Everyone, thanks for joining us. I'm Ryan Tunis. I'm the insurance analyst at Autonomous, and I'm happy to have with us, Peter Zaffino, Chairman and CEO of AIG. I think AIG is one of the more interesting stories in insurance for sure. We're going to have a conversation, but first, Peter wanted to lead off with a few prepared remarks.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks, Peter.
Thought it'd be just easier if I got up and maybe spoke behind the podium for a few minutes. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today, Ryan, and everybody here today. You know, the AIG story is a unique one, and I hope to unpack it a little bit more with some detail. We've done the hard work of repositioning the company in terms of its underwriting standards and underwriting results, and it's been a significant heavy lift. We now are delivering terrific underwriting results, especially when we compare where we started our journey, which was a very unprofitable portfolio. If I switch to today, you know, our top priorities remain Corbridge, Corbridge deconsolidation, and to continue to sell down AIG shares. We can talk about that in the session.
We want to position AIG for the future. There's what we call AIG Next, which is really an expense initiative to start to take a company that was a conglomerate and put it into a single company. So that will save a significant amount of money for us as we get to, you know, focus on our ROE and the company for the future. A few statistics on the underwriting I think are just important. I wrote in the shareholders' letter this year that I thought 2023 was our best year yet, and we've had some really good, you know, relative years, when we started in 2017 and 2018. Just to level set, I've said this before, the portfolio from 2008 to 2018 lost $30 billion.
That has not been done in our industry, and you survived. I mean, so the reason why I say that is not to provide the statistic, but for everyone to have a clear understanding as the portfolio in which we had to remediate was a highly unprofitable portfolio. We also had, within that, a ton of volatility. So, you know, Cat, 2017 became a really active year. If you look at the last six out of seven years, it's been over $100 billion of insurable loss. But our Cat ratio in 2017 was 16%, and this past year, in 2023, is 4.7%. So not only have we improved the underwriting, we've dramatically reduced the volatility, and that continues to be evident in our results. We also did...
You know, in normal, you know, companies, we don't have as much to do. AIG 200, which is really what we use to transform the operational capabilities of the company, would be a big story. There's so many other things to talk about, but we actually, you know, tackled this simultaneously with the underwriting turnaround. It was $1 billion of savings, but what I'd like to leave you with is, more importantly, is it was really a big improvement in terms of data, data ingestion, workflow, digital workflow, cloud migration, and just improving the core foundation for AIG in the future. So that's done, but a big accomplishment. From 2018 to 2023, the calendar year commercial lines combined ratio improved by 2,600 basis points, which is dramatic.
The accident year combined ratio, which is just really the results in that year with no effect of catastrophe or prior year reserve development, was 1,900 basis points. So that, again, you can see what we've done, the evidence through the financial results. We also shaped the portfolio with divestitures that were all purposeful. We divested the reinsurance business, which had, you know, an inherent amount of volatility. Its size and scale wasn't big enough to sort of drive outcomes in the marketplace to become an index. We did that with RenaissanceRe. We did the same thing with Crop Risk Services, which was a crop business, and sold that to Great American. So we continue to prune the portfolio.
I don't think there's a lot more to do, but getting the core businesses focused on where we want to have differentiation in the market and be able to grow. Corbridge, we continue to work really hard on, you know, sort of the final stages of sell downs. We have done a lot there. We started with Blackstone, with an equity investment. We outsourced fixed income to BlackRock, flipped to the Aladdin platform. We used the AIG 200, transformational program as a foundation to do Corbridge's, operational Corbridge forward. We did three secondary offerings last year that generated $2.9 billion of proceeds, divested two businesses, LAE UK Life, which is $1.2 billion of proceeds for Corbridge, and we just announced a Nippon Life 20% sale for $3.8 billion.
All this has led to, you know, our financial flexibility in the capital management. This multi-year repositioning the portfolio has allowed us to significantly strengthen the balance sheet and give us financial flexibility for the future. All of our Tier I insurance company subsidiaries are at or above whatever the target levels we've set, so we have more capital in the subsidiaries for the writings we have today, so we can grow in to the business, and to the capital position without additional capital. So that gives us a lot of flexibility to grow. We've significantly reduced our debt. When we deconsolidate, we'll be sub-10 billion, and so that was really $12 billion of retirement since 2001.
I mean, a lot of it was from what we did in Corbridge, but we've been really disciplined on when we've done some leverage with Corbridge that we took off, you know, that with AIG. So our debt-to-capital ratio upon deconsolidation, including AOCI or excluding, we'll be between 15% and 20%. Board support us with a share authorization program of $10 billion. That really reflects the liquidity that we have, you know, plans. Again, of course, it depends on when we deconsolidate and sell down further with Corbridge, but I think about that through 2024 and 2025. We said we should do about $6 billion this year, probably around $4 billion in 2025. Depends on the timing of the deconsolidation, but it gives us a lot of financial flexibility.
We increased the dividend again, 10%+, second year in a row, returning capital to shareholders. So I think if I leave you with one thing today, I hope I leave you with more, but if I leave you with one, it's like, this is a different company. There's really no way to look into the past of anything of relevance to today. Other than we got a great brand, we have good global presence, and we have the ability to continue to grow. And I think our position and voice in the marketplace is significant. So we're really proud of what we've accomplished, the growing reputation, and delivering high-quality outcomes quarter after quarter to be able to position AIG for the future. So I just want to open with those comments, and then, Ryan, we can go to Q&A.
Thanks for those comments. So, it seems like the major theme here is a lot of years where fixing the underwriting. That's fixed, and now it's more of a discussion around a pivot to growth. So I guess, as you're shifting that focus, how do you ensure that there's still a good level of underwriting discipline?
Underwriting discipline is really driven by the culture, and the framework, and who you have leading the businesses. And so you'll hear thematically throughout, our conversation of all the changes that we made. You know, AIG... again, I don't spend a lot of time. I knew AIG really well when I was at Marsh McLennan for 17 years, and they were our biggest trading partner, so I knew the company from the outside as well as you can know it. It was known as a, as a growth company, not necessarily a, a great underwriting company.
And when we needed to really position the portfolio, we had to have a culture of underwriting excellence, have a Chief Underwriting Officer that was not a tick-the-box, but actually was setting standards, monitoring, you know, growth and also profitability, and having underwriting guidelines that were going to be aligned with how we want to shape the portfolio. Out of the 20 top underwriting positions, and I'm talking about from the most senior on down, so our Chief Underwriting Officer, Chris Schaper, leader of International is Jon Hancock, and our leader in North America is Don Bailey. So those would be three. In the top 20 positions, 17 out of the 20 have less tenure at the company than I do, so that means, like, less than six years.
What we were trying to do is drive those leadership positions with underwriting practitioners. They can still manage, they can still lead, but not having general managers overseeing underwriting businesses was really important. They focus on underwriting profitability. That is the primary objective. We are also set up very differently than other companies in terms of how reinsurance is purchased. It's not done by any of the businesses, it's not done by the CFO's office. The head of our reinsurance purchasing, Charlie Fry, I think he's the best in the world. He comes directly to me. We set all the underwriting standards in terms of what we buy for reinsurance based on our volatility appetite and risk appetite for AIG, not-for-profit centers. So that's very different. So the underwriters are focused on gross underwriting.
They don't really look at net underwriting as an outcome. It becomes the outcome every time we have a quarterly income statement we have to produce for the street. But by and large, that culture is very strong, underwriting expertise is very strong, and we will not sacrifice underwriting profitability for growth.
Got it. So I guess it's interesting because from your standpoint, you've been advocating that this pivot to growth happened a couple of years ago. But I think there's been a bit of a lag from an investor standpoint. I think count us in that camp. We wanted to see just a little bit more, you know, let's see the underwriting bear out. But I think investors, most people, I think we now share the same mindset. We're on the same page. So now that growth is more of a focus, and you've been doing this for two years, and I guess we haven't been paying as careful attention as we should have, can you talk a little bit about the progress you've made or the challenges you've encountered trying to shift that mindset back to growth?
When we talked about it two years ago, not to caveat it, but I think we were really talking about, like on a written basis, we feel like we've had a lot of remediation done. So as it earns in, it just takes a little bit of time, and repositioning the portfolio to where we thought the best risk-adjusted returns would exist. We have been very focused. There's businesses today... You know, when you're doing turnarounds, you manage them as an index because you have to drive profitability for the entire portfolio. We've really been focused in those last two years in terms of getting disproportionate amount of the investment into areas of high growth potential and really strong combined ratios, while still remediating always the bottom, you know, portion of the portfolio.
So I think you've seen evidence in areas where we think we can grow very profitably, like Lexington, like the syndicate that we have, Talbot, Global A&H, which has been de minimis, but we've had a little bit of, you know, we have been exiting China, so that's been a little bit masking some of the growth in A&H. Our global specialties, we're the biggest, you know, global specialty writer and think that there's, you know, ample opportunity for growth there. And want to continue to make sure that we have a focus on those areas, and they've been performing exceptionally well. When I look at the portfolio, I always start at, you know, like, what clients do you retain? What's the new business pipeline? Are we able to look at, you know, different areas of business in many different geographies?
So like if you think about property, not all property is created equal. There's definitely different risk-adjusted returns depending on where you are in the world, what's happening with the with Cats, and also what's the underlying profitability. But AIG has six or seven points of entry into property, so we can scale it back or scale it up, depending on those risk-adjusted returns. I think it's very thoughtful, really driven by portfolio work and how we actually drive that, you know, through to the underwriters. So I think the growth will be there. I believe, like, the retentions are very strong now, where in the past, you know, that remediation still affected the current portfolio, and new business has been just terrific. So I still think there's a lot of momentum and a lot of opportunities for growth.
Is it, you guys are obviously different sized than you were, I don't know, 10 years ago. Does that pose any challenges, in terms of the growth you can do or?
No, I mean, you know, if you go back in time, you know, when AIG was at its peak, probably $65 billion of top line, it squandered that opportunity. I mean, because it was, it's not the way it is today, because AIG, at that point in time, was bigger than any broker in terms of what it placed in the market. Now, you know, Marsh and Aon, you know, if, if you say we're $35 billion gross top line, they place three to four times that in the market today. So, I mean, what AIG had as an unbelievable advantage at that time, you know, just wasn't taken advantage of. Now, size matters, but I think what matters more is, like, what, where you trade.
Like, I mean, so when you look at the point of sale, which is through the brokers to clients, are you setting the underwriting terms? Are you setting the pricing? Are you the one that has the lead capabilities, which means you have the underwriting expertise, and that's the businesses we traded. You know, so we're not a capacity player that, you know, tries to find, you know, risks through an open market and best price wins. That's a failed strategy. The businesses that we are in and the global locations, I think, give us tremendous advantages to differentiate ourselves compared to other companies.
Got it. So you mentioned Lexington, it's, that's your wholesale division, a place where you've, you've executed extremely well. But listening to you, you've kind of been in the camp, you've been a believer that there's sort of a secular shift of market volumes into the E&S market.
Yeah.
So I guess just to play devil's advocate scenario, if E&S turns out to run a little bit more of a classic cycle, it's good in hard markets, tough in soft markets, how much of an impediment would that be for AIG?
It won't be an impediment at all. One is, I don't believe it. It's a complicated market. I'll try to explain it, is that, E&S has grown substantially over the last, you know, 20 years. So I'll give you one statistic first, is that if you went back to 2003 and 2004, the entire E&S market was about $34 billion. Today, it's $114 billion. So it's grabbing market share. There's no doubt about it. Their capabilities are broadening, and their ability to actually drive outcomes is substantial. Look at their organic growth versus retail, and they have the momentum. The other piece is that they are able to break their models into really three categories, to oversimplify. One is a pure E&S market, which is, you know, maybe hard to place risks.
You have to, you know, be very focused on going into, you know, E&S markets to be able to do that. The other is they become placement engines for independent agents. About 40,000 independent agents in the United States, they have access usually to two or three markets. They're the more traditional admitted markets. They don't have access to admitted markets. They have to use a wholesaler to get to those markets. And then the third is what we call delegated authority or MGUs, where they underwrite on behalf of insurance company paper or risk assumption, where they're growing and they're putting the most investment in those three buckets. So they have broader capabilities.
What happened is, and this is not intuitive, but the old Lexington had a strategy that it would take retail, so think about Marsh, Aon, Willis, or wholesale business, and that would've been Ryan Specialty, Amwins, or CRC. That is a terrible strategy, and one that ends up getting adverse selection everywhere. Retail brokers don't want to go to excess and surplus lines markets, and you don't have to believe what they say. I ran Marsh, and I'm telling you, I didn't want to go to Lexington. It would be the market of last resort in every instance. Wholesale doesn't want to use a market that will use retail, so they give you the adverse selection. So it ended up becoming a giant business of adverse selection.
Plus, why not just like, you know, issue the largest limits you can to make sure that the results are even worse? That's where we started, and if I look at the market share under that strategy, it was three times the size that we are today. So I would argue that we have plenty of room to grow, number one. The other statistic that's very interesting to me, and I'll say the catalyst was AIG. You could ask around and determine if that's right or not. But in 2017, as I said, when I came in, I had this retail wholesale distribution strategy, and we said, "We're not doing that.
Either we're gonna, like, run the business off or we're going wholesale only, because it's the only way we're gonna get, like, very strong business." From 2017 and 2018, once we decided, which means we had to basically non-renew most of the portfolio and churn it over and go through wholesale. The compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2023 is 20% in wholesale. It's never been that large, and we're talking off of bigger bases now. So I don't think it's really driven by this hard market, soft market. I'll age myself out because I've been doing this for a while. I always... One is I don't like hard market, soft market, but if I was to define a hard market, I'd say it's a supply issue.
Hard markets, 9/11, they were driven by no supply, and therefore, pricing becomes a direct correlation to capacity that could be deployed. There's no shortage of capacity in the marketplace. We could write billions of dollars of premium if they had the right risk-adjusted returns, as could many of our competitors. This is a choice in terms of going to a market. And by the way, you know, back to what we talked around, how much premium goes into the market. I mean, Amwins is now north of $30 billion. I think Ryan Specialty is very close to that, and CRC is not too far behind. So it's gonna be a similar dynamic to what we saw in retail, like Marsh, Aon, Willis for a while, were the big three, and then there was everyone else, but everyone else has caught up.
I mean, they're not the same size, but they have strong organic growth, and they have a lot more relevance. I think you'll see that in wholesale as well. So it's a dynamic shift. There was only eight wholesale-only markets, maybe nine, when AIG decided to make a change with Lexington. I think today, don't ask me to name them, but I think there's north of 80 today. Some are doing fronting. So that market is—I don't see it. You know, even if you go back to that period of time when I said it was back to, you know, $33 billion, it lost a little bit of market share in the more traditional hard market, soft market, but it's not gonna give a lot back this time. So I just—And my last, like, this will be a plug.
I'm not a wholesale-only market. It goes without admitted, I got plenty of med mal bills. I'm not, like, plugging for it. I just think that's where the market is, and so, like, if it doesn't work, I got, like, other businesses that can pick up the opportunities. This is not we're wholesale only, and we're betting the farm on it. I just think there's plenty of opportunities for Lexington to grow. I think that market's gonna grow. And look at submission count when you're talking to brokers, and the wholesale brokers are breaking records every quarter. Like, I can't believe how much submission activity is coming into them, after massive growth in what we've seen over the last two to three years.
Got it. So I get, like, aside from, I guess, growth, reunderwriting, AIG has been a, an excess capital story, and a lot of that's kind of been tied to the sell-down of the Corbridge stake. I guess we'd argue that even post deconsolidation, deployment of Corbridge proceeds, you guys still look like an excess capital story. I think one really interesting stat, I think, is your tangible equity base is actually not that different than Chubb's, and Chubb has about twice the premium.
Yeah.
So that looks like a lot of, you know, underlevered from a premium standpoint. Should we think of organic growth as kind of the most likely deployment of that residual excess capital? And, I think you mentioned that you have, you have a $35 billion gross book. I, I wanna say $25 billion net, something like that. Should we think about, I guess, the opportunity to deploy that capital coming more from keeping more business net or from, just writing more business?
Are you worried I'm gonna give a long answer like the Lexington?
No.
Okay. I would think of it as both. We definitely have excess capital to grow into, and believe that we have ample opportunities. Park reinsurance, first side, is that there's plenty of opportunities for organic growth, in the portfolio. And again, it'll be market, you know, specific, it'll be market dependent, but believe that, that is the first priority in terms of usage to grow into the capital base. The second why I mentioned, like, reinsurance is that, again, you have to go back. This is why I kind of made some of the opening statements. It's like AIG got unfairly punished, you know, subsequent to...
It's one of the things that really frustrated me was that, you know, I brought in a lot of people with tremendous track records of driving profitability through all market cycles, yet we still had to live with the past of what we were doing, you know, with AIG's past. And so, like, I recognized pretty early on, like, we can't have the same volatility as some of our, you know, peers for now, and so therefore, that needs to be done through the gross portfolio as well as through reinsurance. And when you look at our. Just use like it, it's what's in the, you know, K and everything else on the 1-in-100 return periods for PMLs, which is probable maximum loss for, you know, natural perils.
Our PML, relative to shareholders' equity, is the lowest of any of our peer group by literally like, I think we're like 1/3 of the next one, and then maybe even a quarter of the next one after that. So I think we'll be able to take more volatility. We may not choose to do that, but we certainly can take a little bit more on cat, because we're very low attachment points, and we wanted to not have any volatility while we were doing the deconsolidation with Corbridge and preserve capital and earnings, for that matter. The dynamics in the reinsurance market, we're the only industry that like declares what the cat season is gonna be like before cat season starts. Like, so like, you know, we have a lot of forecasts with...
I don't know, I mean, I'm not a meteorologist, but everyone's saying it's gonna be a more active cat season, and meaning in terms of severity as well as frequency, named storms, severe storms, landfall, I have no idea. But people were predicting that it wasn't gonna be that, it ended up being a lot worse. So I think this is the new norm, and I'm not prepared to run a business that's gonna, you know, lose $1 billion a quarter on cat because I wanna take massive net retentions. Having said that, there are things that we can do that will be driven by choices. We saw a little bit of that in the first quarter, where we had a lot of proportional reinsurance, which is basically just ground up.
So let's think about, we're writing, a business, and if you do proportional and you set a 50%, that means 50% of the premium goes to the reinsurer, and they pay you an override, usually get anywhere from 300-500 basis points of override based on the quality of the book. That consumes a lot of premium. It may not be a great choice going forward. We did that to reduce volatility and reunderwrite the portfolio. But if you flip that to just what we call excess of loss, which just attaches above a certain level, that's not going to be driving premium growth. It will result in that, but it'll be restructuring, you know, how we buy reinsurance based on the maturity of a portfolio, and where we think the market is.
Yeah, I don't know if there's a way that you benchmark it in your head, but do you think—would you say at AIG, your business on average is more—I guess I'm thinking more the quota share, the ground up. Is it more heavily reinsured than most competitors, or kind of just what you'd expect for the type of business you're writing? I'm just trying to assess if—would it be taking disproportionately high risk to write more?
No.
on a net basis, or would you just be-
No, the answer to the first question is, we buy more reinsurance, particularly on property, than our peers do. But that, that's a, an appetite of volatility than it is anything else. So we don't have to do that. We did five years ago, we don't today. And, you know, the property portfolio with no reinsurance was massively unprofitable, north of 130 combineds in certain parts of the portfolio. Now, is in the 70s, 80s, combined with fully loaded reinsurance. So reinsurance shouldn't be looked at as a cost that is going to be detrimental. It's a cost that is a clearing price of that capacity. It needs to be priced into the original risk.
I think what happened, this is my own view, it doesn't need to be right, is that what I would look at for reinsurance, if you're ever, like, trying to figure out, like, what companies are doing, I couldn't care less what they did from 2023 to 2024. I wanna know what they did from 2022 to 2024, because people took massive net positions and changed their portfolio. We didn't make any changes, and that's why I think we're a little bit of an outlier, because we chose not to, you know, increase retentions because pricing, capacity, whatever was available that we decided to pass on. So I would think of it that way. The other one we don't talk a lot about is casualty.
I mean, you know, we had a portfolio that again, needed to be remediated, was done for different purposes before all the inflation, jury awards that have been evident in portfolios across the industry now, by reducing, you know, sort of our limit capacity. So one example would be, when I came in, AIG could have a $100 million net loss on a single account. Today, the most we could have, if we put out a same $100 million policy in North America, it'd be, like, $12 million. So it's just a dramatically different portfolio, and I don't believe in, certain lines of business, like casualty, that you take massive vertical, you know, risk if you're gonna put out gross limits. I just don't think it's prudent.
Makes sense. So I wanted to shift gears to, I guess the news from a couple of weeks ago, with Corbridge. You guys, buyer of 20% of your 52% stake in, Nippon Life. I guess first question is, when should we expect from a timing perspective, the financial deconsolidation of that? Is that a, I don't know how we can expect this quarter, or is there things that have to happen from a board standpoint? And then also, how are you thinking about the timing of the remaining sell down of that Corbridge stake?
I think those are three questions, right? Maybe four.
No, might be five.
So first of all, Nippon Life is an outstanding life insurance company. I mean, the most reputable one in Japan, well-respected across... As a 20% owner for Corbridge, is gonna be very strategic. And I think the benefits will be short, medium, and long term. Really, really pleased to be able to announce that. And again, another, you know, strategic positioning for Corbridge that's gonna really benefit them a long time. I believe Blackstone was very good. I mentioned BlackRock. What we did with Accenture in terms of getting better end-to-end processing capabilities, Nippon's gonna be very important for them, you know, long term.
So I think that was very strategic, and AIG decided, based on our relationship with Nippon, is to stay in to 9.9%, two years after closing, just to demonstrate partnership and make the transition easier and still be active participants on the board. Until we close that, it does nothing for deconsolidation. So I would think of it. Now, I'll answer the second question in a second. For Nippon, nothing happens until we close. So if we close in the first quarter, fourth quarter, that would trigger deconsolidation if we did nothing else, in terms of other sell downs. In terms of guidance I gave, you know, we'll see. I said we would do something in the second quarter. If you go back to what I said in the fourth quarter, that we expected the second quarter.
I didn't know Nippon was going to be available at that time, so, you know, we were thinking about a marketed deal or, you know, a block or something of that nature. But bringing something like Nippon, you know, we want to be patient. We've got to go below 47% to deconsolidate. We're at 53% now, so whatever trade we do, that's the math. I mean, so if we, you know, did a 10% block in the next week, then we would deconsolidate, irrespective of what happened with Nippon, and then we would continue to do, you know, consecutive sell downs after that. Now, we've committed with Nippon, we would do up to, you know, a max of 15% in this particular calendar year, and then after 1/1/2025, we can sell down the rest of 9.9.
Okay. That's very helpful. So yeah, I guess one observation. So we've seen a number of expense save plans rolled out and successfully implemented, I guess under your stewardship. Most recently, AIG Next actions $500 million of cost saves by the end of 2025. I guess I'm just curious, when you got to AIG, did you know early on there was gonna be this type of runway for cost save plans? Or, has it been more of a thing that's evolved over time as you've improved things, you've kind of figured out, Hey, we can, here's something I wasn't thinking about. Just curious how that's evolved.
I think both, Ryan. I mean, it was evident that we had way too much expense relative to the size business we were. I mean, that became evident within 30, 60 days. How to get it out was a little bit more time-consuming, which is really how we led to AIG 200, is that there were so many different processes. Even if you think about something simple like shared services as having, you know, 10 different work streams from shared services into AIG that wouldn't integrate at all. We didn't have single definitions of data. And so that was the work that was done there. I really strongly believe with AIG 200, the expense savings became a product of the work.
It wasn't the effort that we were trying to achieve because we just needed to, whether it's cloud, as I said, computing or end-to-end process, it was a very broken process within the underwriting. You know, how you get submissions, how you actually work through, you know, the rating mechanisms, totally inconsistent. And so we got very disciplined, you know, built a tremendous team. In many ways, I think that was more cultural shock to AIG than underwriting. And, you know, at least we had underwriters. They-- it wasn't very good, but, like, there was underwriting going on. In operations, there was nothing, so we had nothing to compare it to. So I think we really built a lot of foundational work that's enabled us to continue to make improvements. We have focused on AIG Next, which is just taking...
If you're skeptical of the combined ratios within AIG, you just, you know, point to the other operations of the parent company, and say, "Well, you just keep a lot of expenses there, and so your combined ratios aren't really as strong." Gonna get rid of all that. And that's what we're really trying to drive, is duplication. Again, still trying to improve processes and the functions, as well as in underwriting, and making sure that where there's excess and duplicative cost, that comes out of the system. But as you look at AIG in the future, how I'd look at it is that, what's the parent expense gonna be? And we basically said, you know, whatever, the 1%-1.5% of net premium earned, or right now, like we said, $325 million-$350 million.
Whatever else is in parent, like, has to go into the business. And so if you don't get the expenses out, the combined ratios are going up. But, you know, I don't really want to get on earnings calls and explain that, so we're gonna, we're gonna get the expenses out.
Fair enough. I guess I have to ask you this, but just market conditions overall, how are you thinking about the sustainability of... you don't like the term, but the current hard market, for lack of a better word?
I think we have to. What ends up happening, not with you, but with the other sell side, is that when you look at consecutive. You know, if you're still getting rate increases, but you may not have got rate increases as much as you got last quarter, it's like, who cares? Like, I don't. Like, I'd like to have it, but, you know, what I want is to make sure that we continue to develop margin, we retain the book of business, and that if I got it like a 30% last year and a 10 this year, and 10's above the loss cost increase, that's a good outcome. So I, you know, I just don't want to look at, like, the sequential rate increases.
In some of our businesses, and quite frankly, a lot of them, we've got north of 100% rate increases over the past four to five years. I wanna, like, hold on to that book and defend it and, and try to add things that have similar characteristics. Casualty is a problem in the, in the marketplace. It's gonna become, I think, more of an issue over time. And so people who have the right portfolio, companies that are positioned well, understand the underlying economics of what's driving the outcomes, and don't have excessive volatility, will win. I hate to go back to property and the cat, but, like, it's, it's a fragile market.
You know, we declare—unless, like, wind season has changed in the United States from, like, you know, June to November, like, I don't really look at cat in the first quarter as being a key indicator. So yeah, the property rates were off from the year prior, but it's still, you know, a good business. Maybe the more commoditized layers in financial lines or, you know, upper layers of, you know, property placements. I don't think casualty. You get a little bit of price competition, for sure. But I think the market is very stable. It's not driven by supply issues. I think lead underwriters are generally disciplined, and new capacities coming in is not terribly relevant. So I think the market is gonna be stable.
Let's see what happens with, you know, the reinsurance implications for cat, because, again, it's being driven by collateralized... You know, reinsurers, I'm no longer in the business, so I'll give you my opinion, doesn't really affect us, other than how we purchase it. But paper, like, so, you know, admitted reinsurers, like at 1/1/2023, moved away from risk dramatically. Like, I mean, they just did. And so those risk-adjusted terms that they have given you is as much about taking away coverage and moving attachment points to being higher on the in PML attachments. So, you know, it would take a lot of vertical loss for them to get hit pretty hard.
And the way collateralized markets work, and the reason why I just mentioned that, is that, you know, you hear a little bit more about ILS. A lot of it's cat bonds. Cat bonds have enormous basis risks, so you don't always, you know, get everything you want when you buy it. And then the collateralized is one limit. So when you buy reinsurance, typically from a, you know, RenaissanceRe's a great partner, so I'll, I'll pick on them, is that if you blow out a limit, it's automatically reinstated, you have a second limit. Collateralized reinsurance doesn't work that way. It's a single limit. It blows out, it's gone, and you have no reinsurance left.
And so there's gonna be. You have a lot of nets that are taken in the industry by primary insurance companies, and then you have a lot of the buydowns that were done in order to supplement those attachment points done by collateralized reinsurance; it can blow out with one major loss. Again, I don't know what's gonna happen this year, but if it's very active, you're gonna have big net positions in the business, and that's gonna affect how capital's deployed, in my opinion.
No. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, yeah, we really have not ever had that event that really tested those CAT bonds. But,
Again, I'll age myself out, but like, you know, when I was running Guy Carpenter, it'd be hard to find a modeled loss that was, you know, Category 5s going in wherever, north of $100 billion. But Category 5 in Miami is $350 billion now. So, like, this is-
Yeah.
The world's changed, and, like, there's more density, more total insured value. The problem in Florida that you had before COVID got exacerbated by three to four 4 times. You know, when you think about TIVs all driven up, a lot of, you know, reconstruction, more density, models are starting to catch up. I don't, you know, put a whole lot of weight into the deterministic and probabilistic sets. However, they're better, and so I think we're just more realistic that, you know, you get big losses. I'm not saying that's what's gonna happen, but, you know, getting north of a $100 billion loss is not a far stretch.
Got it. Yeah, I mean, I guess, that makes me think a little bit about your other business, consumer personal lines. Also done a lot there. There would seem to be opportunities to write, homeowners in the United States on a non-admitted basis at somewhat attractive terms, although you would have to take some of that cat risk. If you were to increase some of your cat exposure, would it-- is that how we should think about it? It'd be probably more on the personal line side, or is that a business you're focused on?
Yeah, I would say first, it would be non-admitted first, because what happens in the non-admitted market, think of three things. One, is you have freedom of form, which means you will issue the policy that you want, and if it's not, you know, your exclusions, wind deductibles, whatever you want to put in there, you have more flexibility than you do on an admitted basis. The other is you have freedom of rate, like, so you can price it however you'd like. And then you have, like the freedom of limit.
So like, if you do high net worth business, which we're in, on an admitted basis, and you have replacement cost, it's got a lot of risk in terms of understanding what the total, like, cost of a Cat would be, because, you know, replacement cost is replacement cost, and you can't really do a whole lot in terms of changing, the policy limits or how you actually structure that. On a non-admitted basis, you can take a $30 million, you know, homeowners replacement cost value and say, "I'm gonna give you $10 million with a 20% wind deductible," or whatever it is. So I think that's a really good place to grow. Now, on the non-admitted basis and high net worth, distribution has to catch up on the wholesale side, it will. That one I will allow us to call a hard market because there's no supply.
Like, I mean the barrier to entry in high net worth is significant because you need to have unbelievably good claims, unbelievably good loss control, policy forms, expertise, know how to underwrite, know how to do Cat aggregation. So the barrier to entry is tough, and so there's no real supply coming in. Reinsurance, if there's more, it'll be more through collateralized vehicles. So the best way to grow in the future, which we'd like to, will be through non-admitted. So I think of our portfolio as 10% today. I'd love to see it over time, and I won't specify how long it'll take us, but I'd love to see that more, you know, 30%-40%. And that we will not be deploying capacity in the same way for the high net worth for admitted versus non-admitted.
We're gonna give a lot more to the non-admitted space, to be able to grow. And so I, I do think of it that way, and then personal insurance outside the United States, Japan's our biggest business, and one that, you know, if I think about one area where digital front end and digital workflow matter, for business, is Japan. You know, so I think the cycle time, in terms of getting quotes out, building capabilities within your own agency distribution, and being able to scale that, a little quicker, is a great opportunity for us. And, you know, optimizing that portfolio. Is it gonna be massive organic growth? No. But will it be organic growth that could be sustainable? We believe it is.
So I think in terms of property businesses, I would think of excess and surplus lines and probably Japan on the personal insurance side, that we would grow more.
Do you have to spend a lot of your time on Japan? I'm just thinking about it's kind of just from a geographic standpoint out there.
I mean, I do, but I've been doing Japan for 20 years, so I know the market really well. I know all of our competitors very well, know the regulators well, and know the way that business is conducted. So I do spend a fair amount of time, you know, there and also in India. I mean, we have—we don't talk a lot about India. It's a phenomenal place, today, and we have a joint venture with Tata, where we own 26% of the company with them. And it's a big business, and it's, you know, $2 billion of top line.
Organic growth, if you speak to the chairman of Tata, who, I interact with a lot, we think we can do 20% organic growth over the next five years. That will double the size of that business to, you know, between $3.5 billion and $4 billion top line. The complexity in the India market, the regulators have become, I would say, more commercial. It's a hard place to enter. You gotta have the best joint venture partner that you can, and there's nobody better than Tata. And so that's gonna be a big area. We don't consolidate it, but it's an area that's gonna build real value for AIG over time. And it's 80% personal insurance, is how you should think about it, but a lot of opportunities in accident health.
Digital capabilities in India are as good as anywhere in the world. It's just a matter of continuing to refine underwriting, continue to refine products and find ways to enhance distribution. The middle class is growing substantially, and the focus on economic growth there is substantial. So it's another big business we have that we don't, you know, talk too much about because we don't consolidate it.
Got it. So I guess just one last one for you. Just on the Financial Lines business, it's-
You gotta have one more after Financial Lines.
Okay. I-
I can't have financial lines.
All right. We'll go to M&A, I guess. But so Financial Lines, it's the one market that's been somewhat irrational the last couple of years, which is a little bit weird 'cause it's, like, not had good returns for the past decades. I don't know why that was the market that decided to act bad. But I guess just one observation is, you know, like, the global corporate, the big underwriters that write big corporations, I'm thinking of, like, you and Chubb, you're also the biggest financial lines underwriter, so I'm guessing it's not a coincidence. So I guess, like, how belted into your overall, client product suite is this line? Is this the type of book you can walk away from, or is it really the cost of doing business with these larger accounts?
Well, the first thing is, sell side should be grilling any company that's growing in financial lines. Like, that should be the first thing. So I, I'm gonna put that on you, Ryan, to figure it out. But financial lines, you have to understand, like, where you play, and so there's only, like, three or four lead markets, that drive U.S. primary, and we're one of them. And so you set terms, you set pricing. That's been a benign marketing effort in terms of its pricing. It's been a slight headwind, but that's where you wanna be. Now, when the market was changing four or five years ago, we weren't gonna just do, you know, primary. We did some of the excess layers because they were attractive.
Now we've had new entrants into the market, and the more commoditized, the higher you go up on excess, the more competition. That'll end in tears at some point in time. But yeah, we'll ride that down on excess, as much as we need to, if it's gonna affect what we think are the combined ratios and the balance of the portfolio. We have a very big financial lines business, which is equally balanced in international. Those are not the dynamics that are happening there. It's much more of a U.S. phenomenon. We've seen some headwinds on pricing in financial lines in international, but the cumulative rate increases, even in U.S. D&O, have been north of 50%.
But it's a line that, you know, we've seen a lot more competition in excess and will continue to shrink if we have to, if the returns are not there.
All right, so I guess, I will try on one more. It's gonna be a little bit of a tough one for you because you like detail, but it's gonna be the opposite of going into detail.
All right.
It's just... If you, if you could only get one metric, over the next couple of years, to help you evaluate how the company is performing, which one would it be? Would it be premium growth? What you've talked about, loss ratio, including Cat? Would it maybe be underlying combined? What's, I guess, the first metric you'd go to?
Only one?
Yeah, you only get one, and it'll be hard for you.
Okay. It'll be underlying profitability, including Cat. 'Cause it's like, you know, you premium out the door to us, and then you got losses going out to pay losses, and we wanna drive profitability in the company. So that's always where I start.
Great. Well, thanks, Peter. I appreciate it-
Ryan, thanks a lot.
... and-
I really appreciate it.