the challenges that come along with cat activity. From our perspective, cat activity is there on a regular basis. And why people choose to back it out on a regular basis doesn't make a whole lot of sense to us. Our view is that volatility is real. It is a real component of risk. When we think about running the business, it is of great priority to us and how we think about deploying capital. So I'm going to pause there, but before I do, I guess one last comment. I know that there are a lot of people that will look at our numbers and Rich will walk you through it and you'll do the math. and you'll come up with an XCAT accident year loss ratio, and what does that mean it is on a combined ratio, and that'll probably get you to approximately an 86.9. But from our perspective, if one chooses to slip off the rose-colored glasses for a moment, we generated a 90.4. That is reality from our perspective. But in spite of the cats and the impact, we did achieve a very healthy underwriting result. And in the process, we achieved a 16.6% return on equity. Ultimately, when one thinks about building book value, you can't just think about the steps forward that you take. You need to think about how you avoid the steps backwards. And when you think about compounding book value over an extended period of time, When you think about value creation for shareholders amongst other stakeholders, not taking those steps backwards is a big part of the puzzle. So with that, Rich, I will hand it over to you. If you would please walk us through.

Terrific, Rob. Thanks very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Operating income increased by more than 100% to $247 million, or $1.32 per share, which is compared with $121 million, or 65 cents per share. The increase is primarily attributable to strong underwriting results, net investment income, and foreign currency gains. The company built upon the strong first half of the year with continued growth in premium and expansion in underwriting profits. From a production perspective, gross premiums written grew by $525 million, or 23.2%, to a record of almost $2.8 billion. Net premiums written grew by $446 million, or 23.7%, to another record of more than $2.3 billion. The session rate was fairly consistent at 16.6% in the current quarter. Breaking down the results further, the insurance segment grew net premiums written by 23.3% to more than $2 billion, reflecting increases in all lines of business. Professional liability led this growth with 58.7%, followed by commercial auto of 28.1%, other liability of 25.3%, short tail lines of 8.6%, and workers' compensation of 7.7%. The reinsurance and monoline excess segment grew 26.7% to $318 million, with an increase in casualty reinsurance of 36% and monoline excess of 27.4%, partially offset by a small decline in property reinsurance of 1.4%. The increase in net premiums written on a year-to-date basis was more than 20%, resulting from growth in exposure and compounding rate improvements that will continue to earn through in the coming quarters. This was evident by the increase in net premiums earned of 19% in the current quarter. Included in the quarter were current accident year catastrophe losses of $74 million or 3.5 loss ratio points compared with $73 million or 4.2 loss ratio points in the prior year. As a result, quarterly underwriting profits increased 80% to $200 million slightly off the record quarterly underwriting results in the second quarter of this year. The reported loss ratio improved 1.3 loss ratio points to 62.4% from the prior year, primarily driven by rate improvement and business mix. Prior year loss reserves developed favorably by approximately $1.5 million in the current quarter. The expense ratio improved two points to 28%, in large part due to the growth in net premiums earned, which is outpacing underwriting expenses by approximately 7.5%. This improvement is evident from an operating cost as well as acquisition cost perspective. We continue to highlight the partial benefit from reduced travel and entertainment, which is slowly coming back. Closing out the underwriting performance, our current accident year combined ratio excluding catastrophes was 86.9% for the quarter compared with 89.8% for the prior year quarter. Turning to investments, net investment income increased 26.1% to $180 million, driven by strong results in investment funds. The significant contribution in investment funds represents three consecutive quarters of outperformance. and we feel it's important to highlight that the investment fund results are not necessarily representative of future earnings. Despite the ongoing growth in invested assets, the fixed maturity portfolio represents 69% of the total invested assets, and the associated investment income declined quarter over quarter due to the persistent low interest rate environment. Strong operating cash flows of more than $825 million in the quarter contributed to the increased cash and cash equivalents as of September 30th. This resulted in a slightly shorter duration of 2.3 years in the current quarter compared with 2.4 years in the second quarter. The credit quality of the fixed maturity portfolio remains high at AA-. Pre-tax net investment gains in the quarter of $20 million is primarily comprised of realized gains on investments of $36 million partially offset by a reduction in unrealized gains on equity securities of $19 million. The realized gains was largely driven by the sale of real estate properties in the southeast. The effective tax rate was 19.6% in the quarter, which largely benefited from equity-based compensation that predominantly vests in August of each year. Overall strong performance resulted in an annualized return on beginning of year equity of 16.6%, as Rob alluded to. Stockholders' equity increased by $70 million to approximately $6.6 billion in the quarter after regular dividends of $23 million and share repurchases of $93 million. The company repurchased approximately 1.3 million shares at an average price of $72.03 per share in the quarter. book value per share increased 1.5% in the quarter, and book value per share before dividends and share repurchases increased 2.5%. And with that, I'll turn it back to Rob.