Okay, good afternoon, all, for our final session of the day. We did save the best for last. So we want to introduce Peter Zaffino, CEO of AIG. We'll start with some introductory comments, and then we'll jump to Q&A.
Thanks, Meyer. Good afternoon, everybody. I just wanted to take a few minutes just to make some introductory comments, and then, you know, I look forward to, you know, spending some time with Meyer and some of the questions, you know, from the group. It's great to be back here. Yeah, we appreciate the opportunity to, you know, spend some time and present to you. In many ways, 2025 has been a real pivotal year for AIG. You know, one of our defining moments, we talk a lot about it, was at Investor Day in March. You know, we set out a few key objectives there, which is really important for this year, is we really wanted to put the past of AIG behind us.
Wanted to spend, you know, quite a bit of time providing more details on the company we are today, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that over the next hour and demonstrate the positive impact the work our colleagues have done to reposition the company. We highlighted and wanted to emphasize a few very important things, which were our underwriting culture. We've developed operational excellence, and that's been, you know, from driving end-to-end process to, digitizing workflow to what we're doing today with GenAI, and of course, you know, executing on a very disciplined capital management strategy. All of that has given us a lot of financial and strategic flexibility for today. We also wanted to, like, introduce, not capabilities, but more of what we were doing in terms of GenAI.
Actually, it's received a lot of attention, you know, since Investor Day, and I'm sure we'll talk about it today. We outlined ambitious long-term financial targets, and we remain on track to achieve those. If I could spend a few minutes just highlighting the second quarter. Adjusted after-tax income per share increased 56% year- over- year, and that was driven by underwriting income, which increased 46%. Our core operating ROE increased to 11.7% in the quarter, and our calendar year combined ratio was 89.3%, so we thought that was an outstanding result for the second quarter. You know, for the first half of the year, our EPS growth is tracking slightly above the three-year objective. We talked about it as 20%.
Notwithstanding a lot of cat activity, the wildfires in the first quarter. So, you know, we're really pleased with the progress we've made through the first six months. We also returned $4.5 billion of capital to shareholders, you know, year to date through the second quarter, and delivered a third consecutive year of double-digit dividend growth. We also reached another significant milestone. S&P and Moody's upgraded the financial strength of our insurance company subsidiaries, and it's worth noting this is the first upgrade that AIG received from Moody's since 1990. We had to go back quite a ways, and so that was, you know, quite an achievement for us.
We retired an additional $830 million dollars of debt in the second quarter, now have a debt-to-total capital ratio of 17.9%, which is one of the best in the industry. We did talk a lot about, you know, on the recent earnings call, the rate environment. I'm sure we'll cover it today. But generally speaking, property has had, you know, headwinds in 2025. Casualty's actually been strong, particularly in excess casualty, and financial lines has finally flattened out, after a period of rate reduction. You know, property, I spent a decent amount of time talking about actually, you know, what are the components of property pricing and how you actually derive the rate making, and how do you drive profitability? What's the impact of reinsurance? How do you look at AALs?
and wanted to make sure that we emphasize the level of diligence that we do in making sure we have a fully loaded, you know, cat cost and all of our property costs are, you know, very transparent, and we know how they move depending on market conditions. So we're well positioned to manage this environment, focus on growth opportunities, but most importantly, underwriting profitability. Before I shift to Q&A, I just do want to share a couple of comments on GenAI. It's been a key focus for us. You know, we want to embed it into our core business and end-to-end processes supporting underwriting and claims. The early results have been very promising. At Investor Day, I spoke about what were really aspirations.
We had some pilots, we had some rollouts, but quite frankly, getting some of the tech leaders to join us, and talk about what they thought was the work that we're doing. But in many ways, we've actually made more progress than what I thought we could do, from when I outlined this originally in March, just because the rollout tech advancements have been significant. And so we've rolled out a few pilots. You know, it was started, you know, years ago, but, you know, a lot of companies are still testing. We're actually live now on things, and so I think that was important, you know, to mention.
We started to roll out a component part of our financial lines, and within the year, we'll be rolling out our E&S business, which is Lexington, and then we expect to deploy more of the commercial business in twenty twenty-six. I do want to leave you with a sense of how fast things are moving. You know, some of the tech companies and hyperscalers are really driving the pace of innovation at a significant level. Their commitments are substantial in terms of CapEx. I mean, combined, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon announced their intent to spend over $400 billion in CapEx on AI just this year. So I think in twenty twenty-six, we ought to see this acceleration in terms of not only what we're planning.
But new horizons as we start to, you know, roll all of this out. So those are just some of the highlights. I know, you know, coming after a second quarter, maybe not a lot of new information, but I just wanted to emphasize all the progress that we're making, executing incredibly well, momentum into the second half of the year. So, that's what I just wanted to say for prepared comments, and then, Meyer, maybe I'll just, you know, transfer over to you for some Q&A.
Perfect. And, yeah, and I should point out two things. One, that thank you for providing an update every year, and every year, the update is dramatically beyond where it was the prior year. So there's been a tremendous amount going on there. Related to that also, I think my question list is gonna be all over the place, because, again, there are so many things going on at AIG that are worth talking about. So let me start with one. We spent a lot of time talking about talent and recruitment. You recently announced that John Neal is joining AIG as President. What does the President of AIG do, and what should we, on the investment side, expect from John?
I was the president, so I'd say we actually did quite a bit, so he's got some-
What's left?
John's one of the top executives in the insurance business. I've known him for a very long time. Actually, when I was at Guy Carpenter, I used to, you know, work with John before he even took over QBE, on a lot of the reinsurance studies. So I've known him very well for a long period of time. He's incredibly capable. He's had some unbelievable experiences, whether it's running QBE or most recently, running Lloyd's. I've talked to some of the investors earlier today. I think there's not a lot of companies that are really global and have a broad footprint, but John actually has a lot of global experience, so he's gonna fit incredibly well within AIG. Strong track record of underwriting strategy.
He's kept incredibly relevant with, you know, all of the moving trends and has a, you know, tremendous following. So he's gonna give us a lot of bandwidth in terms of the path in which we are going to continue our underwriting journey. But he can do so much more than that. He's really well known, so he'll be, you know, working with a lot of our stakeholders, whether it's investors, regulators, you know, reinsurers, you know, and expect great things from him. And he's very additive to a very capable team that we already have. So we're anxious for him to join us later this year.
Right, and it's November.
Technically, it's December.
December.
I'll leave it at that.
Fair enough. That's good enough for my purposes.
I'm good at getting people to work before they're on the payroll.
When you're talking about... So AIG Next, another success in terms of, like, getting ahead of plan, both in terms of time and amount. You talked about not just cost savings, but also increasing internal efficiencies, where you could process business faster. And some of this may get back to the agentic AI, but can you update us on, on where those efficiencies are playing out?
The original plan for AIG Next was actually mostly just cost takeout. We actually had said on some of our earnings calls that it's not gonna be like AIG 200 , where we had 10 different operational programs, and, you know, the baseline for AIG 200 was to improve the company. This was about getting rid of redundancy, getting a parent company, expense structure that fit with, you know, the size of the organization that we are, but we had some very, you know, terrific observations and insights. Actually, Mia Tarpey, who's here today, actually led AIG Next, and, you know, we saw halfway through that there's a lot of things we can do on the operational side that can improve the organization in addition to getting, you know, costs out or costs into the business.
And that was connecting a lot of the functions, better end-to-end process, allowing, you know, opportunities for better insight on data and also, you know, what we're able to do on Gen AI today is based on the, you know, end-to-end connectivity of the organization, and a lot of that was done through AIG Next. So it ended up being a continuation of AIG 200, which was terrific because we had originally just planned for cost takeout, but we were able to improve the company significantly during that period of time.
Okay, and in your introductory comments, you talked about Agentic AI being expanded to other product lines. When you said Lexington, is that every line of business that Lexington writes?
Yes, it'll be predominantly. It may not be every single line, but it's gonna be the property and casualty, which is, and financial lines, which will be the predominant portion of it.
What are the data points that you track to demonstrate that it's working as expected?
We focused on, and again, I'll try not to make the answer too long, but when we had embarked on this journey, it was all about: How do you take in, you know, data structured and unstructured? How do you actually use data sources that you're not using today? How do you equip an underwriter with more underwriting criteria, and how do you reduce the cycle time substantially to be more efficient and to be able to look at submission flow and workflow to be able to drive growth? And then, you know, we didn't spend a lot of time on this in Investor Day, but we've been doing this. It's evidenced through what we did with Blackstone and Lloyd's in creating a special-purpose vehicle for our own reinsurances. How do you allocate capital and optimize a portfolio?
So, like, how do you connect all of that together? Lexington became a very big opportunity for us because, you know, we showed that the submission count, and it's still happening in E&S. You know, yes, there's been a rate environment and property that's coming off, but quite frankly, it's been coming off in a lot of the, you know, property market admitted as well. The submissions are still flowing in through non-admitted and through excess and surplus lines. The volume is very hard to handle when you start getting into hundreds of thousands of increases submissions. For our, you know, own business and whether we were not efficient at the beginning or, you know, where we are today, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that.
What I do know is we have 10x the amount of submissions as we once did, and you're not gonna bring in 10 x the amount of underwriters. So, and then you look back to what's the bind -to- submitted ratio, and it was 6%. Like, so it's not as though it was 20%, and it's like, oh, you want to get it to 25% or 30%. That might feel hard. When the volume started to increase, when the business started to get more demand, our bind ratios went to 2%. And so, yes, maybe we're more selective underwriters, but 2% of what you're seeing seems largely inefficient. And we felt that getting that data and getting things more prioritized and having the underwriting cycle time decrease is gonna allow us to grow significantly in that, in that business.
So that became the next evolution in terms of scale, which we should be able to have it done before year-end. And as we said, if we can just get back to our old bind ratio, it's north of $1 billion of growth. And I think that would be a low bar for us, what I think we can do over time.
Okay, fantastic. Are there bottlenecks in terms of rolling it out even more broadly to every AIG region, every AIG line?
I wouldn't say bottlenecks, but, you know, how much change do you wanna go through in an organization? I think we'll be very aggressive in terms of the rollout in 2026. What you have to realize is that even since March, you know, the companies that I mentioned, not at Palantir, Anthropic, you know, other companies that are pivotal to, you know, our partnerships, they've accelerated their capabilities in the last six months. It's unbelievable, and how they can extract data, where they can extract it from, what we've seen is a lot more discussion around agents or individual large language models that can do specific tasks, and how do you actually roll that out?
So I'm very optimistic that the rollout does not need to be as linear, and that you can do it in multiple parts of the business at once, and that's what we plan on doing in 2026. You do need. You know, look, we're not having it make decisions for underwriters, but you need the underwriters, you know, if I would say not a bottleneck, but a significant amount of heavy lift work, is if an underwriter is looking at 100 - 125 pieces of data, what are those? And what are the, you know, best sources that you can get in terms of property data or casualty data or financial data? And one of the, I think, significant advancements that the large language models have made is that you can now find out where the source is coming from.
So in other words, you get financial statements that came from, you know, a rating agency or it came from something that's credible versus something that may be scraped, that you don't know where it came from. And that's where there was more hallucinations. So I think the data accuracy is better. I think the underwriting criteria is better. The issue, it's not a problem, it's an issue to be aware of, is that how much of these large language models become intuitive and how much further do they go in an organization than what you're asking them to do? If you start to implement a lot of different large language models at once, that ontology gets super complicated. And so we're working through that as well to make sure that we understand, you know, the rollout.
Again, it's not making decisions, but making certain that, you know, the organization can catch up to, you know, how we want to operate in the future.
Okay, fantastic. When you look forward five years, this is, it maybe not a great question: Can AI make underwriting decisions, not today, in five years?
I think they will be able to. What type of decisions and what you want them doing is really the question. But I... You know, like, even today, you know, a simple example would be, you know, looking at sprinkler systems, is it, you know, water, or is it, you know, suck the oxygen out of the room, or is it foam, or, you know, knowing how to train large language models as to what's a better outcome-
Mm-hmm.
On some of the subcomponents of underwriting, I think will be very important and very helpful.
Okay. So to me, that sounds like maybe the prioritization that you talked about, where the best submissions are at the top, that gets more refined.
Submissions at the top and information that could be more binary in terms of how you train an agent, I think could be very helpful to the underwriting process.
Okay, fantastic. You also mentioned the rating agency upgrades. Practically speaking, there's nothing. I don't see anything wrong with those. What difference will those make?
I think for our business, probably nothing. I mean, but from a perspective of this journey of, you know, bringing all of our stakeholders along, you know, we had to get, you know, an underwriting portfolio that was one of the worst performers, to get to a, you know, top performer. We had to get, you know, limit management. We had to develop operational excellence. We had to bring... You know, we were getting no ordinary dividends out of our subsidiaries because the regulatory environment was one where AIG just disappointed. So it just, it was kind of the last, like, stakeholder that had not sort of voted for the change and the improvement that we made, and to see that affirmation, and then going back and saying, "You know, like, in 1990 , I was a trainee at The Hartford. There was no such thing as cell phones, voicemail. The world was different back then," so that's a long time, and so it was just more symbolic of, you know, we've come a long way.
People are proud of it, and it was just another last sort of vote in terms of, "Yes, we believe in all the things you're doing, and we believe in the financial strength of the company," so it was a good moment for the company.
Yeah, no, this, I didn't in any way-
But no, in terms of trading, it won't matter.
Okay. Right.
But we're gonna keep telling everybody we got upgrades since 1990. I like it.
It's a great line. So we're, I mean, heading to Monte Carlo soon, start talking about reinsurance. AIG buys a lot of property reinsurance. And, you know, we're in a presumably softening part of the property reinsurance cycle, so I know the timing of this question isn't great, but is AIG over-reinsured? Are there ways of optimizing that, or do we take advantage of declining pricing to further benefit shareholders, benefit the company?
Over reinsured, under reinsured, it is a strategy and a philosophy. Each company has a sort of a different view. If you're running a business, in a global business that is running in the low 80s combined ratio, with what would be technically considered a lot of reinsurance, I like that strategy. I like the predictability of volatility, containment, and I don't like to be at the whim of, you know, what happens with the weather or, you know, a major hurricane or wildfires. We have a risk tolerance, and that's how we set up the entire company. When the market started to change a lot, a couple of years ago, we stuck really hard with lower retentions because, again, it was within that volatility containment.
And you either load the cost in, you know, for, you know, the reinsurance or you don't. And so my own view is that, and I tried to break this down because I get a lot of questions around this, in the second quarter, which was how do you actually break out the components of property? And, you know, I have this philosophical argument. I'll stay away from it, but, like, why would reinsurance costs be that much more expensive than retaining it yourself? I mean, you could take... could be a couple philosophies. One is, well, I'm not gonna take a single year view. I'll take a five-year view.
Okay, well, that's been wrong each of the last five years. It's been higher than what would have been predicted, so that doesn't seem like the right way to play it. There's a cost of capital issue. Somebody has too much of a margin, like, whatever, that's in the eye of the beholder. But my view is it should be, like, fully loaded into the cost. So if you think about a market that we're going into, what I try to break out is that a reduction in reinsurance costs benefits us because that is embedded into our product. If you just funded it net as an AAL, you don't reduce your AAL because the reinsurance market's going down. That's your expected losses, and it has to stay the same.
So if the rates are coming down and you don't have anything to offset that, like reinsurance, like that's not coming down commensurate, then you have to have margin compression and a meaningful amount of margin compression because you still have the same cat net.
Mm-hmm.
You still have your same risk net. And if you're getting total premium coming off the top, well, that has to still fund that, so it goes really into your attritionals. If our sort of cost of goods sold, I call it, is that of reinsurance is coming down at or more than the original pricing, well, then, really, I'm only focusing on the attritional. Same thing on the risk, is that then it's much more manageable because that cat cost, which would be self-funded with AAL otherwise-
Mm-hmm
... is coming down, and so we get the same benefit for lower cost.
Right.
And so I think, like in a market, look, I don't root for an active cat season or a benign one. We manage through the cycle. But if the reinsurance costs are gonna go down, that benefits us and doesn't put as much pressure on pricing as it would if you kept, you know, substantially large nets.
Right. Okay, no, that makes a lot of sense. This is only tenuously related to that concept, but I've had this thesis for a while, that when we look at lines of business where pricing has gone soft over the last few years, so D&O, cyber, most recently property, there's been a suddenness to those decreases, compared to past cycles. And I know it's a mistake to assume that cycles would be identical. They're not. But how... If that premise is true, that cycles manifest themselves faster, how does that impact your ability to plan for the consolidated AIG?
You have to look at each line of business, on its own merits, and, you know, again, the topic right now is property, and you have to look at the cumulative effects of that, and so you have to have a plan there. I mean, in other words, with property, like the cumulative rate increases have been north of 100%. Combined ratios have been excellent. You can, you know, look at, for us, we have so many different points of entry into the property market, whether it's through admitted in the United States or non-admitted through the United States or through Europe or through Asia. We could hub in Singapore. We see it through Lloyd's.
So there's so many different places, and you wanna take a look at. You don't want to manage it as an index, but there's opportunities in different parts of the world at different times. And so the planning is really what's gonna happen if the rate environment is going to be, you know, down like we've seen in property? Well, okay, what kind of margin do you have? What type of, you know, combined ratios do you have, and can we manage through it? I think you also have to take a look at where you are in the market. Are you lead in pricing? Are you setting the terms, or are you just capacity following outcomes? That becomes a different outcome. And then you have to have a point of view as to how long you can sustain that.
So I think, look, is the property market more aggressive in terms of some of the pricing coming off than we would have thought it'd be in the year? Yes, it is. Dramatically? No. But a little bit more, and so, you know, we will see how it plays out through the rest of the year, but we have a, you know, perhaps a different plan in 2026 if the rate environment continues. In financial lines, it is the same thing, which is we reduced our writings when they started to become cumulative rate increases in commoditized layers, high excess, mid excess, and we just started to non-renew business. And, you know, there will always be pockets of where there's opportunities for growth. We're seeing that in casualty now, non-admitted as well as admitted.
And, you know, I think some of the specialty classes have had some pressure on pricing, but again, the same dynamics as our property book, which has had really strong combined ratios. And then you have to be prepared to grow when there's, you know, opportunities that exist in the marketplace from either dislocations or opportunities in different, you know, parts of the world and geographies. So, that's part of the planning process. And I think we're in a really good place in terms of understanding what the economics are for each of the lines of business that we trade in.
Right. Okay, fantastic. I did want to look around the room if there are questions. I want to make sure that you're getting the information that you need out of this session, so please raise your hand if you do have a question, and we'll get the mic to you. In the absence of that, so another large commercial CEO has suggested and-
Who?
Uh, Evan.
I need to know.
And suggested that bigger companies are positioned to grow faster. And the backdrop for this question is we've seen huge market share concentration in personal lines among the biggest companies, some of whom became bigger because of scale, but that dynamic has played out. We haven't really seen it in commercial lines. And the suggestion is that because of a number of factors, we should see that, basically better growth at bigger companies. Are you seeing that? Do you expect that? How are you addressing that potentiality?
I think over time, I think that will happen. I don't know that we're seeing it right now because, you know, again, it's always what you see in this marketplace, where, you know, either some MGAs or capacity that has come in that needs premium, needs volume, till something happens that tempers a little bit of the growth. But I think over time, scale's going to matter significantly, in some ways more than it ever has. Whether it's balance sheets, ability to have diversified growth, quality and expertise in underwriting to be able to, you know, scale a business. But...
I'm again trying to not make every answer about GenAI, but I think in three years, businesses that have invested you know the pendulum's going to push those much you know further faster. And those who have not been able to you know ingest and be able to accelerate you know cycle time will be I think very much disadvantaged. You have to have scale to make those investments. You have to have expertise in order to be able to operationalize it, and I think you know larger companies with scale are going to benefit from all of that significantly.
Okay. When you look at your competitor base, and I'm asking this because I don't get the sense that you compete a lot with smaller regionals writing small standard commercial policies, how do you see your advantages playing out there?
You know, the footprint for every large insurance company is a bit different, and so it's in pockets. I mean, you know, obviously in London, it's a big specialty. We're the, you know, one of the world's largest specialty underwriters, and so, like, we're competing with Lloyd's, we're competing with other large insurance companies that may have some expertise in specialty classes. But I think we are the most, you know, sort of prominent amongst, you know, organizations in terms of size, scale, expertise. I believe that. You know, in the U.S., it's a little bit more in terms of how we scale. We've done an amazing job with Lexington in terms of its relevance to the marketplace and size and scale, so we have some, you know, formidable competitors there.
But I do think that there's a way that you bifurcate that with size, expertise, and ability to grow, you know, versus more, you know, commoditized. It's not all large, you know, players, but there are, you know, specialty insurers that compete in that area that really differentiate themselves, and Lexington is one of them. I've mentioned property and the many ways in which we can access, you know, property from so many different parts of the world. We're a very different business in Asia. I mean, we're the world's largest non-domestic insurance company in Japan, where we haven't fully seen all the benefits and I think potential of that business, with some of our personal insurance, particularly A&H and, you know, some of the digital investments we're making there to fuel growth.
That will be on the come. And, you know, India, I know it's not a consolidated business, but it's a big business and one that we think has, you know, one of the biggest growth potentials in terms of value, size, relevance, and also when it gets out of its domestic, you know, sort of capacity, meaning it can actually do, you know, global business through the network of AIG. That could be very advantageous for us as well. So, like, we compete, you know, with a lot of different companies and a lot of different geographies, but really, I believe, bring expertise and, you know, value differentiation in the markets that we trade in.
Okay. That is very helpful. You've talked about, in the context of M&A, certainly an openness to M&A with incredibly strict hurdles for financial, cultural, and strategic upside. So the financial and cultural, I think, would very much depend on a potential acquisition. Can you talk about where there could be strategic advantages to AIG from M&A?
I think we've demonstrated through a lot of the work that we've done in restructuring the company that, you know, we would know how to embed an organization, deal with the operational complexities, and get the, you know, synergies that needed to be realized very quickly, but also, you know, embed an organization to be able to make certain that they are more benefited from being part of AIG than not, and that's dependent on a lot of different things. You know, I talk about, like, there may be segments we're not in, in SME. Geographies are additive to our global, you know, network. More scale in businesses where we already have size. A&H would be a great example.
If we could find something that, you know, we thought was high quality, that we could bolt on to a big business that's profitable, that we could accelerate, that would be, you know, something that's very additive. But I think that there's a lot of. I keep mentioning a lot of strategic and financial flexibility. You know, I want to be patient, which doesn't mean wait forever, but I wanna make sure that whatever we do acquire is strategic, is ROE accretive, but also is a better fit for them and for us, being together. And I think depending on the market, and depending on the challenges of growth, that may come earlier or later, depending on what happens, with market conditions.
Okay. If I can just not respond, but a follow-up to that, should we think about that strategic benefit as making AIG better or AIG making other businesses better, consolidated with it?
Both.
Okay.
That would be our hope.
All right. One issue that's come up a lot, and I like this issue because it gives me the opportunity to talk about something besides pricing, and on the sell side, that's 95% of my conversations, is speed of processing for smaller applications, and I'm asking this question really in the context of Western World. How does it compare, and what are its prospects for developing further competitive advantages on speed and accuracy of response to brokers?
So Western World, for those who don't know, is part of, you know, our excess and surplus lines business. It's really services the, you know, small end of, of commercial, and it's, it's done remarkably well. Whether it's been new products, its speed to bind is, is very impressive and, you know, developing a risk appetite, but also an ease of doing business in terms of ingesting data. We know what our risk appetite is, in those businesses, and it's actually penetrating into a market that we really haven't had, you know, much presence. So I think the framework of that, you know, business is great, the strategy is, evolving, and our execution has been very good. That's all... Sometimes the submission count, there, and the flow and growth has been, tremendous.
But I think in this, you know, world that we're in and that we're going to be competing with in the future, it's only gonna get better.
Okay, fantastic, and that's, again, you said you don't wanna use AI as the answer to everything, but it's gonna be have-
Yeah, that-
Relevant.
AI can help decision making there a little bit more just because it's, you know, much more small commercial. Volatility around decision making is not gonna be great, and so hopefully we'll be able to advance it. But even today, with the technology we have, it does serve our distribution very well because they can bind things, you know, in minutes, and so, like, getting to seconds doesn't really matter, but making sure that we can continue to enhance our ability to expand risk appetite when we want to, or, you know, focus on specific industries and be able to target those submissions better.
Okay, fantastic. I do want to scan the room again just to see if there are questions. I do wanna make sure I'm not overlooking them. Quick question on underwriting and claims talent and maybe other segments that I'm not thinking about also. But whether we're talking about the relentless formation of MGAs, whether they're talking about brokers looking for talent, whether we're talking about underwriters, there does seem to be an elevated battle for talent right now, and I was hoping you could talk about where AIG participates. What do you do to attract, to retain, and from a different perspective, to develop talent so that you have superior underwriting and that persists? Or claims handling, I always-
Yeah. We don't have the same dynamic as brokers do, where, you know, teams get lifted out or, you know, there's significant, you know, war for talent in terms of groups of people because, you know, I think underwriting is different in that maybe business travels with brokers, but it doesn't travel with underwriters. So I think you have a real opportunity to develop the culture that you want in an underwriting organization. We've done a remarkable job with, you know, just terrific leadership that we have within AIG, great practitioners. You know, we had to add a lot of underwriters in 2018, 2019, 2020.
We have a tremendous training program, and so, you know, getting out of university into our analyst program and then getting, you know, individuals working through, you know, the overall company has been tremendous. And so we supplement, you know, what we bring in from the outside with, you know, talent that is developed within AIG. And so we're always looking for ways in which, you know, we can train and advance and enhance the skill sets that we have within the organization, and that means actually training, you know, to where the business is going, not where it's been.
Right.
But yeah, we're always, like, gonna be in the war for talent. You know, retaining, attracting... Look at AIG, I don't fully understand it, to be honest. It's like it gets the headlines for everything. I mean, there's been people that have left and like, "Who is that?" Like, I mean, and it's just, it just gets headlines, and so our attrition's been very low. Our underwriters are very attractive in the industry, just based on the experience that they've gotten in a sort of once-in-a-career opportunity to work through a turnaround and, you know, underwrite portfolios, be part of that. But I've been incredibly pleased with, you know, the quality of what we have, the culture we've developed, and our ability to attract talent is tremendous.
Okay. And that attraction flow, if that's the right word, how does that compare, not to five years ago, when you really needed to rebuild the bench, but like two or three years ago?
We have been very selective because it's really important, you know, now that we have. You know, there's different skills needed to underwrite a portfolio than to grow a portfolio or to, you know, be in an underwriting group that's not going through that level of, you know, rapid change. We're always looking to fill in technical expertise, you know, depending on, like in London and Lloyd's, there's, you know, different classes of areas where we want to compete that we're, you know, adding and supplementing talent. But generally speaking, it's very specific as to knowing positions that, you know, we want to develop. I mean, look, AI is a big one right now. It's bringing in people from, you know, different industries.
You know, we just brought in somebody to be the Chief Digital Officer, Scott Hallworth, who is, you know, got a lot of banking experience in terms of being a Chief Digital Officer, but he was the Chief Actuary at Travelers.
Mm-hmm.
You know, so coming in with a totally different lens of, you know, financial services, but being grounded in, you know, data and how our business operates, that's been a tremendous and will be addition to the organization. And so finding, you know, different capabilities that complement where we are today is a big part of what we're doing.
Okay. And no $200 million signing bonuses?
No.
Okay, fair enough.
No.
On the MGA side, you guys do have a little bit of delegated underwriting authority. How do you manage that? I know, I think there's investor concern that's probably a little exaggerated right now, but it does require a slightly different administrative skill, and I was hoping you could talk about the AIG approach.
Yeah, we don't do a ton of delegated authority. That is not a priority. You're right, it's a different, you know, requirement in terms of skill set. You know, now, Glatfelter was a company of a great example, where they were writing on behalf of, you know, another insurance company at the time, but, like, they had their own capital.
Mm-hmm.
They consider themselves an underwriting company, and their track record, you know, proved that. But they also had a distribution, you know, in terms of volunteer firemen that was... and you couldn't really penetrate it. So do you want that expertise within the organization? So that was an example of an acquisition. I think we use the same criteria for, you know, where we would do, you know, MGAs or MGUs. Companies with experience, track record, skin in the game, alignment in terms of underwriting outcomes, not looking to drive top-line growth at the expense of underwriting profitability.
And you'd rather do it with fewer than sort of spreading it out and watching it very carefully, to be honest, because, you know, back in, and it's happened to AIG and many other companies in the past, where, you know, that can go pear-shaped pretty quickly in a market where you don't have a real accurate view of what, you know, the accident year loss ratios are, the growth, and, you know, the development of the book of business. So I think there's been a lot of delegated authority. In my view, it's gonna end in tears over time for some of the organizations, but, you know, unfortunately, our business takes a little bit of time.
Right. I mean, that's... I would argue that that's true even on the traditional side, with maybe slightly misaligned incentives.
Yes.
I want to spend a little bit of time focusing on reserves, really from two perspectives. We did have some older accident year strengthening in the second quarter, and I want to get a sense of your comfort for other legacy mass torts, for lack of a better word. And then one point that I think that's been underappreciated is the fact that when we look at your quarterly results, and this is true even in the second quarter, there's favorable development, and it's favorable development besides ADC amortization or ADC gain amortization.
Right.
So I want us to talk about those two. I know they're somewhat contradictory, but they are two different realms.
We're very focused on making sure that we continue to strengthen the balance sheet. We take a very conservative view on reserves. I wouldn't read into the back years at all. Nothing emerged. There was nothing that said, you know, we have to do something on mass tort. We decided to do it, and have built some conservatism into that. You know, we've been very focused, and I've said this on, you know, the first quarter call, where we built in some margin and some of our accident year loss picks, not from emergence, not from concerns on the accident year loss ratios, but just, you know, being conservative in terms of our view of the current environment. There was the ADC amortization, a little bit of release, but again, I think that was all, you know, very orderly.
We've been doing it quarter after quarter. And Keith is spearheading, you know, a little bit of more of getting away from these DVRs and looking at, you know, reserves in a more thorough way every quarter. Yes, there'll be deep dives in certain quarters on lines of business, but just getting a much more balanced view, you know, throughout the year, instead of, you know, waiting for the third quarter or waiting for certain quarters for, you know, certain lines of business. We've been working, you know, hard on that since the end of last year. And I think it's just patience and, you know, making certain that, you know, we are, you know, watching emergence of each of the accident years.
We study Schedule P, probably, and I don't want to compare us to other companies, but you know, what has happened to the industry, you know, of whether it's other liability or other areas where there's long tail, you know, sort of claims activity and watching, you know, that emergence and watching our own. I mean, you know, our absolute, you know, loss ratios are so much higher because they needed to be based on, you know, some of the, you know, the underwriting that happened in the past. But you know, we are looking at a variety of different metrics to make sure that, you know, we're being conservative and observant of what's happening in the industry.
Okay, fantastic. And again, I want to look around just to make sure that I'm not overlooking anything. One, there's some new occasional news articles on a shift of longer tail casualty policies to more of a claims-made basis because it's not that much in the short term that the industry can do about social inflation, but you can reduce the tail size, which would limit the compounding risk associated with that. How tenable is that? How much of AIG's book could and should be written on a claims-made basis that hasn't been so far?
I mean, you pointed out the benefits of doing claims made. I don't know that, you know, in the segments that we trade, and that clients are gonna be as receptive to claims made as we may like, you know?
Yeah.
Certainly, when you're underwriting, you know, an occurrence form that has, like, a really long tail, that making sure that you have the appropriate, you know, pricing for what could be, you know, loss cost inflation that may or may not be contemplated today is of course a concern with the class. What you do there is you focus on terms and conditions, you focus on attachment points, you focus on, you know, limit deployment. We have, again, not every answer is reinsurance, but we're only willing to take, you know, a certain amount net, depending on the gross limit deployed, which is much, you know, smaller than what the historical, you know, portfolio would look like.
So some of that emergence came from, yeah, maybe it wasn't great underwriting, but it also was significant net limit retention. That gets you in trouble when you have, you know, sort of vertical exposure, and hadn't fully contemplated. I do think that there are gonna be pockets of industry, you know, classes that we will push pretty hard for claims made. I don't think it's gonna be a predominant trend within the industry. You know, some companies are trying to put stuff together. I don't know what the take-up is. I don't think it's significant. But you have to really manage that through underwriting with the terms and conditions and focusing on, you know, how much limit you're willing to deploy, and are you following someone? We lead, we set the terms. That's really important.
Okay. No, that, that's-
I think with our reinsurance deal too, is not that, you know, I sat up here, whatever, five years ago. You know, you're two to three years into it, you got to play it out, but, like, we're, like, in year eight or nine in terms of taking low nets within, you know, within casualty. Started, you know, sort of in 2018, 2019, but we also did the unearned portion of the book. And so we just don't have big attachment, sorry, big retentions. We have lower attachment points, and so as each year goes on, you're gonna get more and more confidence in terms of how we think about, you know, ultimates, certainly on the back years, but even on some of the more, you know, recent years.
Okay. No, that's very helpful.
I mean, I'm speaking to an actuary, so it's dangerous, but,
It's also-
That, that's my view.
But yeah, no, we're trying to get the sense, and I think it's been pointed out that, you know, there are a number of periodicals focused on the insurance industry, and sometimes it's tricky to filter out where they have these stories: is this a real shift or is this a one-off? So I think that insight is very, very helpful.
I mean, you gotta do the work, like you look at companies. Again, you go through Schedule P and see whose loss ratios held up, you know, from their original. Even go out, like, you know, whatever, you know, go through your 2015, start year two. Say everybody got year one wrong, 2015, 2016. Like, you can see companies that traditionally get it wrong.
Yeah.
Like, and you see companies that traditionally get it right. Like, and so I think that's important in terms of, you know, experience, looking at triangles, understanding, again, limit deployment and potential ultimates, and it's a complicated line.
And not to jump too far afield from what you're saying, but one of the analyses I've been working on, and this is not gonna come as a surprise to anyone, is that the best predictor of whether a company will have adverse development on accident year X is if they did the prior year. So, you know, for me, it all fits into why I don't trust book value as a valuation metric, but your point is something that I'm more than happy to say I've seen.
Yeah, book value is as good as the quality of the reserves, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like, and so if you have a view of what, you know, ultimate looks like, then you'd have a good view of book value.
Right. Which may not be what companies are saying.
Correct.
Where are we on Global Personal in terms of the shift to an MGA model, the shift to-
Yeah
... adequate pricing, and what are the long-term prospects?
So are we talking high net worth or, like, just the general Global Personal?
I was gonna ask about both. I'm starting off on the overall.
Yeah, so I would say if you start with the sort of bigger one, which is, you know, Global Personal, I would say very good businesses. You know, we've divested, businesses that we didn't think were core. We need to grow A&H more. It's profitable, but it has not grown to the level it needs to grow. We have to have a little bit more profitability improvement in the personal, defined as personal auto and homeowners, that we do in international, not necessarily in the U.S. But the big, you know, bet is gonna be can we, you know, get the high net worth in PCS-
Mm-hmm
... to profitability, and we will. It's been slower than I would've liked, just in terms of some of the headwinds that have existed. You know, changing, you know, a model that, you know... I still believe the way we've structured this will work out in the long term. But we need other carriers, you know, to be, you know, working with us in the MGA to be able to, you know, underwrite the business alongside AIG. That was the real driver of the quota share, which, well, you know, we'll see negative growth in, you know, in twenty twenty-five. But that is bringing in strategic partners that are gonna learn more about the business, that will either provide paper or will come off business.
I mean, we don't need the quota share for, you know, reinsurance ceded or, you know. Look, it's a benefit in the short run on profitability because the ceding commission is higher than the expenses. We were able to lower the MGA expenses and get an enhanced ceding commission. Okay, so what? That's a 400 or 500 basis point benefit. That's not gonna be, you know, long-term business strategy. But I do think that the opportunity is gonna be seen. We're growing in E&S more than we are in admitted, of course, but not as much as we need to. You know, we have been off to a slower start than I would have liked.
And in the rest of, you know, 2025, and as we get into 2026, we're gonna have to accelerate that, you know, that growth or, you know, think about going more into an open market environment, you know, where we can see, you know, more submission activity. So, it's working. The profitability improvement is there. It's happening this year, but the absolute performance of the high net worth business is not where we wanna be, but we're heading in the right direction.
Okay. Once the profitability has been addressed, what's the global market potential of high net worth homeowners, high net worth personal lines?
We won't go outside the U.S. I wouldn't expect to see that strategically in the next three years. You know, I think the opportunity is... You know, I'm gonna give you a number, and then you can hold me to it, but I think it's substantial. I mean, I still believe that going into the, you know, sort of E&S environment, problem with admitted is if you're in the ultra-high net worth or high net worth, you have to put out, you know, large policy limits. The accumulation and cat exposure gets pretty heavy very fast. If you look at areas that have always been problematic, there's been, you know, more TIV in those areas. Think of Florida, Texas, you know, California, all have different dynamics.
I still think the Northeast is the most exposed because of how weak the PMLs are, and the TIVs are massive.
Mm-hmm.
And also, you know, if a category three ever found its way up this way, flooding, construction type, we're not ready for it. So, look, there could be things that happen that accelerate it. But I think it's, you know, the opportunity over a longer period of time is well within the hundreds of millions, maybe, you know, even greater than that.
Okay.
Because I just think that there's not... The void isn't getting filled. You know, you hear, you know, anecdotes, but they're real, which is like we've seen, like I'm not gonna call it a trend yet, but let me get through the full year, but even with what was happening with the wildfires, is looking at, you know, sort of claims development, because you wanna be observant on inflation, supply issues. You know, is there more demand or replacement costs? Like, what does it look like? I mean, a lot more of our clients took the check and aren't rebuilding, you know? And so, like, forget it. Like, I'm not doing this because I can't get insurance, and I'm not gonna be in a place where, you know, there's gonna be more, you know, wildfires, not protected, and so I...
But that's not really solving a problem. I think, you know, and again, we haven't seen something significant in Florida. I think there's more limit to be purchased, and there's more demand, you know, if we are there to offer the product.
Okay, fantastic. I had one, and again, if there are questions in the room, please let me know, but I wanna focus on investment income. You talked in the Investor Day, and again, not abruptly, but taking more risk. Where are we on that process? How should we think about the timeline?
I didn't say... I think Keith said that.
Hi, Keith.
What we were alluding to is that when we were fixing the underwriting side, we were also very, conscientious of being conservative on the on the investment side. And so we went from a, you know, when we were part of, you know, AIG was life retirement and, you know, P&C, you know, the general insurance, we had $325 billion of, of AUM. And then we began to say, "Okay, is an outsourcing model more advantageous?" Well, knowing we were splitting up, you know, I'm not gonna spend time talking about Corebridge, but you know, we had Blackstone, you know, come in, Nippon come in. We outsourced a lot of the fixed income to BlackRock, both Corebridge and, and AIG.
But, you know, when you're $100 billion or thereabouts of, of AUM, developing a more outsourced model, not for the investment strategy, not for the asset allocation, but for the execution-
Mm-hmm.
We felt was an appropriate model. And, and that's what we did, and I think it's worked out really well. Now, along the way, you know, we started to get out of hedge funds, we started to get out of some of the alternatives, and Keith has been, you know, working with the head of our investments, Pat Boisvert, in terms of repositioning, you know, the alts or the reinvestment that we've had in fixed income.
I think there is an opportunity for us because we were so conservative in terms of the overall percentage of asset allocation alternatives, that there's ways in which we can get, you know, perhaps not chasing it, but just executing better, with a more balanced strategy where we can get a little bit more, you know, return, 3.8 years, not the longest duration. It's not like life, but it's also not that complex.
Okay, and then, last chance to, as I look around the room, and if not, I am going to thank Peter. Please join me in thanking Peter for a very informative session.