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

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Hanover's 2026 Investor Update. I'm Oksana Lukasheva. Thank you for joining us. The Hanover strategic ambition and our progress have been consistent. And today, we will focus on what comes next. What is changing in our approach as the industry evolves, where we see the greatest opportunities to create value. What we expect will drive sustainable earnings and returns and the financial framework against which you can assess our progress. In a moment, you'll hear from our CEO, Jack Roche; and CEO Elect Dick levy, followed by Bryan Salvatore, President of Specialty Lines. We'll then turn to a business leader panel on operating model transformation and AI moderated by our Chief Information and Innovation Officer, Will Lee. Next, Chief Claims Officer, Dave Lovely, will discuss our claims transformation. CFO Jeff Farber will close the presentation by introducing our new long-term financial targets. We will conclude the event with a 30-minute Q&A session. Before we begin, a brief reminder that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from those discussed. Please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosures in today's presentation and our filings with the SEC for additional information. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the presentation materials, which will be posted on our website. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome our President and Chief Executive Officer, Jack Roche.

Thank you, Oksana and thanks to all of you for participating in our Investor Day. We very much value the ongoing dialogue we have with the investment community, and we appreciate the opportunity to give you an update and deeper view of Hanover strategy. and our future prospects. Our 2021 Investor Day was designed to carry us through 2026. And as we approach that horizon and a thoughtful CEO succession, this is a perfect time to reflect on our progress and to lay out the next chapter. So let's take a couple of minutes to review our accomplishments. As a management team, we are quite proud of the performance against the 5-year aspirational goals we put forth in 2021. We generated approximately 20% operating ROE for the last 12 and 18 months versus our target of 14% by 2026. We also outperformed our operating EPS target while being relatively in line with our book value and premium growth targets. Importantly, we achieved these targets while navigating a highly complex environment, including post-code uncertainty and significant spike in inflation. In fact, these environmental challenges served as a stimulus to accelerate our portfolio management actions and further advance the diversification of our earnings stream. As a result, we sit here today with the best financial and strategic position we've ever been, generating robust and diversified earnings across all 3 business segments and significantly better -- risk across our geographic footprint. Today, we are a true national player in commercial lines and a top super regional in personal lines. At the same time, we executed major improvements in our portfolio and property aggregation management, greatly reducing our earnings volatility. And our thoughtful and consistent growth are enabling even more relevance with the top distributors and allowing us to improve our scale and expense position. Now if you ask me what I'm most proud during my tenure, it is not any individual result or metric. It is the leadership team and the culture I will leave behind. This highly competent team has embraced this most dynamic environment and truly collaborates as one. Our business unit and corporate leaders share insights on loss trends, market shifts and strategic direction. They are students of the industry, not just their function. Every leader here is expected to understand the complexities of the P&C business well beyond their own functional area. Our leaders are agile and effective. Business leaders are more than underwriting experts. They evolve their operating models and drive their own technology agendas. In this most transformational time in our business, we have the strongest team in the history of the company, and they're very excited to elevate to the next level. And my confidence in the company extends well done to the senior leadership group to the broad -- organization. A team that has proven it can execute through significant change and is ready to keep evolving for the future. At the heart of our success is very special culture. It is built on our care values and exceptional leadership standards we hold everyone accountable to. Our various outside recognitions are gratifying, but the feedback I value the most is from our 5,000 employees who give us some of the highest picipation and engagement scores in the industry. I truly believe that our talent and culture are major contributors to our financial success, and lead to the sustainability of our performance going forward. And it is the most durable asset I can leave to my partner and successor, Dick Lavey. As I get ready to pass the baton to Dick, I couldn't be more confident in his ability to lead this unique company forward. His deep experience in the Property Casualty business, complemented by ignite expertise in the technology landscape, position him very well in this dynamic environment. Dick is one of the most tech-savvy P&C executives in the business today, and he has a world-class team around him that is truly excited about the future ahead. So with that, I'll turn the floor over to our CEO elect, Dick Lavey.

Thank you, Jack. I'm so honored to follow in your footsteps and continue this amazing journey. Having been at the handover for over 22 years I feel so connected to our people, our culture, and our strategy, and I'm beyond proud to lead this team forward. I'll begin with a summary or an overview of our next chapter, which we characterize as scaling with resiliency and durability. And there's one conviction I want to start with today. I believe the Hanover occupies an increasingly distinctive position in the market. National [ Cabar ] A+ capabilities and talent, local agency intimacy and a diversified and broadly profitable portfolio built around customers who value advice. We have created a competitive advantage that delivers real and measurable durability in our earnings power, and that is a very powerful position from which to grow and the opportunity to head is to scale that advantage without losing what makes us distinctive. Importantly, underlying our path to a diversified portfolio is a strategic and intentional go-to-market approach, where we have a focus about where we compete and which customer segments we target and how we've built our operating models to perform in these markets. Specifically, we have a disciplined focus on a small to midsize customer profile in small commercial, middle market and specialty with an emphasis on the full account. And this segmentation is critical to us and will continue. In Personal Lines, we have been purposeful in writing full accounts and moving upmarket, writing more complex PL customers with multiple homes, cars and ancillary needs. This is the segment that seeks insurance advice and is comfortably positioned in the IA channel. This is a key driver, we believe, of our go-forward resilience and durability as we scale the company. So looking out the next 5 to 7 years, the industry forces continue to challenge the environment, no doubt, but also create opportunities. And we firmly believe that our approach allows us to smartly navigate these trends. There's volatility and complexity rising across many liability lines. The independent agency channel will continue to consolidate and reorganize agent and customer expectations will continue to demand speed and clarity and Generative AI technology is enabling many new possibilities. AI is incredibly exciting for our company and for the industry. This represents a paradigm shift in how our industry operates streamlining how we do business involving many of the long-standing challenges that have frustrated agents, carriers and customers alike. It will help reduce friction in how we exchange data and interact with customers and agents bringing both efficiencies to how we execute and enabling better insights and decisioning in underwriting claims and service. So when you combine these opportunities with Hanover's innate agility and our tech business partnership, I couldn't be more optimistic about where -- what we can accomplish as we scale this company. So the strategy, the diversification and the transformation approach all contribute to a very strong earnings architecture. In fact, our recent improved performance is not just a function of a favorable cycle but rather a reflection of a resilient portfolio profile, reimagined operating models for claims and underwriting, a differentiated agency strategy and a financial management approach designed to compound value through the cycles. And our company is backed by a fortress-strength balance sheet with strong reserves, a high-performing investment portfolio and strategic capital deployment. So as I step into the EO role, the Hanover is embarking on its next chapter. Not as a better-performing version of our prior model, but as a structurally different company, more technology-enabled, more specialized and with radar scale, all of which enables us to deliver value. My goal is to march our company forward towards $10 billion in premium and $1 billion in earnings and on that journey, we have aspirational goals to deliver 7% net written premium, compounded growth and mid- to high teens ROE in the next 5 years. As a backdrop, it's worth some brief comments on where we believe the industry is headed with these 4 trends that are well understood. Risks are definitely getting more complex. There's weather volatility, casualty inflation and evolving loss trends that require sharper underwriting execution and a claims operation designed for severity management. So as a result, [indiscernible] is definitely required. Agency models continue to evolve. Many are consolidating, concentrating business among a number of large distributors and commoditizing certain markets, Personal Lines Auto and Micromaterials as examples. This requires independent agent carriers to focus on products and sectors that are sustainably embedded in the value-added consultative IA channel. Customer and agency preferences are evolving. They place business where quoting is fast, workflows are easy and carriers can respond with clarity. This is no longer a [indiscernible], it's table stakes in our industry. The technology environment is changing rapidly as generative AI enables new technologies or new capabilities, excuse me, at faster speed to market, carriers that embed AI and the flow of work will outpace those that struggle to integrate the technology into their operating models. So we believe this future environment rewards carriers like the Hanover that combine advice-led distribution, underwriting precision technology-enabled speed, claims discipline and volatility management. I'm excited now to turn to our ambitious strategy, and I'll begin with this new visual. This compass is an excellent framework to represent how we will chart our course forward and navigate the challenges ahead. Our winning position is based on a trifecta of competitive advantages. First, authentic agency partnerships; second, product breadth and business diversification; and third, smart innovation and operating model change to effectively meet our agents and customers demand for speed and simplicity. These advantages are supported by proven execution enablers rigorous underwriting and financial discipline, a high-performing people-first culture and a customer-focused mindset of value-added services. So I'll offer some brief comments about the 3 competitive advantages and the 3 enabling differentiators and then go a bit deeper on each 1 successively so that hopefully, you can easily track where I am with my comments. Our 3 highly profitable, growing businesses provide access to attractive profit pools that have shown resilience to traditional insurance cycles, enhancing durability of our earnings. Our distinctive agency distribution strategy and authentic partnerships continue to differentiate in this industry and help secure access to profitable business. These deep relationships with leading agents and brokers are created and enhanced by our proprietary insight platform that helps us build road maps to partner relevancy as well as by our field operating model and culture. And the operating model work has been a strategic imperative for years. We continue to advance these models to align with the changing needs of today's independent agent distribution and for customers. Our underwriting analytics and financial discipline are -- additional to consistent performance. Risk management and reserving rigor, portfolio agility, prudent capital management, all of that enables us to navigate evolving risks and capture attractive profit opportunities. Our consultative account-based approach to customers with value-added services combines comprehensive protection, preventative risk solutions and access, which deepens customer loyalty and enhances lifetime value. And finally, our high-performing people first culture attracts, develops and retains top talent, creating a competitive advantage that supports innovation, execution and long-term shareholder value. and highly touted by our employees, our very special culture is a critical linchpin to our success. I intend to work very hard to preserve and nourish this competitive advantage as we scale our company and face change in our dynamic industry. So our portfolio. Our 3 major segments offer us a diversified revenue and earnings stream and enable flexible and thoughtful capital allocation options to those segments with the best return profiles, giving us multiple paths to probable growth and earnings resilience. Specialty, providing higher-margin optionality, core commercial, providing easy led scale and personal lines providing diversification relative to commercial pricing -- the pricing cycles and liability challenges. And each segment is value-oriented and specialized and comfortably entrenched within the IA channel. So specialty, we have 4 divisions, 9 business units and 18 product offerings, which provide diversified growth and earning streams while enhancing our relevance to AC Partners. It's small account focus creates significant opportunities for automation and scalability and growth, supporting a clear path to a sub-90% combined ratio and high teens ROE through the sold. Core commercial includes a very broad appetite in small and niche expertise in middle market. We focus on smaller to midsized businesses, avoiding significant property and cycle volatility. Personal lines is focused on multiproduct customers and is positioned to benefit from the continued share gains of the independent agency channel in this segment and our recent turnaround is delivering more stable, higher-quality earnings. Currently, we see attractive growth opportunities across all 3 segments. And we're targeting approximately 7% annual growth rate for our consolidated enterprise over the next 5 years. On distribution, it's really exciting for me to brag a bit about our distribution advantage as we've been building this out from the moment I arrived here 22 years ago. And we've created an unmatched network of authentic agency and broker and now tailor partnerships. Our agency franchise truly is a proprietary growth engine. And I believe the forces reshaping distribution aligned with the strength that have differentiated the Hanover for 2 decades. I'm proud to say that the Hanover has a front row seat with most of the best players where we've been offering our wisdom, our advice and proprietary agency insight data to help them with their decisions. And in turn, we've been clear beneficiaries. Agency archetypes are also evolving with more digital-first agencies, more panels, more wholesale use and therefore, carriers who can evolve their models, enjoy wider addressable markets and growth opportunities. We have a thoughtful and clear road map to build out the technologies that are required to connect to agencies to remove that friction in our workflows as I've discussed, and meet agents where they are or how they want to interact. So we're making great progress on this, including some strong work with the leading agency management systems. Our agency count is expanding slowly as top agents consolidate and new advice-driven agent models emerge. Personal Lines is targeting roughly 185 new appointments per year. concentrated in our diversification states and small commercial is targeting 350 to 375 new appointments with expansion in both traditional appointments but also virtual managed appointments in networks and more remote agencies. As evidenced by the statistics on the right, you can see we've achieved some terrific depth and breadth within our distribution, where 74% of our premium is coming from agents producing more than 5 million and 67% of our premium from agents that have 5 or more business relationships. So we want to discuss the Hanover agency insight for a few moments. It's truly a unique asset in our industry. No other carrier offers a similar capability. And it really creates a valuable competitive advantage for us and provides us for a blueprint for our growth. For those not familiar, this is a proprietary custom-built system and approach that provides agents an excellent and thorough analysis of their entire book of business, and we act as a consultant by educating them on a variety of dimensions of their business. I can't tell you how many agency principles have said to me in our consultation sessions Dick, the Hanover team has taught me more about my book of business in the last 2.5 hours than I've seen in the 30 years of running my agency, which is just terrific. So there are 4 major steps to the agency insight. First, we ingest an agent's complete data set. We then do a slew of analyses and offer back a variety of benchmarks, agents love to see a scorecard of how they perform versus agencies of like size and quality. We then offer ideas on how to optimize their value through cross-sell, upsell, strategic market consolidation, producer and account manager productivity, and carrier and wholesaler utilization as examples. We not only give them our PowerPoint file, but we also returned back all of their data organized in a file and in a way that they can then use it to operationalize the plans that we covered. So this process, as you can imagine, generates a measurable information asymmetry in our favor in every agency relationship where it has been deployed. We've completed the agency insight on virtually all of our partner agents, and it's a requirement for all new appointments. So it's very powerful. So let's move to technology and transformation. Awesome topic. We have so much excitement and optimism on this topic. We pursue a thoughtful outcome-driven approach to ensure that we can clearly see a measurable ROI which positions us to innovate at scale and with capital efficiency. So first, I would say our tech environment and our tech stack is an excellent position. We've replaced upgraded and modernized the vast majority of our core systems and have used a cloud migration mentality, where it makes sense for us, but not in all cases thinking critically about how to best manage cost and outcomes. Similarly, our data is continuously getting better and currently in excellent shape. And as we all know, this is an essential enabler to successful Gen AI transformation efforts. So when we consider the potential for Gen AI, our philosophy is to invest in a disciplined, thoughtful way and focus on areas which align with our strategy where we see a true path to value and scalability. I had the opportunity and good fortune to help shape this approach during my time as COO, and I will bring that same practical outcomes focused mindset to every investment and every capital allocation decision. So process improvement comes first, while technology is the accelerator. That's how we think about it. We think about use cases that would bring efficiency and improve decision-making to our work, focusing on bottlenecks and lower value-added tasks. Then we reimagine the workflows with these capabilities embedded not just as something that gets layered on top as like another tool that our folks are using. Importantly, our transformation framework operates on 4 principles: standardized platforms where it makes sense, build once and reuse, embed AI in the flow of work, which is what I just described and the test, learn and scale approach. On the first point, we have achieved a common technology platform across our company, meaning we've standardized the tools that we use. A few examples. Pega is being used to orchestrate workflows across businesses and functions. Hanover AI is what we call is a homegrown AI agent builder for proprietary and restricted data and agenetic work. And then Microsoft co-pilot is what we use for everyday innovation. So those are standardized. As you've heard, we -- also, we focus on 3 major functions, underwriting claims and service, no surprise, but focused on optimizing how work is ingested, analyzed, triaged and synthesized in a way that accelerates the work that our employees do to complete their job. More specifically, this view shows some of those AI agents that we're building to actually make this happen. So you're going to hear more about this in action from our transformation panel later this morning. but AI agents such as the ingestion tool, appetite checking, intelligent routing those all help with efficiency, while AI agents such as decision alerts or underwriting scoring pricing guidance, those all help with enhancing our insights. I'm so excited about how these technologies can finally help us reduce that friction around data exchange that we experience and enable us to grow our company. Absolutely, this work has measurable results as we see here in a number of categories. And frankly, we aspire to have additional efficiencies. Significant reduction in the turnaround time for underwriting which is a wide range here, depending on the product and the segment, 15% on one end for the more complex risks and upwards of 60% for the simpler risks that we can touch much less. Yield improvement, very important, a critical one to enable us to scale, putting more quotes out more quickly and writing more of it. We expect a 10% to 20% improvement. Again, this varies by business, and some others here a lift up in claims adjuster productivity, gaining overall operating leverage from slower hiring as we grow the company as a couple of more examples. So let me now make some brief comments on the 3 enablers of our strategy. First, disciplined underwriting, analytics, financial management is so critical to our performance. My focus is to maintain our strong financial performance as we grow and a broad-based discipline is paramount. So a few critical areas worth mentioning, underwriting excellence in all of our business at the top. This begins with excellent talent and the training and development of these professionals to foster and grow deep underwriting expertise, supported by a strong line of business capability, which provides clear guidelines and exposure management tools to help with risk selection and pricing segmentation to make sure we effectively price the risk adequately. Strong analytic horsepower provided by actuarial, finance and business resources who have access to the latest suite of tools to help and assist with the development of predictive models, where appropriate on new and renewal business to offer granular portfolio insights, which help guide our mix and our diversity hugely important for aggregation management. This team has developed and deployed a daily in-force property exposure database so that we can track enterprise aggregation every single day for which our reinsurers are giving us enormous accolades. And lastly, a financial discipline and performance management operating cadence that has really become a bedrock of our company. And Jeff Farber will speak about this in more detail. So value-added services. We strongly believe our industry must continue to make advancements not just in restoring people's lives and businesses when loss occurs, but also helping in assisting the prevention of losses from occurring and really improving the quality of homes and business operations overall. As such, we have a risk mitigation mindset and focus on delivering claims prevention strategies and technologies to our customers across all segments with robust partnerships with companies like Hartford Steam Boiler, with whom we partner on deployment of temperature and water sensors. This program is showing excellent success. We also have a menu of added services that we offer to end consumers and a fulsome set of digital capabilities to enable customer interactions however they prefer. But rather than list all of those services, we prefer to share our customer satisfaction outcomes, which reflect how we perform, frankly, in the ultimate moments of truth. So you can see here, high retentions, mid- to high 80s, which is excellent. Customer satisfaction, very strong, around 90 in both policyholders -- and our policy holder centers and claims. Excellent Net Promoter Scores above 70%, 74%, 73%, which is very strong relative to a typical NPS benchmark. And then lastly and perhaps most importantly, our culture, which I truly believe is an operating advantage and a multiplier for us. As Jack discussed in his opening comments, we couldn't be more proud of what we've created here at the Hanover with regards to culture. There's something pretty magical about it, honestly. Our employees feel valued, respected, empowered to make decisions and confident that their contributions have a meaningful impact on our performance. We spend considerable time clearly defining what great leadership looks like here at the Hanover, and we built our own leadership model that we call Leadership 5 or L5, which spikes out 5 core leadership pillars listed here. These define the behaviors that we expect, the leaders we want to develop and the standards by which we hold ourselves accountable. And my intention is to continue to build a company that attracts and retains exceptional talent, where people have the opportunity to grow, reach their full potential as leaders and make meaningful impact where they can become great coaches, innovators, change agents, decision-makers and integrators. This really is a passion project for me. So our strategic advantages and enablers come together to deliver excellent performance over time, delivering consistent value for our stakeholders. This value creation flywheel is a terrific representation of how this performance fuels itself. Our capabilities and operating models will drive the relevancy with our agent partnerships that we described, which in turn enables us to grow profit pools as we scale, leading to a strong and strengthening balance sheet that enables reinvestment and then the cycle repeats itself. So as we look ahead, we have established a new set of 5-year financial targets that reflect both our ambition and our confidence in the strength of our franchise. We are targeting a return on equity in the mid- to high teens, supported by disciplined underwriting, strong execution and thoughtful capital management. We expect to grow net written premiums by approximately 7% annually, balancing growth with profitability and risk selection. And that growth, combined with continued operating leverage and capital deployment is anticipated to drive earnings per share of approximately 10% annually. And finally, we expect that performance to translate into book value per share growth of approximately 10% over the period. So together, these targets reflect our commitment to delivering attractive, sustainable returns and creating long-term value for our shareholders. The Hanover team is very excited for the future, and we are ready for what's next. So now I'll place on my other hat as the current leader of core commercial and personal lines and offer some commentary on the prospects of these segments before I turn it over to Bryan to speak about specialty. So starting with Commercial. I'll once again emphasize how disciplined we are with our customer segmentation and gearing our focus on the lower end of what is traditionally defined as middle market as well as small commercial. We thrive in this space of small to midsize customers who have complex insurance needs and we bring a full account solution to the table, including specialty coverages. In fact, just over 80% of our accounts have a total premium of under $200,000 in what would be called middle market and over 80% of our small commercial accounts are under 10,000. So focusing on this space has enabled us to deliver price resilience and higher-than-average retentions through the softening cycle, as you've seen in our results. Throughout small commercial, we have a full spectrum of offerings from the easier to underwrite and price business, that could be processed through our automated point-of-sale system to individually underwritten business that doesn't fit on the BOP. And this increases our relevancy with agents and puts us in a winning position as they consolidate business to more strategic carriers. As we step into the middle market space, we approach the market as industry experts. And for a few of our industry segments, we have created specialized underwriting units. Technology, life sciences and human services as examples. So now standing at $2.4 billion, this portfolio has achieved a very nice diversification of industry mix, as you can see on the right here that really helps insulate us from deterioration in any one individual segment. We have a little bit more on small commercial. We have a robust and ambitious growth goal for small commercial, and we enjoy excellent momentum today. Agents, as you know, are pursuing efficiency in many different ways, and we are meeting them where they are. So whether they adopt the latest digital capabilities or they prefer the more traditional workflow of quoting and binding business. Our goal is the same, which is to make it easy, make it easier to do business with the Hanover and to innovate at pace. This positions us to continue to be a winner with the best of the best in small commercial. And a number of areas really give me great confidence in our ability to scale this business while growing at 8% on average in the next 5 years. So first, we have significant capacity and headroom within the agencies with whom currently work, our agency insight process tells us that and helps us map out a path to greater relevancy and is especially useful when agents consolidate their business into fewer strategic markets. So we're unique in that we have dedicated resources to do this work on behalf of agents, including an industry-leading customer service center that can service the business for agents after we shift the business to us. More importantly though, our new state-of-the-art point-of-sale platform brings excellent ease of doing business, enabling quotes in just minutes, which is driving market share gains by winning the hearts and minds of account managers, helping to build muscle memory, right, which we know is huge in small commercial. The new point-of-sale system is also enabling us to expand our distribution because now we can more easily introduce new products into new states and more easily trained new agents. Increasing access to more customers, more small commercial customers is really critical to us in scaling that business. So today, we have roughly 2,300 agents using our system and we could easily double that number in the coming years and still preserve the franchise value, which is precious to us Hanover and so that would grant us significantly more access to customers. So shifting to Personal Lines. We deliberately shaped our $2.7 billion high-performing portfolio curated in a selective 19 state footprint, which frankly, has a more attractive industry performance profile relative to other states. Our target customer set is highlighted in that stack chart with the Platinum product in the middle tier segment and the prestige product for our $750,000 to $3 million coverage A or replacement cost type customers. We boast a nearly 90% account profile, which is industry-leading based on our industry agency data. So really, the end of many of our competitors. Also, a vast number of these accounts have a common auto and home effective date. And this common effective data essentially reduces potential shopping events from 2 to 1 leading to better pricing resilience and higher retention and workflow efficiencies for agents. So to continue to win in this segment, we also completed our product build-out of high-margin ancillary lines. and adding these coverages has had a magnifying effect on retention. So we know from our data that accounts with 4 or more policies essentially has a 95% or better long-term retention. You have a customer for life when you have all of their policies in one place. Our team in Personal Lines has built a truly best-in-class capability to help agents consolidate business to more strategic carriers, which is becoming more and more common. It's been very helpful in the last couple of years as we've been trimming exposure in certain geographies. So importantly, as a result of our market-leading catastrophe management actions and our overall deductible strategy, particularly in the Midwest, we have a broadly profitable, more resilient and well positioned for growth type of portfolio in Personal Lines. Finally, this puts a spotlight. This slide puts a spotlight on why we were so intentional in our push upward into the higher-valued Personal Lines segment, which here, we're defining as customers with a $500,000 coverage and above. So that cuts across our Platinum and Prestige segments. We sized this segment at $95 billion with the vast majority of it being in the IA channel. So while the channel has a 37% market share overall of first lines. In this segment, they control 90%. So that shouldn't come as a surprise as these are more complex accounts with multiple policies. So requiring the advice and counsel of an adviser. And you can see that within our agencies, we see a 3x -- we have had 3x the growth of these types of customers versus our competition. So clearly, our focus here and our overall value proposition is resonating. I am extremely optimistic that we can outperform in this customer niche and in the states where we choose to compete. As the personal lines marketplace and pricing rationalizes, we've proven that our model can consistently perform and grow at that mid-single-digit range. So as I prepare to step into the CEO role, I am incredibly proud of the strength of our company, our people, the franchise that we have built. Our next chapter is about compounding our advantages through very disciplined execution and growth. And I am truly excited to lead this company forward as we continue to create long-term value. So with that, I will turn it over to Bryan to discuss our specialty businesses. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dick, and thanks to everybody that has joined us today. Specialty has become a very important driver of earnings and growth for the Hanover. And I'm excited to spend a few minutes discussing the franchise we've built, and why we believe specialty is well positioned to become an even larger contributor to the Hanover's enterprise value. Today, I'll share how the Hanover strategy is implemented within specialty and how it is giving the business a structural ability to grow profitably across market cycles. What differentiates our franchise, our improved profitability over time and why we believe specialty is positioned for profitable growth. There are a number of reasons why I am confident about the future, and I break them down across 4 main themes. First, Specialty is a differentiated underwriting franchise built around distinct markets or expertise and rigorous discipline combined with strong relationships creates real competitive advantages. Also, over the last several years, we've transformed specialty into one of the company's strongest contributors to profitability and earnings. Third, speed and ease of doing business have become important differentiators. This is particularly important in the highly profitable small specialty space where turnaround is measured in hours, not days. We are well positioned to win here. More broadly, I view specialty as a microcosm of the Hanover strategy. We've built a collection of highly specialized businesses into a diversified but closely coordinated franchise that is growing profitably, serving agents exceptionally well and contributing meaningfully to Hanover's value proposition. With our market position, broad-based profitability and market access, we are targeting 9% net written premium CAGR over the next 5 years. This can be impacted by market conditions, and we will continue to prioritize profit over growth. But what excites me is as we enter 2027, every one of our specialty businesses is positioned to profitably grow. That's a different position than we were several years ago, and it reflects the deliberate work that's gone into strengthening this franchise. Let me start by giving you a better sense of what specialty actually is today. Hanover Specialty is a diversified portfolio of niche businesses that require specialized underwriting and claims experts that have the deep technical knowledge to solve the distinct needs of agents and customers. Today, specialty includes 9 businesses with 18 new product areas and approximately $1.7 billion in direct written premiums or $1.4 billion in net written premiums. That's spread across a range of markets, including marine, industrial property, E&S, professional lines, surety and a strictly managed program business. There's also complexity to the specialty distribution as it combines highly focused specialist producers, independent agents as well as large brokers, wholesalers and MGAs. We have built strong relationships and trust across these producer channels. Importantly, given our diversity of product and distribution, we're not dependent on any one product, any one line of business or any single distribution source. This diversification gives us multiple sources of earnings and the ability to shift emphasis as opportunities evolve across market cycles. And it has been important to our strong profitability and our 6% CAGR over the last 10 years, even as we actively shaped the portfolio, exited underperforming businesses reduced concentrations and aggressively managed limit and mix. That reshaping is evident in how the book has evolved over time with growth and scale. As we scaled specialty, we were deliberate about growing our most profitable businesses, such as marine, industrial property, our professional and executive lines, surety and E&S, most of which have not only grown and become a bigger percentage of our portfolio. We are very pleased with the results of our efforts and our top line choices have been met with bottom line outcomes. One message I'd emphasize here is that we view this accomplishment as structural improvement. Since 2019, we've achieved an improvement of specialties combined ratio by more than 10 points, while approximately tripling pretax operating income. Four consecutive years of combined ratios in the 80s, while increasing specialty's contribution to enterprise earnings from less than 1/5 of the company's PTOI to roughly 1/3 today. Specialty has become one of our company's most important earnings engines and a critical part of Hanover's growth. And we are committed to solid growth as we move forward. Our times, we may accept slower growth in a product area as we balance competitiveness with pricing discipline and profitability. But as I mentioned earlier, every one of our specialty businesses is now positioned to profitably grow. I referred to our accomplishments as structural. This is driven from our targeted actions and robust portfolio management discipline. Over the last several years, we have substantially repositioned our portfolio. We have augmented and significantly strengthened our surety business. We focused our specialty property appetite introduced tap sales to several segments to improve speed and efficiencies, adding capabilities and brought scale to our newest offerings, and these attributes will not diminish in a softer market. Conditions in the specialty markets vary meaningfully by line, customer segment, geography, and we have a strong underwriting drill to navigate them. This is accomplished by analyzing the classes of business, geographies, market opportunity and more for each of our 18 distinct product areas -- establishing in each area to parts of that market we will aggressively pursue. And we review our approach often, and it is ingrained across our businesses and our underwriters. We then drill that down to the account level and the terms and the pricing. As an example, we recently navigated significant price competition in the private company management liability area. While many companies went negative on pricing, we were able to thoughtfully decelerate price increases but never went pricing negative on the portfolio. And while growth slowed for a short period, we still grew. And now with price strengthening somewhat, we are growing management liability in upper single digits. Equally as important as what we do is whom we work with to build our business. The Hanover has been very successful in building strong retail agent relationships and specialty both contributes to and benefits from these retail relationships. It's worth noting that many retailers access wholesalers and certain niche and affinity group platforms for product or placement expertise or access to certain products. We built our distribution in the 3 producer channels, retail agents and brokers, wholesale brokers and nation affinity market administrators and hired people with proven success in these channels to manage the business. As a result, we have established a strong footing with each channel that continues to grow. For example, we had very little wholesaler placed business 9 years ago. Today, it is over $300 million of our business is profitable and it's growing relatively fast. Also, many of the larger retailers have built out both wholesale and affinity facilities as part of their strategy. We will work with these firms to develop and support this part of their business by aligning on the targeted offices or operations. This provides broad opportunities while reducing reliance on any single source of business. Another area where we have invested heavily to strengthen the franchise is speed and ease of doing business. In small account specialty where we are a meaningful player, speed increasingly translates into success as placement decisions are made in hours, not days. Speed becomes as important a competitive lever as price. This is a meaningful opportunity for us. Our large portfolio of smaller accounts gives us the scale and the transaction volume to benefit from workflow improvements, automation and technology-enabled underwriting. We're investing in these across the portfolio whether it's AI-enabled submission triage in E&S, digital processing capabilities in marine, workflow enhancements in surety or accelerating coding capabilities in professional and executive lines, the goal is consistent. Access and turnaround that is quick, easy and dependable. With a focus on enabling our underwriters to spend more time evaluating risk, working through agents need building relationships and spending less time on gathering data and administrative work. You'll hear more about our investments in AI and our operating model shortly during the innovation panel that follows my presentation. Let me close by bringing all of this together and reinforcing that we have many sources of profitable growth. As I shared, our existing diversified portfolio is in a very good shape and represents a meaningful source of growth. We also see opportunities to scale our newer offerings, including cyber, financial institutions, product liability, among others. Over the last 18 months, we've launched or expanded our appetite in 13 areas. This is another key driver of our growth. Importantly, these are not transformational bets. They are targeted extensions of businesses we know well, supported by a rigorous underwriting planning and ongoing portfolio management. They include quota share builders risk, expanding our motor truck cargo, excess for A&E health care increasing our capacity and surety were desirable and starting to write media liability. Additionally, we are selectively expanding our distribution, adding targeted relationships and that broadens our reach. We will remain attentive to selective portfolio opportunities such as renewal rights or other targeted transactions that could complement our capabilities. And finally, we will continue to improve on speed and ease of doing business to drive growth without compromising our price or underwriting standards. So we have a lot of levers we are pulling as specialty continues to tribute to the Hanover's earnings and our portfolio is in the best position ever to deliver on this. With that, I'll turn it over to Will Lee, ending up our business analysts.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Willard Lee. I'm the Chief Information and Innovation Officer at the Hanover. I'm thrilled today to be able to host our business and technology panel. I've been able to have the opportunity here to be able to see technology from many different angles. I've seen it from the angle of a business operator and also as a technology leader. And so all of those experiences have really helped shape my perspective on what good looks like, but also from the standpoint of looking at our entire tech portfolio and understanding the priorities and sequencing to drive the most value for the money that we're spending on the technology side. As you probably heard from Dick this morning, one of his main messages was talking about bringing more technology into the ecosystem. And through that, what we're going to be doing is not only just looking at technology, but also thinking about operating models and workflows, which are at the heart of all of our businesses. So today, I'm joined by 4 business leaders, they're here to showcase their areas within the value chain. I am joined by Dan Halsey, who runs our personal lines area. I have Sarah Medina, who runs our professional lines. Kate Williams, who runs our E&S business. And finally, we have Matt Mitchell, who runs our middle market and corporate underwriting functions . So before handing over to Sarah I did think it was important for us to talk a little bit about the guiding principles that each of our cross-functional teams use on a day-to-day basis. So the first point is just it may seem obvious, but it is about sort of matching up our deep business expertise with our technologists. Having that mine meld and that collaboration upfront really does give us the best outcomes because it is in a straight line between point A and point B. Secondly, we are building all of our technology responsibly. And so what that means is that within each of our project teams, there are a set of nonnegotiable. And those nonnegotiables range between our technical architecture, our AI data governance and also our cyber security enters and policies. And then finally, we have what we call our enterprise city plans. And those city plans are our way to be able to show our business areas where we plan to share infrastructure and business capabilities and where we're planning to build bespoke solutions. And so for all of us that have to be on the same page around that City plan looks like, is so important going forward as we bring more technology into the ecosystem. We want to be -- always be looking at the total cost of ownership of the technology and also our ability to scale those technology dollars.

Okay. So now to Sarah. So with your example, I love it because this is an initiative where we didn't try and throw technology at the problem right away and we looked at the operating models and the workflows first. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what you've been up to in professional lines. .

Yes. Thanks, Will. So the most important lesson that we learned when we went through the transformation for professional executive lines is that you do need to start with the operating model first, not the technology because we firmly believe the technology is most effective when it's applied to the right processes. Our prior model worked well for us for many years, but it was designed for a different environment. And as we've seen, customer expectations evolve and agencies consolidate their business, both customers and agencies are asking more from us relative to speed and ease of doing business. So with that, we knew that we did to redesign our model so that we could continue to service the distinct areas of our portfolio. So what we did is we took a step back and we reexamined the work itself. So that meant looking at the ways in which the business was coming into our organization. We looked at each step of the underwriting process and where the key decisions were being made. And then from that, we redesigned the model. so that we align risk considered to the appropriate underwriting expertise. So I meant streamlining our more simplistic submissions, but then for complex risks, aligning those to where we had specialized resources. We're seeing great results from the work that we've done. Our productivity per underwriter is up. We've improved our service standards. And in our small firm segment, we're able to respond now in a matter of hours, which was days before. So that's coming through in our submission to yield ratio that's increased 5%, and we do anticipate additional gains as the model continues to mature. So I think the impact is clear. We've been able to grow our business increase underwriting productivity, and we're doing that without a corresponding increase in our expenses. In the first quarter for professional executive lines, we grew 5%, that accelerated to 9% in the second quarter. And we've improved the amount of business that we can have flow through our straight-through underwriting engine. So with those capacity gains, we have underwriters now able to spend more time on the key decisions and relationships that really drive our profitable growth. Another important piece is that we can leverage the framework that we've built in other areas across specialty that are looking to transform their business. So the sequence really matters. It's the operating model first, and then it's the technology augmentation second. We're really well positioned because we've standardized our workflow and really simplified the way in which we do business so that we can deploy AI more broadly and at a greater scale so that we can realize returns faster. As a next step, we're really excited and see significant opportunities for AI to help us in terms of submission triage and intake in ways that we can also deliver risk insights directly to our business and underwriters. So we're not looking at AI and technology as an initiative, but instead really the next phase so that we can become a more effective and efficient underwriting organization.

That's a great point you're making just around starting with the operating models and the workflows before the technology. So now let's turn it over to Kate on the E&S side, sticking in the sort of the intake, triage area of the value chain, but this was actually an area where we decided we would put technology first to help you with your profitable growth. So you are one of the first folks to adopt our intake engine, enterprise intake engine. So maybe you can tell us a little bit how that's been going with you in your business.

Sure. In 20 years of E&S underwriting, I have seen a great deal of change, both that align with our risk appetite and profitability objectives while making the best use of our underwriting resources. Inside the last decade, the E&S industry has seen multiple years of double-digit growth, new capital, new market entrants and expanded -- at the same time, the historical distinction between E&S and standard market placements has largely eroded. As a result, agents and brokers have really had to adapt and adjust their marketing practices, often submitting the same risk to dozens of carriers acrossoubed. We recognize that continuously adding to staff in response to that demand is not the best solution. Instead, we needed to narrow our underwriters' focus, directing their expertise to the opportunities that matter the most. Instead, we needed to narrow our underwriters' focus, directing their expertise to the opportunities that matter the most, particularly in a competitive and softening market where speed to quote has become an even more critical driver of growth and underwriting success. And our small to lower middle market segment Speed is decisive. Identifying the right opportunities to quote is the essential first step. To address this challenge, we first focused on bringing structure to our e-mail-based intake process. Submissions frequently arrive as unstructured e-mails with information spread across applications, loss runs, numerous supporting documents in any number of formats. We developed capabilities that transform these e-mailed submissions into structured data, score and prioritize the opportunities, hand up potential declinations and then surface the most promising risk to the top of our underwriters' workflows. While implementation continues, these capabilities are reducing the time spent sorting and reacting to the loudest or most urgent submissions. Instead, our underwriters can focus their expertise on the areas that bring the greatest value, those opportunities that are most likely to quote, find and deliver underwriting outcomes. Although it's still too early to quantify the full impact on " and close ratios, we are building a smarter and more scalable underwriting platform that enhances our capability to compete in a dynamic market. Our E&S growth accelerated from second quarter through August, and we are excited about the momentum that we are building and the opportunities that lie ahead. Now that we've gone through the work in professional executive lines to successfully redesign and launch our model, I think we're really well positioned, Kate, to leverage the work that you've done in E&S because submission triage and intake is our next step. And then the next layer is what happens when this information actually reaches the underwriter. Matt, you're doing a lot of work to embed AI capabilities directly into your work bench so that data and risk analytics are there at that key point of decision-making. How is that working for you? And where are you seeing that come through from an execution standpoint on your business?

Sure. Similar to Kate, middle market, we will be leveraging AI for submission intake, triage and summarization of new businesses. But if you focus on the value chain, particularly around underwriting, our primary focus is effectiveness, Not just efficiency. And the reason why we focus that way is the complex underwriting process for middle market. It involves carefully analyzing exposures and controls over many lines of business looking at policy structure and using that to inform our technical pricing by line of business. We think there's an opportunity to use AI to improve specific steps in the underwriting process, but also improve and strength in our overall analytics. This is becoming increasingly important as the business of middle market is very complex. New exposures are hitting it all the time, and we have over 5 lines of business in a dozen industries. And so the complexity is only increasing. So our approach is really a two-pronged approach. First, one, where do we deploy AI capabilities to enhance specific steps in the underwriting process and do it in a way that helps us build out robust analytics. While it's early days, we feel we have some tangible wins in creating some underwriting capacity and improving execution. Two examples come to mind. The first is what we're doing with contractual risk transfer. And the second is about how we're enhancing the underwriting of our commercial auto line, a difficult line for many companies in today's environment. Understanding contractual risk transfer is critical to understanding the liabilities the risk is assuming or transferring through a contractual indemnification agreement. What Reuters are doing today is they're using AI to evaluate these lengthy documents, assess the risk practices and procedures, make sure that the indemnification language is appropriate for the jurisdiction and making sure the underlying limits are okay. We think this is an extremely important way to help understand the holistic picture of the liability. Moving on to commercial auto. This line is a difficult line and we think underwriting discipline is critical, not just analytics. And so what our underwriting using AI for is to analyze OSHA violations, they're also going out and finding inspection reports, safety rating and information that's not captured on the loss runs. We think this on top of the applications, providing a more holistic view of the risk and helping to guide our underwriters to make the right decisions. What's nice about the 2 examples I just highlighted is they're doing it in a very standardized format, improving the speed, but also improving the employee -- and the underwriting execution. We think these examples are creating lift, the writing insights and they're improving our execution as well.

So Matt, maybe we just stick with you for a couple of more minutes here. So your business is so data-intensive and middle market. Maybe you can talk a little bit more also about how both on the data and AI foundation, you're building that out as you're moving forward?

Sure. Thanks, Will. Technical pricing is critical in middle market, and that's built really on your data and analytics. And so we think we're constantly looking for opportunities to improve our pricing sophistication. One good example comes to mind is what we're doing with loss run. The middle market unwitting process involves looking at 5 years of prior carrier loss information. This information shows up in a PDF file, it could be 10 to 20 or even more pages and has often has inconsistent formats and inconsistent descriptions of operations. So one thing AI is enabling us to do is convert this into a nice summarized approach that actually provides the underwriters a total view of the loss information. But beyond that, we're using our large language models to actually extract that information, convert the data, store it in our databases, why that's important is we look at many more risks than we write. And now we're using this information to help it out more enhanced pricing tools and benchmarking that we think will be accretive to the organization over time.

Matt, as I sit here and list you share, it really resonates. Prioritizing the right opportunities to quote is really only the beginning for E&S. The next step for us is underwriting augmentation. You and I operate in very different markets, admitted surplus lines, but there are so many parallels, particularly in the complexity of the risk that we underwrite. Contractor review, for example, is a critical component of our E&S underwriting process, spanning some of our largest industry segments such as construction and commercial real estate. The efficiencies gained by just this feature alone will be significant with clear potential to multiply as capabilities are added.

Thanks, guys. I think that, that definitely shows the improvements that we're making on the underwriting decision side and the efficiencies that we're getting from underwriting. So now let's transition over to Dan on the part of the value chain here, which would be servicing. And all the investments that we're making here obviously shift for our agents and our customers. So maybe you can talk a little bit more about what's happening in Personal Lines.

Absolutely. So in personal lines, we compete for a customer segment that is increasingly valuable and increasingly demanding. These customers typically have more affluent households and more complex insurance needs. Importantly, they rely from guidance from independent agents to help them protect their lifestyle and their assets, knowing that success cannot be based solely on price. You have to be good at ease of doing business, you have to be really responsive and you have to effectively support the agents in servicing those type of customers. This is where AI has been giving us meaningful business value. So far, we are recording and storing interactions across our entire underwriting and service organizations, including conversations with customers and agents. At this point, we have 4 million conversations available for analysis. Previously, we would have no ability to get through those 4 million conversations. But today, with large language models and AI-powered sentiment analysis, we can now understand these interactions at scale. We're able to identify what great service looks like and 10-point frictions in both customer and agent journey. These insights are bringing tangible value to our business. It's helping us grow, grow more profitably and help with operational performance. To date, we've seen improved retention and accelerated new business production while we've maintained our pricing discipline. We have doubled our identified cross sell opportunities, which will allow us to deepen our customer relationship and increase share of wallet. Our straight-through processing of target market business is up nearly 20% since the end of last year to over 85% this quarter, which means faster service and improved responsiveness. This has been a notable difference for our agents, and it has allowed our team to help our agents write higher-quality risks. And the proof is in the momentum we have in our Prestige product this year, which is now growing over 12% year-to-date. We're also achieving greater operational efficiency and scale without compromising personalized service, which differentiates Asian. So the value proposition is quite straightforward. AI helps us listen to agent and customers learn from every single interaction and continuously improve the experience we deliver. This isn't a story about 4 million conversations. It's what those conversations are helping us do. to grow profitably, enhance efficiency and deepen relationships with our customers and agents. These are practical examples of how we're deploying AI at Hanover today. Disciplined investments with measurable outcomes designed and aligned to our strategy.

So thanks, Dan. That's a great example that you're giving at the end here around how you're using AI to accelerate the development of your people. So I have an example in IT that's also near and dear to me. We are rolling out our AI software development cycle as we speak. And part of that, as we think about rewiring our process is that we're doubling down on the skills that are needed for the future. And that includes a lot of the business acumen and the business engagement upfront. So we will have developers who will spend less time coding and more time doing requirements. We will also have our BAs building prototypes using a bunch of the different AI tooling to be able to build prototypes that are much closer to being production-ready than the traditional wire frames that were done in the past. So we believe with the combination of those 2 things put together, that gives us the best outcomes for our customers, our agents and ultimately, our shareholders. So again, I wanted to thank the panel for today for sharing your insights on your initiatives. We're going to turn our discussion now over to the last piece of the value chain, which would be claims and we'll have Dave lovely coming up talking about his modernization journey. So on behalf of myself and the panel, we appreciate everybody's time and attention today.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Today, I would like to talk about how claims is becoming a strategic margin lever for the company, delivering better outcomes for the customer while driving disciplined financial performance. At our last Investor Day, we committed to transforming claims through a targeted investment in plant, technology and analytics. Today, we can say with confidence, we delivered on those commitments. We improved both loss cost accuracy and loss adjustment expense, while also improving customer experience, creating meaningful and sustainable value for both enterprise and our shareholders. At the same time, we're building the next generation of capabilities. Investments in our single pane of glass strategy are already underway, and they are beginning to generate additional value across the enterprise. As the external environment becomes more complex, we continue to strengthen our expertise and our operating capabilities so we can respond with speed, discipline and consistency. Through our One Hanover approach, claims insights help drive better enterprise decision-making, strengthen portfolio performance and improved reserve confidence. In 2021, we committed to transform our claims operation improving outcomes, increasing efficiency, strengthening our analytical capabilities and delivering greater value across the organization. We delivered on those commitments. We generated 90 basis points of loss adjustment expense improvement. And we did that while continuing to invest in our capabilities and our infrastructure and while executing on a comprehensive redesign of our operating model. Those investments have also improved indemnity outcomes, producing more than $65 million of annual run rate savings equal to 110 basis points of loss ratio improvement. We achieved that through faster claim cycle times, more sophisticated fraud prevention, stronger recoveries, enhanced vendor strategies and the earlier identification of complex claims followed by the faster deployment of specialized experts to manage those losses. As part of this operating model transformation, we implemented a new claims system digitized workflows, expanded our use of advanced analytics, and we added specialized expertise for handling complex claims. Together, these changes are helping us deliver better outcomes, more consistently and more efficiently. We are already realizing measurable operational benefits as reflected in several key performance indicators. Our digital tools are seeing strong customer adoption, which has accelerated claims cycle times, reduced unnecessary inquiries and helped streamline operations. We have also launched new predictive models across the full claims life cycle, and invested in an interconnected ecosystem of vendor tools. In the near term, these capabilities will continue to improve productivity, accelerate claims handling and enhanced decision quality while reducing operating expenses. Over time, they should strengthen our ability to identify hidden severity risks, detect complex fraud and generate deeper portfolio intelligence across the enterprise. Importantly, we achieved these results while also improving customer experience. Our Net Promoter Score of 74 is the highest in our history and places us in the top tier of the industry. That reflects sustained improvements in claims execution through simpler processes, faster resolution, more accurate valuation and the effective use of specialized expertise on complex losses and it reinforces the core principle of our operating model. We are committed to delivering fair outcomes and exceptional customer service. When you step back and look across these results, the story is clear. better claims execution leads to more accurate loss outcomes and that creates strong margins, greater reserve confidence and higher quality earnings. Having transformed our operating model, we are now scaling the next phase of value creation through AI, automation, advanced analytics and decision intelligence. And importantly, this is not just a future state vision. Many of these capabilities are already being deployed across our claims organization, helping our professionals navigate complex files, access information more efficiently and make better informed decisions. What differentiates our approach is our single pane of glass strategy. Rather than deploying a collection of disconnected tools, we are building a unified claims platform that brings together data workflows, event solutions, analytics and AI-enabled decision support into a single operating environment. That architecture creates a value multiplier. Every interaction creates data. Every insight improves decision-making. Every new capability strengthens the platform and generates additional opportunities for value creation. Most importantly, this is a platform strategy, not a point solution strategy because new capabilities are built on a common foundation benefits compound over time rather than becoming fragmented across separate systems. We have built a scalable organization that aligns expertise and technology around the complexity of each claim, allowing us to match the right resources and decision support to the needs of that claim consistently and effectively. In the long tail casualty lines, we have enhanced severity management through predictive analytics, expanded clinical expertise and earlier intervention that is helping us identify higher-risk claims and manage outcomes more effectively. For short-tail auto and property claims, we've expanded digital capabilities such as photo estimating and virtual property inspections improving efficiency and accelerating resolution. Through our One Hanover approach, claims is becoming an increasingly important source of insight for underwriting, pricing, reserving and portfolio management. Today, claims insights are helping the broader organization identify our merchants earlier, improve risk selection and respond more effectively to changing risk conditions. Our operating model our investments in talent and technology and our agility have strengthened our ability to respond to worsening litigate trends, emerging risks across the industry and the evolving needs of our business partners as they bring new products to market. As we continue scaling capabilities, we expect claims to create additional value over the next 5 years. Specifically, we are targeting an additional 30 to 50 basis points of unallocated loss adjustment expense ratio improvement, greater accuracy in evaluating losses combined with faster, more consistent level of service that our customers and agents expect and further improvement and reserve confidence driving higher-quality earnings. Over the past 5 years, we've transformed claims through a powerful combination of advanced analytics, specialized expertise, AI-enabled decision support and the one hand over continuous feedback loops into underwriting, pricing, reserving and portfolio management. When these capabilities work together, they create measurable value of multiple dimensions at the same time. more accurate loss costs, lower operating expense, faster claims resolution, greater recoveries and stronger reserve confidence. This transformation is proven measurable in already producing results. We've built the foundation, demonstrated the impact and established a road map that will continue to compound value for years to come. Thank you.

Thank you, and good morning. My colleagues covered strategy and execution. And now I get to share what we get for all this terrific work. These are our new financial targets through 2031. Our long-range target operating ROE is mid- to high teens. Net written premium, we expect to grow 7% annually, and our operating EPS and book value per share 10-plus percent on a CAGR basis. Remember, profitability is the primary focus and growth is secondary. The top of the flywheel describes how we achieve our advantages as an organization. The bottom covers financial drivers and benefits. Those include underwriting benefits and efficiency, balance sheet strength and earnings resiliency and disciplined capital management. I'm going to summarize for you all that we're going to describe in the presentation. But really, it goes around earnings resiliency and driving efficiency. So we have strengthened and diversified our performance, and I'll give you some of the examples shortly. We are driving efficiency through scale, and I'm going to show you that also. Cat and volatility, we've reduced that meaningfully over time, and we've been prudently reserving balance sheet. And then finally, capital efficiency and capital management drive EPS and book value per share growth. We have been outperforming our peers based on ROE for the last 8 quarters. And I think this provides an excellent launching pad for the next 5 years for the Hanover. I'm going back here to 2016, which is just before our first Investor Day that I was involved in, this is actually my third. In 2016, we had an ex-cat combined ratio of 91.1%. By 2021, we had moved to 89.8%, and our guidance for 2026 was 88% to 89%. We have a very strong track record for 10 years of continuous combined ratio improvement. 2031 expectation is to continue that trend very meaningfully from our 2026 guidance. My colleagues spoke about net written premium growth and what the drivers are. Specialty and small commercial drive the meaningful portion of growth, but all segments participate meaningfully. Broad-based profitability is key to cycle resiliency. The chart on the left shows the last 10 quarters of profit from 2024 through Q2 2026. Upper right-hand has personal lines. The bottom has core commercial, which consists of small commercial and middle and the upper left is specialty. And if you look at it, you can see it's exactly 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 for each of those pieces. That drives resiliency. Our ability to achieve better renewal rate than the industry because of account strategy and our small-sized accounts is a big differentiator. If you look at as an evidence point on the right side to see Commercial Lines renewal rate and Hanover in the light blue, has consistently, over the last 3.5 years, achieved better rate than the industry. A major driver of our performance improvement over the last several years and the 5 years going forward is efficiency. Our scalable operation continues to drive efficiency. The expense ratio has been and will continue to be such a driver. We achieved 28.5% based on our 2031 target from 33% -- in 2016. Let me take you through the important drivers for 2026 original guidance to 2031 target of 28.5%. Scale is a meaningful driver from the growth of premium but underwriter efficiency, reduced outsourcing costs and lower future head count growth, driven by technology and AI instrument are big drivers for us. We've done a tremendous amount of work on our cats from 2023 forward. And that includes getting lots of price, reducing aggregation and modifying terms and conditions. If you look at the bars on the left, this shows the 1 in 10, the 1 in 100 return period modeled losses as a percentage of equity from '23 to '26. And you can see it's gone down dramatically. On the right side of the slide, this is our annual cat load expectations for 2031. It happens to go down from 6.5% in '25 and in '26 to 6.3% in 2031, but that's largely driven by the mix change in the portfolio. We've done tremendous lengths to make sure our reserves are appropriately stated and our reserves are prudent. And we've really done that by enhancing IBNR as a percentage of our total reserves. So if you look from 2019 forward, we've increased that percentage dramatically. And that has shown up as favorable development every year since 2017, which is essentially 10 years. Prudent reserving is a cornerstone of what Hanover is all about. We have a very conservative investment portfolio. It continues to drive strong earnings growth. Higher interest rates enabled us to be positioned the portfolio into a significantly stronger earnings asset generating exceptional net investment income. It provides a foundation for 6% NII CAGR or higher over the next 5 years. Book value per share growth is very important to the Hanover. As we sit at the end of Q2 2026, we're at $111 per share. The income of the firm, the impact of growth, the impact of scale and efficiency and the growth of investment income drive tremendous increase in book value per share. After repurchasing and ordinary dividends, book value per share grows to almost $200 a share by 2031. We have a very clear capital management strategy that consists of profitable growth, increasing steady dividends and strong capital returns. In order to give you an idea of how we're thinking about and meaning strong capital returns, in May of 2026, we restocked our repurchase authorization to $700 million. If you go back to that original inception date, we expect that $700 million authorization to last 2 to 3 years. So that gives you an idea that we're providing for meaningful capital returns over the 5-year period. No good 5-year plan would not have some upside potential on top of that plan. For us, it's potential additional indemnity saves from claims. -- investment allocation to additional credit risk, which we may make at the right time, additional benefits from technology and, of course, potential inorganic growth from small accretive capital deployment. So I get to finish with the payoff. These are very compelling aspirational financial goals. I want to thank you for your attention and I'd like to invite my colleagues to join me up on stage so we can continue with the Q&A session. Thanks.

[Operator Instructions] And today's first question comes from Michael Phillips at Oppenheimer.

I guess, first off, 2 questions. First off, Jack, congrats into all the best to you on your next phase of what's happening for you and appreciate everything you've done. Two questions. First off, I guess, for Dick, can you help us think about -- you gave some nice numbers on your 5-year plan. Can you help us think about, I guess, the earnings potential power of the company going forward and maybe separate from what you've done structurally and what you can do versus, I guess, the overall environment and we've gone for a low volatility and -- capability. Is it more one1 or the other? And maybe specific is the former.

Okay. Great. Mike, that's a great focus area to launch us here. We are so pleased about our earnings performance. And I would say that performance and more importantly, our future earnings power to your question, is really driven by more than the current environment. So more than the pricing environment, more than cap performance. And I say that emphatically because certainly, while we expect some normalization of elements of our profitability. There are structural changes that have been made at our company. We're a different company underneath. So personal lines, right, all the deductible strategies that we pursued the aggregation work and the diversification of geography, really important the core commercial were broadly profitable and a mix change and risk profile, it has been improved. And in specialty, we've gained scale in many of our businesses and now really a diversified contributor to our earnings. Small to midsize customer focus in commercial lines and our upper tier focus in personal lines. All that gives us pricing resiliency. Our volatility has been reduced across the portfolio. Net investment income is now large and really a sustainable contributor to earnings and frankly, thoughtful rerisking perhaps some upside there. So all of that really all of it kind of survives the normalization that we could expect in pricing and cat loss activity. So we have a stronger return profile underneath it than we have historically. And that really is driving the durability of earnings that we see and compounding those earnings and our book value going forward.

Okay. I guess my second question would be, I think you're a great one to answer this in used to lead the agency distribution for Hanover. Lots of news, obviously, from the larger brokers kind of going after middle market brokers obviously, that got reinforced a couple of weeks ago with Hanover. Can you talk about what that means for your distribution? And specifically, I have 2 specific areas around that. What does that mean for your ability to compete against the larger carriers? And then secondly, your investments and the agency distribution, did they become diminished as the agents that you focused on become part of your pocket, what is your -- target company?

Yes. Just the opposite, I would say. I'm bullish about what a transaction like this, USI NFP can mean in time. And maybe I'll address that more specifically. But broaden it and generally asking this -- the distribution consolidation that's occurring has really been a net benefit to our company. As you pointed out, we are a distribution company. We -- agency management, agency analytics, these are towering strengths of our company. So as the distribution consolidates, we generally have very strong relationships with the acquirers and the acquirers. So that 1 plus 1 equals 3 occurs. They think strategically about their carriers, the importance that they place on which strategic areas they should go after and consolidate their business with that requires operational and analytics. So we come to the table with our ANZ insight and frankly, our operational prowess. So we are -- we're brought to the table in these discussions. And I think on a go-forward basis, that is going to be super helpful. Specific to the Aon USI NFP transaction, I like what they're building. It's a middle market capability, middle market, lower end of middle market. As you know, that's our wheelhouse. That's where we play. That's where we have success. So letting our strong relationships that we have with USI and NFP, frankly, across the country. I have fabulous relationships going back to my days running field operations with USI -- that's going to enure to our benefit. But a really important point to point, something you mentioned in your question -- and when these kinds of transactions occur, really overnight, the new combined institution has large concentrations of business with large carriers in our industry. So Hanover shows up as a great alternative a complement to that and very much needed. Jack and I have been out in the marketplace with the CEOs of many of these organizations. And and we hear it all the time, but we need a carrier like Hanover that brings something to the table. It's a diversification play for the agent just as we talk about diversification, they need to diversify the portfolio of care that they work with. So that's very, very good for an organization like Hanover. We're going to, in 2 weeks, be out at CIB Conference, and the agendas are all about this topic. They're very robust and it's an opportunity for us to talk about how we map out our future together. So I'm upbeat.

Okay. That -- maybe just a real quick one for Jeff, if I could. Jeff, are the numbers you gave for the guide, are they based on what is the base, the full year '26?

The numbers are really our 5-year model beginning January 1, 2027 and going all the way through 2031. We've clearly based that in terms of jumping off points on how we're doing, how we're building, what forward curves look like for NII and what our view is over that time period, Mike. .

Our next question today comes from Paul Newsome at Piper Sandler.

Maybe a little bit of a big picture question. In the first 2021 goal, your growth rate was pretty similar as a target. I think you came in just a tad under what you're looking for over that 5-year period. But we also had a hard market during that period of time. how does the new target sort of differ given that the environment today is looking increasingly solved?

Yes. Let me say a word about that in that I agree that coming out of COVID and facing the challenges that came with the post COVID environment heading into a high inflation period had, I think, some volatility in top line both ways. You know our accomplishments over the last 5 years also include a period by which things shut down materially, and we had to make some real adjustments in our portfolio in our underwriting. So I think there was tailwinds and headwinds relative to our growth over the last 5 years.

Yes. And Paul, as we stare down in the next 5 years, I mean, this is an ambitious plan. We're going to be disciplined about how we earn it. as I said in my answer to my last question, we have this diversification now that gives us some optionality, places to press the gas pedal, places to hit the brakes. And the cycles, as you know, the pricing cycles are not moving in unison. So we can pick our spots to thoughtfully allocate our capital to drive growth. And again, it goes beyond the environment. We have opportunities to drive market share with our agents. Appoint new agents that give us access to more customers and scale the capabilities that we've invested in and bought. So our next 5 years builds on this foundation that we had, and I think that gives us a lot of confidence. But we'll navigate it [indiscernible], as Jeff said in his opening comments, we have aggressive, ambitious growth goals, but it's about profit first. So we'll make the right decisions.

That makes sense. And it's fair to say you came in pretty close to the growth, but your ROE was way higher than you thought back then, which is great. A little bit of talk maybe on M&A. I think you went through -- you guys went through really well the capital management pieces with buybacks and such. But there was a comment about the interest in renewal rights and maybe you could give us some thoughts as to how M&A may or may not fit within those financial targets.

Yes. Good. Thanks, Paul. So I would say it's desired, but not required for our next chapter. It's not built in into our assumptions here. This is an organic growth plan that we're looking at. But we have ambitious goals to bring in new capabilities, and we will continue to aggressively evaluate potential opportunities, but we're going to continue to have a high bar, a high threshold to make that happen. We've had a lot of success in the past of making acquisitions that are accretive quickly, and that remains paramount. So it's immediately or quickly matching our culture and distribution. So we look at the potential opportunities across those 3 lenses. And we're active looking, but we're being smart about it. And rest assured, we'll be disciplined. .

And our next question today comes from Mike Zaremski at BMO.

Thanks for putting this thoughtful presentation together. First question is on the combined ratio aspirations and guidance. I believe 86 to 87 ex catastrophes was the guide assuming that includes potential reserve movements. So just -- so that's clearly a very bullish profit margin guide. I know you -- within that, there was a 30 to 50 basis points of loss adjustment expense ratio improvement. But just curious, given how healthy that guidance is -- are you -- could you unpack maybe your expectations on pricing power? I know investors are kind of focused on the deceleration trend. Maybe you can kind of share whether you feel like pricing is going to stay kind of at current levels or not really decel much more to get you to that kind of bullish ratio?