Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's CNA Financial Corporation quarterly earnings call. I'd like to remind everyone that this conference is being recorded. Now I'd like to turn the floor over to Scott Weber. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Greg. Good morning and welcome to CNA's discussion of our 2018 second quarter financial results. By now, hopefully all of you have seen our earnings release, financial supplement, and presentation slides. If not, you may access these documents on our website, www.cna.com. With us on this morning's call are Dino Robusto, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and James Anderson, our incoming Chief Financial Officer, in addition to Craig Mense, our current Chief Financial Officer. Following Dino and James' remarks about our quarterly results, we will open it up for your questions. Before turning it over to Dino, I would like to advise everyone that during this call, there may be forward-looking statements made and references to non-GAAP financial measures. Any forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made during the call.
Information concerning those risks is contained in the earnings release and in CNA's most recent 10-K and Form 10-Q on file with the SEC. The forward-looking statements speak only as of today, Monday, July 30th, 2018. CNA expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements made during this call. Regarding non-GAAP measures, reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures and other information have also been provided in the financial supplement. This call is being recorded and webcast. During the next week, the call may be accessed on CNA's website. With that, I will turn the call over to CNA's Chairman and CEO, Dino Robusto.
Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share our second quarter results with you today, which show our continued progress in growing our underwriting profits. Before I start, I want to welcome James Anderson to our analyst call, and after my remarks, I will turn it over to James. You will recall that we announced last quarter that James is taking over for Craig Mense, who is retiring at year-end. Craig is also with us on the call today. Our core income this quarter was $0.99 per share, bringing our first half per share earnings to $2.02, which is the highest half-year earnings for CNA in over 10 years. We are pleased with the second quarter $0.99 per share core income as it included an $0.08 per share after-tax impact for IT investments we made as part of our technology and analytics strategy.
Core income for the second quarter was $270 million, which was $31 million higher than a year ago, where return on equity was 9.1%. Overall, our second quarter 2018 combined ratio of 93.8% is essentially in line with last year's 93.5%, as catastrophe losses were lower in this year's quarter and prior period development was comparable. Our underlying combined ratio of 95.3% reflects a modest increase over the same period last year at 94.6%. You may recall we had an unusually low number of large property losses in last year's second quarter, which we attributed partially to good luck. Large property losses were slightly higher than expectations in this year's second quarter, but essentially consistent with expectations for the first half of the year. Nothing unusual in our property losses year-over-year, simply normal fluctuations quarter-to-quarter.
You will recall that I have consistently highlighted in my comments regarding our focus on improving our expense ratio, that we are going to continue to make the necessary investments in technology, analytics, and talent, all the while reducing our expense ratio, which at 33.5% for the quarter, is down almost a point from year-end 2017. We had solid growth with net written premium in the quarter increasing 4% from last year. Our underwriters continue to effectively manage the rate retention dynamic with strong support from all levels of management. In the second quarter, we continued our momentum on pricing, achieving rate increases in commercial overall of +1%, and excluding workers' compensation, commercial was +2%, specialty of +2%, and international of +3%. In commercial, workers' compensation rates declined by 3.5%, while at the other end of the spectrum was auto at +5%.
The work comp rate dropped slightly from the first quarter, but not concerning in light of the benign loss cost trends in frequency and severity we have been experienced and continue to experience. All other major commercial lines had positive rate increases that were consistent with or slightly higher than the first quarter increases. We continue to be encouraged by the rate we can achieve in the market, and importantly, our ability to effectively achieve strong rate retention outcomes at the individual account level. Our P&C retention ratio was 82% this quarter, a decline of 1% from the prior quarter, driven mainly by specialty's retention, which dropped three points.
As I've commented previously, we have a couple of pockets of our healthcare portfolio, namely large hospitals and aging services, which have greater need for rate increases, and our underwriters have been pushing successfully to obtain them, as evidenced by 30% of our healthcare renewals in the quarter having a rate increase of more than 10%, which drove the overall healthcare portfolio rate increase to 6%. When they could not secure the necessary terms and conditions in line with our risk-adjusted return requirements, our underwriters appropriately walked away from those accounts, which is the primary driver for our healthcare retention ratio of 73%. Our retention in international was also down in the quarter, driven by our Lloyd's Syndicate, Hardy, where we continue to reduce our cat-exposed property, whereas in Canada, which has consistently been our most profitable geography outside of the U.S., the retention was essentially stable.
In commercial, our retention, as shown on page 10 of the earnings presentation, remained consistently strong at 85% in both the first and second quarters. Our underwriters have also been successful in securing higher rate increases this quarter in other lines while maintaining a stable retention. For example, in management liability, we achieved a 1% increase, which is a half point improvement from Q1, but a three-point improvement from Q3 2017, while retention was consistent with the first quarter at 89%. An additional benefit for the quarter is that exposure growth increased over a point from the first quarter, resulting in a second quarter written renewal premium change of 4.2%, which is two points higher than our loss cost trends. On an earned basis, our renewal premium change is now on par with our loss cost trends.
While the increase in renewal premium change was the key component of the total growth in the quarter, we also achieved 15% new business growth this quarter compared to a year ago. In commercial, our new business growth was broadly spread across our targeted market segments in both specialty and international. We were successful in writing a new professional liability affinity program, which has long been a key focus area for us and where we have historically been very profitable. As well, in specialty, we grew new business in management liability 55%. Although this is off a relatively small base, we are encouraged given it is an area of focus for us. Reviewing our performance six months into the year, we continue to be optimistic about our journey to achieve sustained top quartile industry performance that I have consistently discussed with you.
Our strong results for the first half of the year fuel our optimism as they are driven by our pre-tax underlying underwriting income, which was $190 million, up 43% from the first half of 2017. Our first half 2018 underlying combined ratio improved 1.6 points to 94.3% compared to the first half of 2017. The first half underlying loss ratio improved six tenths of a point to 60.7 from the first half of 2017, which is clearly top quartile performance. Importantly, the lower underlying loss ratio is driven in part by improvement in healthcare, reflecting the vigorous actions we have taken over the past year and a half that I previously referenced.
You have heard me reveal with each subsequent earnings call, our journey has many components to it, which include greater underwriting discipline, strengthened collaboration between underwriting and claims, risk control, and actuarial, and the hiring of strong industry talent, the latest being Jennifer Livingstone as our Chief Marketing Officer. We have increased our strategic engagement with our agent and broker partners at every level of the organization. I have also highlighted in the past, paramount along the journey is enhancing our technology and analytics capabilities. As these areas continue to evolve, we will continue to invest accordingly. The investment I referenced earlier in my remarks is one example of that.
As you may have seen in the press release this morning, we entered a multi-year relationship with Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, as well as infrastructure and data management platforms to manage our IT infrastructure. This partnership will facilitate the transformation of our IT operations through orchestrated cloud migration and meaningfully enhance the user experience. Additionally, it will reduce current technology costs by at least $10 million a year beginning in 2019. You may have also seen a recent press release regarding an anchor investment we made in MTech Capital, a fund that invests in newly formed insurtech entities that we expect will give us additional strategic insights into the evolution of technology and analytics. We are excited about the advancements technology and analytics will continue to offer us across our value chain, and we will continue to take advantage of this evolution.
Turning to our life and group segment, we had a core loss of $10 million for the quarter and a gain of $4 million for the first six months of this year, which evidences continued break-even earnings since our unlocking in 2015. Our conservative set of assumptions that underlies our carried reserves, along with our active management of our run-off long-term care business, continues to generate results in line with expectations. Overall, the second quarter and half-year results reveal that our disciplined execution along our journey to sustained top quartile underwriting performance is paying off, evidenced by our consistently improved underwriting results, which we have achieved while growing our premium revenue with good quality new business and doing it all more cost effectively.
This success in execution underlies the confidence we have in our ongoing earnings potential, therefore, we are pleased to announce a 17% increase in our regular quarterly dividend to $0.35 per share, an increase of $0.05 per share. With that, here's James.
Good morning, everyone. Let me just say that after 5-plus years of watching and learning from Craig, I'm going to do my best to live up to the high standard he set, while also helping Dino and the team execute on the goal of consistently generating top quartile results. Our property casualty operations produced core income of $319 million, up 22% from the prior year quarter. Pre-tax underwriting profit of $105 million was consistent with recent quarters, driven by a steady underlying combined ratio and $59 million of favorable loss reserve development. Each of our three P&C segments produced favorable development, with specialty accounting for the majority. Specialty's development was primarily driven by our professional liability business, as well as surety, and comes predominantly from accident years 2015 and prior.
For the second quarter, our net pre-tax catastrophe losses were modest at $26 million, or about one and a half points on the loss ratio. Our expense ratio also improved to 33.5%, which is representative of our current run rates. Moving to each of our P&C segments, Specialty's combined ratio was 86.8% for the quarter, and its underlying combined ratio was 92.7%, or a half point lower than the prior year's second quarter, with the loss ratio driving the improvement. For the first half of 2018, Specialty's combined ratio is 87.2%, a strong result by any measure. Our Commercial segment's combined ratio in the second quarter was 96.6%. This result included two and a half points of catastrophe losses, which is a favorable result by historical standards. Commercial's second quarter underlying combined ratio was 95%, a point higher than the prior year's quarter.
For the first half of 2018, Commercial's combined ratio was 96.8%, more than a point better than the first half of 2017. Our International segment generated a combined ratio of 104.7% in the second quarter, driven by a higher number of large property losses, as Dino mentioned. International's combined ratio for the first half of 2018 was 100.8%. Within our second quarter Life & Group result, long-term care morbidity experience continues to be consistent with our reserve assumptions. Rate increases, investment income, and reduced expenses were all small positives. Persistency was slightly unfavorable. Our Corporate segment produced a core loss of $39 million in the second quarter, which included the $23 million after-tax charge related to our new IT infrastructure arrangement Dino referenced in his remarks. Pre-tax net investment income was $506 million in the second quarter, compared with $475 million in the prior year quarter.
This improvement was driven by our limited partnership and common equity portfolio, which produced $42 million of pre-tax income, a 1.8% return, compared with $16 million last year. Pre-tax income from our fixed income security portfolio was $454 million this quarter, which is essentially flat to the prior year quarter. The pre-tax effective yield on the fixed income portfolio was 4.7% in the quarter, a level that we've been able to keep relatively stable over recent years without taking on more risk. The composition of our investment portfolio was relatively unchanged, with the exception of our continued gradual shift from lower-yielding tax-exempt municipal securities in our P&C portfolio to corporate and asset-backed securities based on the relative value being offered. Fixed income assets that support our P&C liabilities had an effective duration of four and a half years at quarter end, in line with portfolio targets.
The effective duration of the fixed income assets that support our long-duration Life & Group liabilities was 8.2 years at quarter end. Our balance sheet continues to be extremely strong. You'll likely have seen that both AM Best and Fitch moved CNA to a positive outlook over the last six weeks, following favorable actions from both Moody's and S&P last winter, providing further validation of our capital strength and improving earnings power. At June 30th, shareholders' equity was $11.4 billion, or $42.06 per share, and shareholders' equity excluding accumulated other comprehensive income was $12 billion, or $44.29 per share, an increase of 4% from year-end 2017 when adjusted for the $2.60 of dividends per share paid so far this year. Our investment portfolio's net realized gain was $1.9 billion at quarter end.
In the second quarter, operating cash flow was $136 million. We continue to maintain a very conservative capital structure. All of our capital adequacy and credit metrics are well above our internal targets and our current ratings. With that, I'll turn it back to Dino.
Thanks, James. Before we move to the question and answer portion of the call, let me briefly leave you with some summary thoughts on our performance. Our second quarter core income was $31 million higher than Q2 2017. Our first half core income was $77 million higher year-over-year. We have pre-tax underwriting income of $79 million, following up on $111 million in Q1, giving us $190 million for the first half of the year, up 43% over the same period last year. Solid growth of 4% in net written premium for the quarter, 7% for the first six months. Our Life & Group segment continues to sustain break-even earnings since our unlocking in 2015. Our 2018 second quarter core return on equity is 9.1%. Net income return on equity is 9.4%.
Our core earnings per share for the first half of 2018 were $2.02, the highest level of half-year earnings at CNA in over 10 years. Finally, based upon the confidence in our future earnings potential, we increased our regular quarterly dividend to $0.35 per share. With that, we'd be glad to take your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to join the queue for questions, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. Just make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow us to receive that signal. Again, that's star one for any questions at this time. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone the opportunity. Okay. First, from Deutsche Bank, we have Joshua Shanker.
Yeah. Hi there, everyone. Congratulations on a decent quarter. First question, can you give us the renewal rate price increases and the retention numbers excluding healthcare?
I don't think we can easily calculate it, but we can get it for you.
Yeah, Josh, we can get it for you after the call. We just don't have it at hand at the moment.
Just the one thing I would say, if it's 6% for healthcare overall, some rates accounts up as much as 30%, it feels to me that, and there's nothing wrong with this, but that the rate renewal environment for the aggregate book might be close to flattish. Is that wrong of me to think it that way?
No, Josh, I think that is a good way to do it. It is flattish but slightly up. I think I indicated in my remarks, comp at minus three and a half, last quarter sort of minus three. You got about a half a point there that was down, but international was up half a point, management liability was up half a point. Auto was up four tenths, ocean was up about a point. Property overall was essentially the same in the sort of low two percentage. Healthcare, just in general, in terms of it is about 7% of the book. We can do the actual math. That is a feel for it.
7% gives me enough. I can do it myself. I am not going to put you through it.
Okay, fair enough.
That is fine. Perfect. The other question is, I am just trying to understand style of analysis. In the fourth quarter of last year, you took this big reserve release on morbidity. A lot of watchers and investors were surprised about that given commentary about morbidity at others. You pointed out in the 2Q quarters now that morbidity was consistent with expectations. Can we talk about what the second quarter underlying actuarial analysis is versus the fourth quarter, and would we expect it to be possible, given what you do in 2Q, that you would detect any changes if there was one?
Josh, the actuarial analysis that we do for long-term care happens in the fourth quarter each year. What we see on all the other quarters is an actual to expected calculation. When we say that it's in line with our expectations that were set when we unlocked in 2015 and on the gross premium valuations that we've done at the end of 2017. There's no new analysis that's been done other than checking actuals versus expected.
Okay. That solves for me.
Yeah, Josh, this is Craig. Just to maybe add to that we certainly would see, to directly answer your question, if things were changing, we would see it, because we follow it, and claim volumes have not changed for us over the last really two and a half years.
Can we just review the morbidity adjustment? What prompted that in 4Q? It was based on projected claims or based on actual claims?
Josh, when we unlocked at the end of 2015, we were reacting to morbidity that we had seen in the prior years before that, which was really on the heels of the beginning of our rate increase program. We had seen a lot of what we called shock morbidity leading up to year-end 2015. When we did that 2015 gross premium valuation analysis, we projected that shock morbidity was going to continue for the next few years. What we saw in 2016 and 2017 was it actually didn't. It normalized much quicker than we expected. That's really what drove the 2017 change.
Okay. Thank you very much for all the answers.
Moving on, we'll hear from Jay Cohen with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Yes, thank you. I wanted to talk about the international business. Underlying combined ratio there last six quarters around 100. Obviously, it's not doing as well as the other segments. Is there a more concerted effort to drive that ratio lower? Does that need maybe a little bit more extra attention?
Jay, thanks for the question. It's a good question. Look, first, let me just start off by saying, all of the initiatives along the journey to sort of get to that top-tier performance that I've been talking about, everything from the discipline underwriting culture to talent, expense, all of that happens across every one of our offices worldwide. When you take a look at international, or as we call international, you got everything from our Hardy Lloyd's Syndicate to the Canadian operation, which is maybe more akin to what we see in the U.S. You've got to take each of those sort of in its components. Let me just make a couple of observations.
Hardy, which has been the area that's been most strained from a loss ratio and indeed, a combined ratio standpoint, is where we are and have been shifting over the course of the last six quarters from the standard Lloyd's type products, the marine, the shared and layered property cat treaty. What we are replacing it with and what we want the Lloyd's Syndicate to be is principally the target markets that we have expertise in, that we think we can bring to the marketplace, which is healthcare, technology, life sciences, and certain aspects of our construction business. That's a process that takes time, and it has been going on. There's been, and I believe it's been mentioned, some of the evolution away from things like aviation, running off political risk.
We had a very unprofitable A&H, and we had some of that classic cat property which we're moving away from. That's a unique effort for Lloyd's that transcends the other offices. That's the way we see Lloyd's playing out for us in the future, we clearly expect more profitability from that. Now, you take Canada on the other end of the spectrum. Canada, if you look at it historically over the last 10 years, this has had a combined ratio under 90%. Now, as I indicated, look, we had some property losses that were higher than expectations in the quarter. Obviously, when you do it for the half, they're in the line. For the quarter, it made the Canadian piece slightly unprofitable. Since that's been where the lion's share is, that's why the quarters international.
There are efforts clearly, in particular on the Lloyd's Syndicate, to make that more profitable, and we remain very optimistic about our international operations, both in terms of it contributing to our bottom line, but also in our ability to be able to serve some of the multinational clients. We're all over its various components. Maybe that's a little bit longer than you were hoping for, but I think important to dissect it that way.
Dino, it's great perspective. Thanks for sharing that. Very helpful.
Okay.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, that is star one if you have any questions. Next we have Gary Ransom with Dowling & Partners.
Yes, good morning. I had a question on the IT expenses. Wondering if you could give us a little more of a qualitative view of what this investment is actually going to change in terms of the customer experience and the agents, what the underwriting tools might be. Kind of giving us a picture of what's happening down in the trenches for all these changes that you're making.
Yeah. Gary, it's Dino. Look, we're very excited about this partnership with Atos. First of all, it is a very unique, what we call industry leading service model because they are assuming ownership of the IT infrastructure, servers, devices, and in the process, going to be modernizing all of that. That eliminates obsolescence risks for us because they take that over. It's very unique also in that it's as a service model. It's a consumption-based model. Moreover, Atos uses what they call their Canopy Hybrid Cloud, which puts our infrastructure and the software running on infrastructure is going to be migrated to the cloud, which is clearly what you want to be able to do.
All of it is building, if you will, a large foundation for us to be able to then take advantage of the different sort of analytics, languages, et cetera, that cloud brings to and allows us to modernize it. It's also from a digital standpoint, it's also this sort of device as a service. They take over all of the management of the devices and bring to bear their sort of cutting edge digital interfaces, which we fundamentally believe the right way to go is to use a world's leading provider, get it in a consumption model as a service, which is really, really unique in the marketplace. All of it also helps our entire security because of their cloud.
Look, we are interested in converting and building a foundation to convert all of our legacy because this is clearly the direction in this industry with the tremendous advances in technology and all this. We're very, very excited about the change, and it's a step, albeit a very large step, in many more we're going to make.
The way you described it as a consumption model, does that mean it's more akin to a variable cost as opposed to a fixed cost?
Yes.
Yeah. Okay.
As we grow Of course, like most, at least I was going to say smart consumption models, it's stepped, so that after a certain level of growth, then the per unit cost comes down a little bit. Nevertheless, look, our interest is to let them benefit with us because that ends up making it interesting for them. Once they've eliminated all the obsolescence risk and we are using the most cutting-edge cloud environment, we're both very happy.
The $10 million of savings you referred to, that's part of just eliminating what you're doing and handing it over to them?
Absolutely. There is no question that the scale they bring to bear on a global basis, and I think it's slightly conservative, the number at $10 million. That's baked in. It's a seven-year deal, so we're very excited.
Okay. I will love to hear more about that over the next several quarters.
Great.
Can I change the subject slightly?
Sure.
I wanted to also ask about loss cost trends too, and just whether you're seeing anything across your lines that are a change or a shift. Do you see frequency moving up anywhere? You see severity doing something unusual? I'd love to hear about any pockets where there's change.
Sure. Gary, this is James. I'll give you some color on a few areas. The one area that we're seeing the most change is healthcare, as Dino has mentioned. We've seen increasing severity trends really driven by large jury awards that both we and the rest of the industry have seen more recently, driven by large hospitals and aging services. As Dino mentioned, our underwriters have continued to respond by managing the rate retention dynamic there, getting the six points of rate and our retention down at the 73% level. We have now baked in loss cost trends of 6% into that healthcare book. The other area that's elevated from a severity trend standpoint is commercial auto, and that's not really a change. It's been elevated for several years, but that's at a 4.5% severity assumption, with going up to six when we have excess exposures.
At the other end of the spectrum, workers' comp loss cost trends continue to be very good. We're seeing high single-digit negative frequency and flat severity. Just to make you crystal clear, that's what we're seeing. In our workers' comp reserves, we still have a 4% severity assumption baked in as we want to make sure that our reserve levels are set at the longer term trends. I would say all the other lines, Gary, are really more modest with no real deviation from our longer-term trends.
Right. Okay. That's very helpful.
Gary, it's Dino.
Yeah.
Sorry, Gary, if I could just add to the point about healthcare, as James was saying, we've been reacting very aggressively, you're seeing rate increases 6%, 9%, 8%, moving the retention effectively. The combined ratio over the last six quarters come down about 15 points, still a little over 100. It's caused that and overall rate retention dynamic is improving it very quickly. We feel good about it being in a profitable position sometime in 2019. Just thought I'd add that color.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Gary.
Once again, that's star one for any questions. Next, we have Meyer Shields with KBW.
Great. Thank you. Good morning. James, if I could just close the loop on that. Are you booking workers' compensation frequency negative or flat?
Well, our current trends right now, we have severity is running flat, and we book a low single-digit negative frequency.
Thanks. Then sort of on the same topic, I guess, in your introductory comments, you talked about renewal premium changes coming in line with loss trends. Do you think about it from the perspective of renewal premiums or the rate side in terms of forward underwriting margins?
Yeah. The renewal premium change both, it's a combination of the rate and exposure that had gone up a point. The written, a little over 4%, four points, it's about two points higher. The earned now is in line with the loss cost trends. Look, it's good news, the exposure growth. Not all exposure obviously acts like rates. Some have much more impact. In the case of payroll, as salaries go up for the same amount of work, that's clearly to your benefit. There's other forms, then there's some exposure that doesn't act as rate. Nevertheless, there's a good portion of it that does. It's been consistently going up. Look, if it continues and it sustains itself, that's going to portend well for the underlying loss ratio.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. Perfect. Then just quickly, the IT savings, are those going to be in corporate, in the individual segments or both?
It's going to be in the expense ratio by the business units that use it and impact it, right?
That's right. It'll come through in all the areas. It'll come through in ULAE. It'll come through in the expense ratio, all the different parts of the enterprise.
Perfect. Thanks so much.
As another reminder, that is star one if you have any questions. All right. Looks like we have another question from Ron Bobman with Capital Returns.
Hi, good morning. Congrats. I had one sort of simple question. If my memory serves me, I thought, I don't know, five plus years ago, you went to sort of a semi or some sort of outsourced tech service provider model. I'm not sure. If I'm close to accurate, could you explain the transition, if there is one?
Yeah. I mean, we did, Ron, I think it was probably seven years ago, moved to an outsourced model, but it's different than the one that we're moving to now. It was really an outsourced labor model before. This is much more an infrastructure as a service, where it's not just the labor, but it's the entire hardware, as Dino mentioned, servers, networks, everything. The entire infrastructure is being outsourced to the third party.
Yeah. That firm is who we changed from to Atos. Your memory is quite good.
Okay. Some things it is, not with yesterday's lunch. Thanks, gentlemen. Good luck with it.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ron.
At this time, it appears we have no further questions from the audience. I'd like to turn the floor back to management for any additional or closing remarks.
No, that's great. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We'll see you in a quarter.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference. Thank you for joining once again. You may now disconnect.