All right, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for day two. We're very excited to kick it off with Intact's new Chief Financial Officer, Ken Anderson. Ken, thanks for joining us this morning.
Thanks, James. Great to be here.
Let's just kick it off quickly with obviously you're going to be new in the CFO role. So what kind of near term, long term goals are you setting for yourself, maybe for the company? Should we expect any material changes in how things are done?
I guess I've been with Intact for 17 years, reported to my predecessor for most of that time. I guess I'm a product of the Intact approach to leadership development, to succession, and I would hope that it'll be a fair bit of continuity on transition into the new role. From that point of view, I'm very focused, I guess, on just supporting my colleagues. I've been on the executive committee for the last five years, so quite familiar with how the organization works and it's really about the strategic objectives and helping my colleagues deliver on those objectives. Firstly, from a customer point of view, three out of four customers as advocates, we're well on our way there. Engaged workforce tends to be a workforce that drives out performance and then it's respect and we measure respect in terms of that financial performance.
Firstly, ROE, the 500 basis points of outperformance on ROE every year and then growing that net operating income per share at a 10% clip annually over time. That is the track record of the last 10 years. I guess my objective is to help my colleagues deliver that for the next 10 years.
Yeah, good. In terms of the financial performance of the business, Q4 finished off fairly strong across all business lines. Anything with respect to Q1 that you can share with us how it's shaping up? Only a couple of days left, hopefully no more snowstorms coming.
I think my compliance colleagues would not be too happy if I started talking in detail about Q1 at this stage. Maybe to just recap on the momentum that we have coming into 2025 across the business, I would say quite strong. Full year 2024, operating ROE, 16.5% and that is despite about a three point drag from excess catastrophes in 2024. You know, the operating performance is quite strong if we take it by business line. You know, Personal Auto running sub- 95 growing at a double digit rate. Quite comfortable to grow when we are running Auto sub- 95. Feeling pretty positive about that. Personal Property, you know, in Q4 results were good. Full year we had those excess cat losses.
If you look over a five and ten year period in Personal Property, you'll see 90% combined ratio, slightly, slightly better than that in fact. You know, very comfortable with our position in Property moving forward. Again, double digit growth there. Commercial lines sub- 90 combined ratio in 2024, growth in the mid single digit range. Good momentum, we think, heading into 2025. In the U.S., again, two years now, 87%-88% combined ratio on the U.S. operation, growth there mid single digit. We are remediating a couple of lines, which is tempering growth a little bit, but overall performance really strong and we'll be looking to grow at a faster clip as we move through the year. In the U.K., the acquisition of Direct Line in 2023 is coming together really well. Performance is trending pretty much in line with expectation.
We were, you know, 92.7%, 92.8% combined ratio in 2024. We're seeing a little bit of drag from on top line as we remediate the Direct Line business. You know, as that remediates we will be trending the combined ratio from that 92% zone to 90% over the next 24 months and we feel pretty good about how the business is evolving there. I guess across the whole platform feel quite positive about the momentum as we, as we head into 2025.
Yeah, sounds like it. Let's dig into some of the business lines then maybe starting with Personal Auto. Obviously strong growth last year, inflation seems to be moderating. You have some other factors like auto thefts seeming to be more contained now across the country. You know, maybe just describe what you're seeing in terms of the market for Personal Auto. Should we see more of a push into Auto from Intact at this point given the setup?
Yeah, I think so James. As I said, you know, it's about running that business sub- 95 and we're doing that. We're seeing, you know, double digit rate increases and what we're seeing is we're able to grow in that zone of rate increases on our side. The market is overall unprofitable in Auto, you know, so if we're able to run at a sub- 95 combined ratio, we're certainly comfortable growing maybe outside of Alberta I would say, which is probably the one area that is a little more problematic as we all know. Beyond that the Auto portfolio is performing well. As I say, industry is unprofitable. We're starting to see unit growth emerge. We're comfortable with that because we're running Auto now in that combined ratio zone which is generating mid teens ROE so happy to grow in that environment.
Yeah. You touched on it with unit growth. We started to see a little bit of acceleration. Now, is that, obviously rates have been the biggest driver of Personal Auto growth, but is unit growth now, is this going to be a more important driver of the growth in Personal Auto?
I think we'll see rates may moderate slightly as we move through the year to a mid to upper single digit zone. But as I say we're comfortable growing units. I'm not going to predict exactly where unit growth will go, but we're happy with the type of unit growth we're seeing and if more comes, we'll be happy with that too. Overall, the focus is on sustaining the sub- 95. We feel, as I say, our relative position is improving the industry. You know, the results for Q4 were out in the last couple of days. The industry is certainly unprofitable in Auto. So we're seeing competitors raise rates at probably a higher clip than we're needing to raise rates. So that should bring some unit momentum in 2025.
Yeah. The industry is unprofitable and you mentioned some Alberta, we'll say, issues or just regulatory changes there. From your perspective for Intact, what are the biggest risks to the Personal Auto? To being able to achieve that 95% combined ratio, to be able to deliver the, the, let's say, upper single double digit growth. What are the risks that you're seeing?
Yeah, you know, Auto, it's a regulated line so we study it pretty closely. I think the longer tail part of the coverage is something we monitor very closely. Our reserving has been conservative historically because we have that long tail element to it. We've been very successful in spotting the trends ahead of our competitors and adjusting our pricing and our segmentation accordingly. Conservative reserving on the long tail is important to ensure you don't get surprises when it comes to Personal Auto. That's something that we focus on. I think the second area is indeed Alberta. We're probably marginally in a better place than we were six to nine months ago. We have the 7.5% rate cap that's in place. We would, you know, we would prefer not to have that, but it's better to get that than get nothing.
We have been successful on the new business side where the rate cap does not apply so we are able to get in excess of that on the new business and we have pushed through on that front. In Alberta the industry is extremely unprofitable. You know, we are at the margin, you know, in the zone of getting profitable. But you know, that is an area we are watching very closely. I guess the third area is on tariffs and again there we are pretty immunized, I would say, you know, in terms of our loss cost, only about 13% of our loss cost is imported. We feel in good position therefore, if there is pressure on that component from an inflation point of view to be able to deal with that.
Those are probably the three areas in Personal Auto from a risk point of view that we focus on. Overall, sub- 95, happy to grow.
Yeah, let's shift to Personal Property then where the results have been very, very strong. Excluding, let's say, active cats in Q3, there's been consistent improvement in that current year loss ratio through 2024. This is on the back of several profitability actions over many, many years. Maybe a little bit about like what's been implemented so far. Is there more to do to sort of sustain what's been, you know, really, really strong sub-90 performance in that line?
Yeah, that's exactly right. Sub- 90, you know, five year, ten year track record is, is in that 90 or just below 90 zone. Obviously 2024 we had, we had the cat losses which, which impact the full year. Q4 was 77% combined ratio. I wouldn't project that as the run rate going forward. Q4 tends to be a little, a little better. I go back to that five and ten year track record and feel pretty good, I would say, about our ability to continue to run the business in that zone. We've done a lot of work. You know, pricing is one of our competitive advantages. We think we invest a lot in the actuarial science, AI, machine learning.
We're now pricing our Property business peril by peril and we're now using maps by peril, be it flooding maps, wildfire maps, hail maps and overlaying those on top of each other as we do our pricing. Pricing sophistication is certainly an area that we continue to try to push the boundaries on to maintain the competitive advantage there. We've also evolved the product over a number of years. Things like basement limits on basement losses. We've also tweaked our coverage around roofs for hail. The depreciated, it's the depreciated cost of the roof is what the payout is on as opposed to the new cost of the roof. Product evolution is certainly something that we focused on as well. Prevention is now something as well that we're heavily focused on.
We have the partnership with WDS where, you know, where in areas that are susceptible to wildfires, they're going out in advance, you know, putting protective covers in place, lowering essentially the risk of embers causing fires and causing full losses. We have a few specific examples where we believe they've prevented already full limit losses that would have otherwise occurred. Work on prevention. We see now an opportunity moving forward to also engage with customers and leverage prevention as an opportunity to engage with customers. We've acquired Jiffy, which is on home maintenance. You know, as we move forward we see opportunity to leverage the crossover between customer engagement and prevention. You know, that's certainly an area that we're now working on exploring further.
Yeah, and I think that kind of maybe leads into or answers a little bit of the next question I was thinking about was just around the changes in the reinsurance program where you've increased retention for Intact. I guess the question was going to be like what gives investors confidence that that increased retention isn't, you know, higher risk given the way catastrophes have been trending? You kind of answered some of that. Is there anything else to the story that can give investors confidence that higher retention doesn't necessarily mean higher risk?
Yeah, I would say from a reinsurance point of view, our main purpose that we buy reinsurance is around the tail risk. From that point of view, you know, we buy well in excess of what is needed to cover a 1 in 500 year event. We have actually lowered what a 1 in 500 would cost us over the last three years. If you were to go back to 2023, essentially a full limit loss, if you like, on a 1 in 500 year event would have cost us 5 points of combined ratio in the year in 2025. That is now 3%. Through exposure management, but also lowering co participation on that reinsurance tower, we have lowered our overall exposure to those large events.
When it comes to the lower end of the tower, so to speak of reinsurance, that's where we look every year at the trade off between the cost of buying that CAD 100 million in excess of CAD 250 million. To just recap, in 2024 our retention was CAD 250 million. We've increased it now to CAD 350 million. Every year we would look at what's the cost of that CAD 100 million of cover and, you know, if we feel that the cost of the cover is in excess of what we feel the likelihood of the payout or how much of that CAD 100 million we will need, then we will tailor our view of whether it's worthwhile buying it. I guess in 2025 the view was we're comfortable to raise the Canada deductible, if you like, to CAD 350 million.
Now what we've also done is purchased an aggregate cover whereby losses that go in excess of half of the deductible in each jurisdiction go into a pool, and then if those losses were to exceed CAD 350 million, we have an additional CAD 250 million of cover there. That's to cover us for, you know, what we're also seeing is an increase in frequency of events. If there's a large number of events that are in that CAD 300 million-CAD 350 million zone, we do have additional protection to help temper the impact of that type of sequence, if you like.
Yeah, good. Maybe a quick one. On the Canadian commercial side, the larger account business still seems to have some softening and some pressure. Maybe a quick update there and then I guess, you know, why isn't that necessarily feeding into the smaller account SME segments in the Canadian commercial space?
Yeah, I think on the larger account space I guess it's the easier place for competitors to go. If top line is your focus leaning in on pricing in specific CAD 500,000-CAD 1 million accounts can move the needle on your top line pretty quickly. It's an obvious place when top line is under pressure that competitors would go to. I think that's what we're seeing. We're quite disciplined, we're focused on the combined ratio. We price each risk to deliver 15%+ ROE and that's how we think about it.
On the lower end though is really where we're able to leverage our scale, our claims supply chain, but also our pricing sophistication where risks at the SME and mid market level tend to be a little more homogeneous and therefore our ability to price and segment is probably at its maximum if you like, in that space. That is the space where there's maybe a little less competition or let's say unreasonable competition if you like, in that lower end and therefore we're seeing a better ability to get the pricing that we deem adequate to sustain that mid teens ROE at the lower end of the market.
Maybe going to something that's maybe a little closer to home for you. Shifting to the U.K. integration has gone well. The tone seems positive in the U.K. So maybe give us, where are we on that integration? What's next for Intact in the U.K. and how much runway do we see there?
Yeah, so in the U.K., I guess there's two elements to the business there. One is the London market, as we call it, business, which forms part of the overall global specialty lines. And then there's the SME mid market, what we call, if you like, the heartland business of the U.K., where you're in the market across the country with offices dealing with local brokers. In the SME mid market space, that's where RSA had a very strong position. That's where Direct Line also had a strong commercial lines brokered business as well. That's the business we acquired via quota share initially, late 2023. Now that business is coming into our environment, onto our systems, and what we're in the process of doing now is integrating into a single proposition, two brokers combined. Now we have about 6% market share, a number three position in the U.K. market.
That's really an opportunity to leverage those competitive advantages that I talked about in Canada on the SME and mid market, the pricing sophistication. We have Nathalie Dufresne , who was running pricing for commercial lines in Canada. She's been in the U.K. for the last two and a half years now, essentially deploying the pricing sophistication from Canada into the U.K. market. It's really about bringing that offering together and leveraging a market that doesn't have any real outstanding player. It's one that we really feel we can win in. The RSA brand and the Direct Line, which was the NIG brand, are both very well known in the market. We feel the combined proposition is a great opportunity to be the leader in that domestic U.K. market. Performance overall, as I said, is really good. We're in that 92% zone.
Overall, as we improve the Direct Line business, we'll trend towards 90%. We are feeling pretty positive about the direction of travel in the U.K., I would say.
Okay, great. Let's wrap up with maybe the standard M& A type of question here. What are you seeing in the market? Is the market even conducive to a transaction today? You know, is there certain markets that are maybe more attractive? Like, is there more opportunity in the U.K. European area than there is maybe in North America?
Yeah, look, for us, we're ready, I would say, in pretty much all segments of the business, maybe leaving that Direct Line, domestic U.K. market to the side. We probably have 12 months or so of work there. Beyond that, you know, Canada performance really good. You know, the integration muscle is very strong in Canada. It's really a question of actionability. We don't control that, but we're certainly ready. Global specialty lines, 90% combined ratio across that platform and sub- 90 or better actually in all segments of specialty. You know, leaving aside current tensions, the U.S., you know, mid to long term is a great opportunity for specialty lines growth. Too is the U.K. and potentially Europe as well. I think all options are open on the specialty line side.
Maybe don't forget as well we're continuing to roll up on the distribution side here in Canada in particular with BrokerLink, but also in the U.S. now starting to move on the MGA front in the U.S. so lots of opportunity. We don't know when or exactly where, but you know, the files are all open.
Excellent. That is our time for this morning. Ken, thanks for kicking us off today and congratulations on the new role.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you.