The Hanover Insurance Group, Inc. (THG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you, everyone, for coming to the Hanover fireside chat today. My name is Grace Carter. I cover the stock here at BofA. We have the CEO, Jack Roche, sitting in the middle here; and CFO, Jeff Farber, here as well today, and I will turn things over to them to make some introductory comments before we get started with questions.

Thanks, Grace. I will keep those brief. I think some of you we know well, others, I think, may be new to our story. So I thought what might be good is just to take a couple of minutes to tee up, I think the journey that we've been on as a company and then we'll quickly move into some of the questions. Frankly, we're excited to be here because we're excited about the journey that we're on, and I've been with the company a little over 16 years and part of really a transformation of what's now a 170-year-old company that's been through a lot over that period of time, but we really have enjoyed transforming kind of a more generic regional P&C company into a more distinctive kind of P&C franchise for the best agents in the country. And I know that sounds a little bit overstated, but I really believe that's the journey that we're on, and we're significantly down that journey. We have through a series of acquisitions and renewal rights and talent hires and building out organic businesses, we have built a really diversified and distinctive set of products and capabilities as a firm across personal lines and Commercial Lines. We also have, I think, a very distinct distribution approach. We are very selective in who we appoint. We have a more analytical, more sophisticated partnership or partnering approach with the best agents across the land, both big, medium and small. We look for agents that are thirsty for our value proposition more than how big or small they are. And I think we have an innovative and kind of agile culture that is appropriate for the times. This is a very dynamic time in our business, traditional ways of assessing risk, pricing risk, assessing customer preferences really are no longer valid, and you have to assemble talented folks who enjoy part of that new transformational view of the industry and like to come together and collaborate and challenge each other's thinking. So I think we feel advantaged as a midsized company on the move, competing against some of the best companies in the land, but also kind of outsmarting some of the smaller companies that are increasingly being challenged by the specialization and the sophistication of our business. So we're excited to update you today on that journey. We've had a nice track record over the last 5 or 6 years. Admittedly, 2022, it was a bit more challenging for us based on some of the pressures that we face with the inflation and supply chain and then a nasty winter storm at the end of the year. But I can assure you the underlying momentum that we have as a company is strong, and we look into this new year with great optimism and excitement.

Perfect. With that, we'll get started. The first question today is going to be on top line growth. At the September 2021 Investor Day, you established a top line growth target of 7%. And just given some movements in the rate environment since then, I was wondering how the environment today compares versus the original expectations that underpin that growth target and just how you see different segments contributing to the overall top line growth today versus how maybe you expected at the time that you set the goal?

Yes. I think first of all, when we set those targets, we did that after reflecting on the prior 5 years where we substantially met the goals that we set out for ourselves as an enterprise. And we also, I think, forecasted that we thought of that 5 year -- the next 5 years in a way that was not a linear kind of line. We purposely talked about how we could get ourselves to the next level in terms of consistent performance and outgrowing the industry. But what was always part of that is doing it smartly and knowing what the market environment brings to us and being able to grow over that period, at least at that kind of 7% CAGR level. We obviously had an opportunity of late to grow at a faster clip, and we saw that opportunity, and we took that opportunity, particularly in our specialty business, but the pandemic came upon us and changed loss trends, changed some of those dynamics, the inflationary environment. So what we take pride in is that we know how to produce good margins. We know how to grow when it's smart and when it doesn't. And because we have such a diversified portfolio, it's not kind of one path that we're on what Bryan Salvatore and the specialty business has seen is that within his set of 13 businesses, we have opportunities for some real strong double-digit growth and then a couple of areas where we're being more cautious and more thoughtful, personal lines will likely continue to grow at a pretty good clip, but it will be much more about pricing than it will be PIF growth, for example. So I think the environment has changed. But over that 5-year period, I don't see us showing a dramatically different trajectory than we expected over that period from the September 2021 I Day.

Thank you. You also at that Investor Day, had established a 5-year ROE target of 14%. At the time, investment yields are expected to be a net drag on ROE. Clearly, interest rates are taking a different trajectory over the past several quarters and investment yields look a lot different today than when the and they looked then. How should we think about the 14% target in that context? Does it remain the right target? And how should we think about the spread between 14% and the cost of capital today versus when you originally set the target?

You want to grab that one?

Happy to. So there's an awful lot in that question, Grace, I appreciate it. We were comfortable when we said the long-term target of 14-plus percent, and we're still comfortable with that. Things change along the way. 2022 was a bit of a blip in that trajectory where loss cost trends and inflation showed up. And I think 2023 with interest rate help in NII, the continued expense ratio benefit and the earning in of rate will get us back close to the trajectory we had planned, but not fully there. 2024 gets us back to that trajectory, if not even ahead of our trajectory. And a big driver of that is the impact on NII for interest rates. So the notion of getting additional yield in 2022, building in '23. Each year, it's like a flywheel. It really just starts to continue to build and accelerate what we'll continue on. With respect to cost of equity, we've historically had a low cost of equity at certain points during COVID. In late COVID, you saw cost of equity for most terms in the industry increased a bit because of the beta had increased. But as we sit today, our cost of equity is very similar to where it was when we put the Investor Day, think mid-7s, if you run a capital asset pricing model. So we're optimistic in short order, getting back to and getting to that trajectory for the 14-plus percent ROE, which is pretty good when you think about a mid-7s cost of equity.

Perfect. Switching to talk about the specialty book. Last year, the specialty book escaped some of the inflationary pressures, seemingly that had impacted personal lines and core commercial. If we can talk about the characteristics of that book that allowed it to post margin expansion given a challenging loss cost trend environment, just given the growth opportunities there that you mentioned, how large of a share we should expect it to comprise of the overall book over time?

Sure. Yes. We're as I said earlier, very proud of the build-out over really the last decade and a half of our specialty business. I think when I joined the firm, we had somewhere around $40 million of specialty business, really, marine and a little bit of surety. So to sit here today with $1.3 billion of specialty business, our net written premium or greater and growing as well as a lot of niche business inside of our core commercial business, I think of us as a very specialized firm. And so inside of specialty, we have a good mix of property casualty. We do have a marine business. We have a specialty industrial business, and that did have some impact of the inflationary environment. In the casualty trends, I think the biggest factor to answer your question is really our limits profile and where we play in the specialty business. We are not a large high-end E&S player. We're not in the med mal business. We're not in the upper end of management liability and executive protection business. So because of that, I think the limits profile itself kind of puts a little bit of a buffer on some of what you're seeing in terms of liability severity trends. In the short, short term, the pandemic had a positive impact on all of us on the liability side, right? The courts got closed, litigation trends went through, smaller claims made their way through fast and then there was a pretty much of a backlog on any of the complex claims. But I think as we look at our portfolio, we're in the smaller end of the specialty business. We're operating model and IT infrastructure and your ability to get to the retail agent in a really customized way, including the new PPI structures that we have built in is the way we are able to get that less volatile specialty business into our portfolio.

Moving on to Personal Lines. Obviously, personal lines pricing increased over the course of last year, and you expect further acceleration moving into 2023. Could we talk about the frequency and severity trends that underpin your current pricing assumptions? And you've mentioned expecting to reach target profitability again in 2024 for that book. So at what point over the next several quarters, should we expect pricing to maybe start to approach kind of more normalized levels?

Yes, I think we can tag team on this a little bit, but I -- if we've learned anything over the last 3 years or so, be careful about being too precise with your loss trend analysis, right? And so we have a point of view of how frequency is gradually making its way back to pre-ban debit levels but still below that for us given our book of business. We certainly have an enhanced view of how severity is coming through and are not assuming any material changes in inflation, although we expect that eventually to happen, but we're not going to prematurely declare victory on deceleration of inflation in our pricing or in our views as we set our picks. But when you look at more importantly, I think, is how are you assessing the leading indicators that tell you where you are vis-a-vis your original assumptions on frequency and severity. And we've done a ton of work to try to break down not only the costs on the property damage and physical damage side, but also where some of the liability trends are coming at, both bodily injury and property damage. So we are the best we've ever been at putting those kind of interim metrics in front of ourselves to know whether we're on the glide path that we put out for ourselves. The pricing that we put in place at the end of this year and are into the first quarter, should clearly get us to exceed those loss trends that we put out, and we're going to continue to push that throughout the year, and we laid out, I think, in our fourth quarter that we are we are going to participate in a very hard market for those lines. With respect to home specifically, we disclosed that we were getting renewal premium price of 15.5% in the fourth quarter, moving to an expected 18% in the first quarter and continuing at roughly that range throughout the year and into 2024. And so if you think about with 1-year policies each and every quarter, if you're earning in something like, call it, 17% in terms of rate, you get a 25% benefit in the quarter and in the next quarter, you get a 50% benefit. So if one would think about a 17% premium change, hard to say what the changes in the loss cost trend. But obviously, certainly toward the later part of 2022, you have a pretty well inflated loss cost trend. And so even if you made up a number, you said something like a 7% loss trend and a 17% premium change, you're going to really start building some margin improvement very, very quickly.

And sticking with personal lines, you've mentioned plans to move upmarket. Does the challenging loss cost environment influenced the timing for those plans at all? And just to date, has there been a gap in the willingness and ability to absorb higher pricing on the Hanover Prestige side versus the rest of the book? And just given the sharp increases in pricing for both auto and homeowners at the same time, has there been any shift in bundling habits over the past several months?

Yes. So I'll start with the last one. No, we have almost 90% of our portfolio. We have at least the home and the auto oftentimes toys and umbrella. And so we don't see any material change in how people are -- or how our agents are intersecting with us in terms of our account value proposition and related to prestige versus platinum, the statistics are quite similar. We watch them, obviously, because our prestige kind of upper limit, upper middle market profile is newer. But all of the metrics that we set for ourselves are positive. I think there's probably a slightly higher retention, frankly, on the Prestige product, which makes sense. It's a higher quality customer, less price sensitive. And so we don't see any material difference between that. And I think a lot of it has to do with, again, we're a high-quality provider in personal lines with a bundled approach with independent agents. And we are at a stage in the IA channel, where mainly driven by a constraint on talent. If you are pricing your product at the market level, this business is very sticky, and it will be, right? The agent's capacity to remarket businesses that are an all-time low. So the question is, are you on the path you need to be to restore your margins? And are you not the company that agents are having to feel like you're upsetting their rhythm and they're focusing on remarketing your business versus somebody else's. So we're feeling quite good about the path we're on, the agent's response and frankly, the understanding of how much the costs have gone up. It's not as hard as it used to be for agents to go out and explain why they're having to pay double-digit pricing in this environment. Maybe the last thing on the upmarket. We don't have real plans to go more upmarket in the short term anyway than where we are with Prestige. The high net worth business is interesting and it may be a possibility of us for long term. But as we've witnessed over the last half a dozen years, it comes with a different volatility, whether it be weather or wildfire or even some of the liability limits that come along with that business. So we feel like we have plenty of profitable growth opportunity in the 20 states that we play in, in personal lines without changing our strategy materially.

Perfect. At this point, I wanted to take a pause and see if anyone in the audience would like to ask a question. Okay. Perfect. We can keep going. On to reserves, everyone's favorite topic. Following a corrective charge in 2016, our reserve development has ranged from modestly positive to neutral over the past several years. Just going back to some of the things you mentioned earlier with court closures during the pandemic as well as elevated inflation, it feels like it's harder for investors to get a grasp on reserve adequacy today than it has been historically, just the increase in certainty. How would you recommend that investors gain comfort with the level of reserves today? And are there any particular data points that you would point people towards?

2016 seems like a long time ago, but it goes quickly. I had started with Hanover and we took a $174 million reserve charge, which obviously was a big charge for us. And Jack and I were committed to having a strong balance sheet. And over time, we've had the COVID scenario roll through, and we had an opportunity to be prudent there with our picks and make certain assumptions about court reopenings and the level of litigation involvement and trends of medical procedures and delays. And so we've been prudent with our picks. We haven't had any net adverse development since '16, and we've had various levels of favorable development. And I'm feeling really good about our level of reserves. In fact, I've never felt more confident in the prudence and the comfort level of our balance sheet. And part of your question too was how would investors get their head around this? How do they -- I think when you look to the kind of the confidence you have in the management team and their willingness to show when they're having little bumps, so they don't end up with big bumps. And I think part of that confidence that Jack and I spoke to when I came into this role and he was with us for a couple of years as a CFO helping us through that period, we made a commitment that we're going to -- if we see some things that are not convenient and they're outside of our picks, we'd rather deal with those along the way, then try to look at the overall adequacy of our balance sheet. And I think that's important today. There's too many puts and takes for you to think broadly. If you look at your portfolio, you've got to be kind of intellectually honest with what's going your way and what's not going your way and not get behind because it's hard to catch up once you're behind.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Your property cat reinsurance treaty does not renew until the summer. However, a lot of peers have already renewed theirs at 1/1 and seen some changes in pricing and retention levels, largely as expected, I think, but I was just curious if there's any learnings from observing peers renew already that you're thinking about going into your own renewals and how the rising property cat reinsurance pricing impacts your appetite for property lines going into this year? And if you expect any sort of major sort of changes to your overall risk management strategy just in light of what's going on in the reinsurance markets.

So as you said, we're a 7-1 property renewer, and we were fortunate last year for a couple of reasons. Number one, we bought increased traditional reinsurance last year. We also issued a $150 million cat bond at the top of the stack, which goes out for 3 years, assuming it doesn't expire in one of the first 2, which is great. And while I felt like in '71 of '22, we were paying a little more than I might have liked to in February of '22 because interest rates have risen and the requirement for investor. Nothing like what people will probably have to pay at 1/1 or later. I think the primary part of your question is -- well, one of the parts is how have we built into our guidance and assumptions. So it's going to cost us more. There's no question about it. Our attachment point on the Cat program is $200 million. I'd love it to be lower. I think we'll maintain it where it is. I think in the current environment, it's going to be hard for it to be lower. But we've never impacted that program since 2005, which was Katrina, and that was a different firm with different aggregations and a different footprint. So it's been a very profitable firm treaty for the reinsurers for the last 17, 18 years. It will cost us some more money, but I'm pretty confident we'll get it done. And I think the 3-year structure that we started several years back, again, makes that a little bit more palatable to figure out where the increases are coming our way and how we manage through that over time as opposed to what I think a lot of folks based in 1/1 as just an abrupt change, either in their attachment points, price or both. So we feel somewhat favored in the short term by having the structure we have and the timing we have and the experience we've had in our cat treaty. But that's also what's fueling some robust pricing. And I think what you see is shortly after 1/1, folks are starting to show up in the marketplace with a little bit more robust property pricing because they know they have to pay for that reinsurance.

That makes sense. Moving to the small commercial book. I mean most of your core commercial segment has been largely focused on small to midsized accounts. Just given the level of influence that major brokers can have over pricing in the large case market. Do you feel that as you move further down market that there's more potential margin to be harvested and more opportunities for differentiation -- and just as we've seen over the past few years, it feels like more players that have traditionally focused on the large case market have talked a little bit more about small commercial than usual and also some whispers of maybe some direct competition coming in. Just any thoughts on how the competitive environment has evolved for that piece of your business?

Yes. I think your overall assessment is true. And I've been at this for 3.5 decades. I started off as a middle market underwriter. And the thing I always was surprised at is that the largely the account, the more competition there was and the more emphasis that the broker placed on making sure that account didn't leave. And so I think there is a systemic challenge in the upper middle market, in particular, to how do you get good margins. When that's the business that they care the most about -- people are going at it from a new business perspective and they're hypersensitive to the renewals on that. As you move down the account size, that's less true, right? People aren't that worried about losing a 2,500 commission revenue account. So the question is how good is your value proposition? How good is your pricing over time so that you're not the market that's disruptive. And most recently, how good is your operating model and your infrastructure to get at a broad base of the small commercial business. We're really one of the only markets that has a very competitive point-of-sale offering and a non-point-of-sale package-oriented business. The large carriers who are very good are almost exclusively a point-of-sale BOP offering. They write the other lines, but they start with kind of the small to midsize, small business. And then the regionals tend to dominate the package business. And the known truth about many of them is that they miss price business both ways. They have some business that's overpriced and they have a business that's underpriced because their underwriting and their pricing isn't that sophisticated. So what we've done, really, particularly over the last decade is we've built this business to be an incredibly successful business and balance for our organization. And it's because we have that broad base. And when we intersect with those agents, we're very strategic. And anybody that intersects with the largest agents in the country can ask them who are your most strategic partners in small commercial, and I guarantee you we will come up very consistently. Why? Because we have that broad-based business. It's profitable. It's growing -- it's -- we have an operating model for when they want to consolidate. And we have that an efficiency built into market consolidation. We have the best service center according to their views in the industry, but we make just as much money whether the agent services or whether we service it. So we don't force them down a particular path. They can operate the business the way they choose to operate the business, and we have built operating models to accommodate that. And then the last thing is when you think of small commercial, take it all the way out to the small end of the specialty lines. There's the same issue in most of the consolidating agents, they need help taking specialty business that's generating low EBIT margins. and we're one of very few companies through the investments we've made and the way we go to market to help them get the expense ratio down and to start to improve their margins in that smaller specialty business. So that's what I think makes us so strategically relevant to those folks, and it's not a tug of war between companies if you have a strong value proposition and you can help them get done what they need to get done.

You mentioned the larger competitors and regional peers in your answer. Oftentimes, the Hanover gets kind of lumped in with the regional label. Is this something that you agree with? And just kind of across your different segments, how does the size of the players that you're competing with tend to vary?

Yes. So I think it's something that as we built this company or rebuilt kind of the product set and turned it into the company it is today. We had a hypothesis that if we really pulled together some distinctive capabilities and approached a subset of the agents in a much more strategic way, that would be sufficient to kind of web the better agents and not be in a tug-of-war with bigger and stronger distributors. And it frankly has played out that way. And we are -- if you go to the top consolidators in the business, we are significantly penetrated and profitable and have terrific strategic relationships. Now as they get bigger, there's going to be some economic stream. Agents have benefited by a prolonged firm market and will and somewhere down the line when there's more pricing pressure and the organic growth kind of subsides for some of these folks, along with some debt costs going up, that to present some pressure, I think, down the road. But heretofore, the consolidation has advantaged us, and we have been able to kind of work across the spectrum of size of agents and the performance of kind of the larger distributors from a profitability standpoint is actually slightly better. But we work really hard to make sure that our relevance with those agents is real, right? Because at the end of the day, this can't be about leveraging each other. This has to be about helping agents deliver on their strategies and to better serve customers in a more cost-effective way. And as long as that we're able to make that real and demonstrate that, I don't think the leverage is going to be part of our vulnerability. I have more confidence today than I've ever had that agents need somebody like Hanover to help them get through the way this business is changing.

And I guess a quick follow-up to that, kind of swinging back to the first question on the 7% growth target over the next few years. To what extent do new agency appointments contribute to that? Or do you assume a more kind of constant level of agency relationships in that target?

Yes. We've, I think, done a really nice job of identifying additional agents, particularly in personal lines, small commercial and some of the smaller end of the niche specialty business. We're not into growth for growth's sake. And so we're not looking to add a bunch of agents just to make ourselves a little bit bigger and dilute the franchise or diminish our agency penetration. But I think the reason why we feel comfortable with adding 150, 200 agents a year, when it makes sense timing-wise is that more and more people are asking us for our franchise, whether that be the personal lines account business that we've become known for in the marketplace or the Marriott of commercial lines capabilities. And also on the lower end of the spectrum, there's less distribution conflict. People aren't that worried about how many agents have access to our small commercial business. They care deeply about how much of our kind of medium specialty business gets distributed. They don't want all their competition to have the same access or we don't have franchise value. So we work really, really hard at that. But at the end of the day, new agents are an additional way for us to grow and spread our risk, particularly in the flow businesses, thoughtfully and also, to some degree, deal with that as agents consolidate, there's some of those agents that get swelled up into the bigger firms and kind of reduce our footprint, if you will. So I feel quite comfortable about the balance. The most economical growth that we have is better penetrating our existing agents. And so we never lose focus on that. If we're driving good margins in our business, and we have agents with plenty of headroom, that's job 1. And everything else is kind of an and as opposed to an or.

A safe assumption that there's a time component to agency penetration. But on average, where are you on agency penetration now? And looking at that time component, what do you think the headroom is for growing your penetration in the existing footprint?

Well, thanks for that question because it will help me answer the other part of Grace's question that maybe I didn't fully answer in that. We have -- and you might have seen this, I think, in some prior investor work we did where we try to -- we have built a model inside is what does agency penetration look like? And where does relevancy come out depending on the size of the agent and what kind of business they have? So -- and I think you have to think about it that way because agents don't say, "Oh, I have $30 million with that company, so they're my most strategic market, right? They look at what parts of their portfolio do they need help with. And as long as you're a meaningful participant and enough of the business sectors that they're trying to use to grow their business, you're relevant. So you can imagine, we have agents in personal lines where we literally have north of 30% share and the growth room is limited. But that's a small subset or folks and particularly in Michigan, where we've been there a long time and we're huge. What happens along that size spectrum is that percentage of penetration goes down, but the relevancy to be in the top 10 markets actually is still there because of the way they're spread over hundreds of carriers. So we literally have kind of a little bit of science in our distribution management to say, where do we want to be with Acrisure, where do we want to be with Hub International, where do we want to be with Marsh agency versus the mom and pop in some of the rural markets. And we don't disclose a lot of that, but we have -- we hold ourselves to a pretty high standard on whether we're relevant with that agent with our market share versus just how are we their biggest and best market because we won't be. Some of these guys, they write a lot of middle market, upper middle market, some of them write the lower end of national accounts. It's not what we do. But if we can be their best personal lines and small commercial and smaller in the specialty market as they try to deal with the economic challenges of that, especially after all the acquisitions they've made, we can be incredibly relevant, and we are. So that's how we gauge that, and it's a pretty analytical approach. We have that. We don't let people just kind of anecdotally talk about success in our organization. We every RVP has to come through and show their partner agents and what's the path to partnership. In your question on new agents, I have been pleasantly surprised that the vast majority of new appointments or appointments that we have had in our pipeline for a while, want our franchise and are willing to, I think most of them are willing to do an agency insights work right up front, which means that they literally open up their portfolio to us, uploaded into our system and plan that future partnership together. And we are in personal lines and small commercial, we're actually ahead of schedule in terms of the growth and penetration projections in aggregate for those agents. Every -- we look every year, how much new business are we generating from agents that we've appointed in the last 3 years. And that metric, we're actually exceeding our initial targets. So I think it's positive. And when we're not on a half the partnership, we end those relationships hopefully in a respectful way, but we don't let agents hang around and like $100,000 or a call that a success.

So we'll wrap it up on expenses, if that's okay. You've set a longer-term expense ratio target of 30%. And if you could just give us updates on where progress stands relative to where you thought you would be right now and just the most important components of reaching that target?

So we're on a very good trajectory, which is at least consistent with what we had modeled out in our September 2021 Investor Day for the rest of 2021 to 2022 and the guidance that we set for 2023. Obviously, you get tailwinds and headwinds in that situation. Sometimes you have to deal with talent environment that puts pressure on you. Sometimes you have individual needs or drivers around data analytics, artificial intelligence models that need to be built. But we have a really good track record and we know how to get through that. The biggest driver of the save is the leverage that we get from the growth on our fixed expenses. And so that creates a lot of capacity. And then there are certain elements of semi-fixed costs that have to be baked in there. But we're very optimistic that we can deliver the 130 basis points over a 5-year period, which when you convert that to an ROE sort of a 1.25 or 1.3 multiple on that. So it gets nearly 2% ROE benefit from just expense benefit alone.

Perfect. Thank you so much. I think we're just about out of time today. So I want to thank you all for participating and everyone for attending today. Looking forward to the rest of the conference.