Thank you all for joining us for the Bank of America Financial Services Conference. This is the first session of the day after the preliminaries by Mr. Moynihan. Really, we couldn't be happier to have Hartford Financial being the first insurance company to present here. Unfortunately, we had both the CFO, Beth Costello, and the CEO, Chris Swift. He's under the weather today. We wish him. He'll be fine. In the end, I mean, he's not here, we'll deal with it. I just want to make a few preliminaries. I have, like, a little biographical information. We'll not read Chris' biographical information. Beth Costello was named CFO of The Hartford in 2014.
I mean, in terms of my sort of view, I mean, I look at Beth as the architect of the Talcott Resolution . That restructure made it possible for the company to exit the annuity space, and really was the pivot into where The Hartford is today. She joined The Hartford in 2004 from Deloitte & Touche. She's the executive sponsor of The Hartford's Flexibility Network, dedicated to advancing the philosophy that every person is capable of a full and productive work life. Sits on the board of The Village for Families & Children in Hartford, Connecticut, dedicated to building strong families in the greater Hartford area, including foster care and addiction services and whatnot. We're really pleased to have Beth here.
I wanted to make a point that the team of Swift and Costello assumed their current roles on July 1, 2014. In the nearly nine years that have passed, The Hartford shares have outperformed the S&P 500, the XLF, and pretty much most of the closest peers. Certainly not the closest peers, definitely. Obviously there's, you know, inducing credit companies, but it's been a fantastic story, and the leadership is important in making that happen. All the team at The Hartford should be proud of the success. Thank you for coming, Beth.
Yeah.
Preliminary remarks, and then we'll get into some Q&A.
Thank you for all of that, and I'm sure Chris is gonna be really disappointed that he wasn't here to hear all of that. I'm really excited to be here. We were just talking about love that we're here in person. The last two years we've been virtual, so it's great. I just wanted to start with saying that, you know, from The Hartford's perspective, we really feel that we had an outstanding 2022. When you look at our core earnings growth of 14%, core earnings per share growth of 23%. Again, really showing the leverage that we're getting from the shares that we've been repurchasing. Our commercial lines businesses performed very strongly with top line growth of 11%, and an underlying combined ratio of 88.3, which is just outstanding.
Group Benefits also saw top line growth in their fully insured premiums, growing 6%. We saw a core earnings margin of 6.5% for the year. Just feel really good about how our businesses are performing, our investment portfolio obviously contributing to that as well. Personal lines, as we all know, is an area that is a focus, we're restoring profitability, and we're on the track to do that. You know, we've been impacted by many of the same things that others in the industry have been. Just feel really good how we ended 2022 and our momentum going into 2023. As I said, really happy to be here. As you said, Chris is very disappointed that he couldn't join us today.
Well, we're happy to have you and certainly probably Chris is listening. Thanks, Chris. Small commercial as a concept, it means different things to different companies. What is the ticket price of a small commercial policy? How big is the market share at The Hartford? What's the opportunity for having greater share of your choice markets where you wanna go in?
It's a lot with your first question.
Yeah.
Small commercial is an area that I think that undeniably we excel in. If you look at the growth that that business has been posting, and more importantly, just consistent and sustained profitability, you know, really has just been a growth engine for us when we look at our new business last year at, you know, a little bit over $700 million, just a phenomenal result. We at The Hartford, you know, we define small business as those businesses that have, you know, payroll less than $20 million, total revenue less than $50 million. For like, insured property, think of any one location as also being less than $20 million. We size that market at being about $110 billion.
When you look at what we posted in 2022, you know, a little over $4.6 billion, you know, we're obviously a significant player there. I think our new business shows that we're continuing to take share. This is a team, and I think many of you have had an opportunity to meet Stephanie Bush, who runs that organization. It's a team that does not sit still. They have had great success over the years, but they're always looking for the next thing. That momentum we continue to see. We see continued opportunity there.
I know for those that listened to our year-end earnings call, Chris talked about some of the things that we're doing in the ENS market in that space, which we also see as an area of growth. I would just say investors should expect that Small Commercial is gonna be, continue to be an area that we excel in.
What is the future of small commercial? I mean, Travelers bought Simply Business. Berkshire has developed their Berkshire THREE program. Next Insurance, a darling of the fintech world. I mean, I call it Small Biz Quote, so I go to try and buy a direct policy from The Hartford, which sends me to Small Biz Quote. Uh-Oh. Is that an experiment at this point in time? Is that the future? How should we think about the role of the direct consumer small business models?
That's a great question and one that we talk a lot about. We've been investing in our direct platform for many years, so I'd call it more than an experiment at this point. I would say the volume still predominantly comes in through agents. You know, we also have been investing in our agency platform as well. We talk a lot about the fact that for new business, oftentimes, you know, new business can go straight through on the glass, you know, over 70% of the time. We've made it really easy for agents to do business with us, and we continue to enhance those capabilities. People talk about questions and how many questions to ask. You know, we look at the same things.
It's all about when you think about an agent trying to place a piece of business, to the question you asked, which I didn't answer, the average size premium is small, right? The more volume they can do, the quicker they can do it, and the fact that they can go back to their customer and say, "Here's a quote from The Hartford, and The Hartford is going to stand by it, not go back and re-underwrite it or anything like that," that's really impactful. We've invested a lot in that. We also see the opportunity in the future for more direct to consumer, we've also invested in that platform as well. There are things that we do to look at ways to drive business to the site, paid search and things like that.
Where we sit right now, I would say the majority of customers still come to us through an agent. When that will change, is to be debated, but when it does change, we're ready for that, and I think we will equally be as successful.
Right. Well, let's pivot into some basic questions. Market conditions right now, on the one hand, we've just been through a couple of years of elevated pricing. Reinsurance prices are suddenly up again, which probably will cause pricing to go up again. Where is the equilibrium in the market on the pricing in your core lines of business? Are we in a new phase of the market? Are we still in continuation of what we've experienced the last couple of years?
Yeah. you know, as we look at the momentum going into 2023, we'd say for the most part, conditions kind of the same. lines like property and auto, GL, you know, we're continuing to see, you know, very healthy price increases, you know, keeping up with and to some extent, exceeding loss trend, which is important. You've heard us say that our view going into 2023 is that we're really looking to maintain the slightly improving margins. When we look at the momentum in those areas, you know, we see that continuing. You know, some of the areas that we've talked about that may be feel a little bit, more pressure is there's been a lot of discussion about D&O and public company D&O.
I'd say for us, if you look at our financial lines in general, gross premium is about $1 billion, and the public D&O portion of that is about $200 million. It's not a big area for us, but that is an area where we have seen pricing momentum change. We are seeing, you know, significant rate decreases, in that line. The other line that we talk about is workers' comp. Obviously a big line for us, a very profitable line for us, a line that, we feel that we're very uniquely, positioned to continue to perform very well.
Obviously, you know, rates have, from a pricing perspective, felt pressure there, although we have seen lift from average wage growth, which is, you know, obviously added to the overall premium that we've seen there. You know, that is an area that when we talked about our view for 2023, and we provided outlook as to what we expected from an underlying combined ratio perspective in commercial lines, we said in 87-89. But within that, we said that we're probably feeling like about a half a point of pressure from workers' comp. Even with that half a point, again, very profitable, continues to be a growth area for us, not a significant change that we're seeing at this point.
Making predictions is really hard to do, you know? When you think about workers' comp, I think that there's a general sense that despite it being very profitable, that one's very profitable and underpriced simultaneously, there's been no rate increases in a long time, decreases mostly. Obviously, macro conditions have helped the profitability of workers' comp. If we look five years into the future and think about the regulators and their role in establishing the price, when the macro conditions ameliorate, that might make it less profitable, what recourse does Hartford have to maintain the profitability of that line? Over the years to come.
Yeah. I'm not gonna make a prediction per se on what will happen in five years. I will say, though, that we have navigated through different market conditions in workers' comp for years. If you look at our performance over a period of time, we've outperformed from a loss ratio perspective by about five points. I do think, and we've talked about this, that, you know, as we look at some of the COVID years starting to fall off, where some of the experience was maybe very favorable from a frequency perspective, that will start to work into rate filings, and we do expect at some point to see a pivot there.
Obviously, interest rates can be a component of that, as well, but I'll point out that as interest rates went down, it wasn't as if pricing was going up significantly, to compensate for that. There's a lot of components that go into managing a workers' comp book. We also are, you know, very selective in what business we're putting on, what classes of business, where we see growth. You know, in our middle market business, we've actually seen our workers' comp margins improve over this period because we've been doing a lot to re-underwrite the book. In that business, where you really are underwriting, account by account and looking at loss experience and taking that into consideration, we've been able to manage through that.
It's a long way of saying, Josh, I can't predict exactly when things might turn, but from where we sit, it continues to be a line that we know how to manage, that we can maintain profitability, and the returns are very strong. If that starts to pivot at some point, that will go into our view as to what new business we wanna put on, how we think about renewals and all that, because we are a company that is focused on underlying margins at the end of the day.
If we think about the trends underlying, the success in workers' comp, part of it is the fantastic job market we're in right now. To the extent that unemployment retreats back from all-time lows, is that an issue? I mean, clearly there's a premium issue, but do we notice over time that increasing unemployment leads to higher claims? As an aside, is there any correlation with the claims experience in the disability book.
Yeah.
During those periods of retrenchment of the economy?
Yeah. I'll cover each separately 'cause it's a little bit different, the experience that we see when we look back. When we start with workers' comp, unemployment going up in and of itself, we don't see as a significant trigger to additional loss activity. Again, at the end of the day, someone being injured on the job still has to prove that they were injured. You know, yes, you can have maybe some things on the margin, but it's not as if you'd expect to see a huge influx of claims just because unemployment was going up. What we actually monitor, more closely is the opposite, which is when unemployment starts to go down, having been up, and employers are hiring new employees.
Our data would suggest that a high percentage of workers' comp claims come from workers who are injured their first year on the job. What we watch for very closely is how those cycles are going, what industries that we might wanna be more careful about, so think construction, an industry where if, you know, people don't know exactly what they're doing, could result in injury. We see, again, more the area for us to watch is when we start to see, kind of coming out of a slowdown in activity. On the disability side, a little different. I would say that in recessionary environments, you can see some uptick. Again, someone has to prove that they're disabled.
It's not as if just because unemployment is different, has changed, that it makes it easier for someone to be approved for disability. One of the things that we do see that happens sometimes in a more constrained job environment is what we refer to as recoveries, kind of getting people back to work, can sometimes just be a little extended. Now the counter to that and something that, you know, we talk a lot about is it's important to remember that a, you know, disability claim, you're getting a percentage of your income. You're not getting 100%. In an area where you have high inflation, there's an aspect of just what someone needs to sort of cover their costs. You know, those are trends, again, that we watch very carefully.
Our claims department is very focused on looking at duration of claims, where we might start to see some durations extending. Again, a lot of very active outreach to claimants to work with them, to get them off of disability. Yes, we could see a little bit of movement there. Even if I go back and think about previous recessionary environments, our data, the way our claims department is organized now, coming out of the last recession, our claims and Group Benefits, our workers' comp and Group Benefits claims organizations were not together. They're very tied very closely together, looking at trends and so forth. I feel we're positioned very differently, going into, you know, whatever environment we might be seeing as we head into 2023 and 2024.
Well, I have a lot of questions, but if I ask them all, I imagine there'll be no time for the audience to ask any questions. I wanna pause, and you can raise your hand at any time and we can stop. If somebody does wanna ask a question, that's a possibility. just and I'll continue, but let me know by raising your hand and we'll get to that. All right. One of the things that I feel it's unique at The Hartford, I mean, completely unique, but compared to a lot of peer companies, cat volatility over the years has been remarkably low relative to what we've seen. Some of that is reinsurance planning, some of that is exposure management.
Can you talk a little about, A, Hartford's success in managing that volatility and, B, what higher catastrophe reinsurance pricing means for The Hartford in this new 2023 cycle twist?
Sure. As it relates to managing catastrophe risk, we have been very focused on that for many years. Looking very closely at our concentrations in coastal areas as we think about hurricane. We've been very focused on tornado hail events because we've obviously, you know, seen increases in that type of activity. It really has been around exposure management. You know, working with our risk management groups to understand where we have concentrations, how we look at those concentrations across our businesses. You know, another example is wildfires in California. If you go back, you know, a few years, we did have some concentrations in some of the areas that were hit, and we've done a lot where we can to prune that exposure.
I would say it has been more about exposure management than relying on reinsurance. When you look at our catastrophe reinsurance programs, we've got a per occurrence set of treaties, which is really there to manage a large event. And, you know, other than, for the most part, it attaches at around $350 million. We do have a sub-layer that covers things that are non-named tropical storms and earthquake, which, you know, we have tapped into occasionally, and actually it's been the winter storms where we've seen that activity. We have an aggregate treaty, which is really provided for protection of just a series of small events. We really look to manage it both ways.
On both of those treaties, we have not tapped into them very significantly over the last several years. Again, on that underlier treaty that we have, the two winter storms that we had, we saw, you know, potential for some recovery. Obviously, have to pay the claims out to see if we actually will have a recovery, based on our estimates, we had booked some offset. On our aggregate treaty, I think we had one year where we hit it and actually our cat estimates had come down since that initial year, very small amounts. It hasn't been a big part of how we manage catastrophe risk. We did see increases in the cost of those programs this year.
Again, stepping back and looking at the broader markets and what others experienced, given our experience, you know, very manageable increases. You know, the total premium for both of those programs in 2022 was, you know, slightly under $100 million, and the cost went up, you know, roughly 20%. It's not a significant driver of, you know, impacting our profitability. Part of what's been happening in the reinsurance markets is a reaction to what's been happening in property markets in general, and that's been continuing to fuel the price increases that we've seen. We knew going into this season that we were expecting price increases at this level.
Our pricing models were already incorporating those costs as we looked at what we needed to get from a pricing perspective to maintain targeted returns. That's how I would kind of characterize the various ways that we're looking at managing cat risk.
If I look at a number of things, look at lower cat volatility, non-correlation between the workers' comp side of the book and the commercial side of the book, small claims in general for the company overall, diversified stream, whether it be from the Group Benefits business, personal lines business to commercial business or the mutual fund business. All these things are very diverse, non-volatile source of income. The financial leverage at Hartford isn't materially different from a lot of its large cap peers. Is there room for Hartford to be to have a higher debt load, a better financial leverage? Does all this diversity and lack of volatility in the results, is there the possibility of Hartford having more financial flexibility?
Yeah. managing our financial leverage and our debt leverage, you know, we've been on a path, and you at the beginning talked about the journey that we've been on, and we have been reducing our financial leverage over several years 'cause it was very high.
Mm-hmm.
I feel like where we've gotten ourselves to now is really in the targeted range that we want it to be and feel very good about how we think about managing that debt load. Not looking to increase that leverage. I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a rating agency restriction. It's just how we think about managing our balance sheet and the financial flexibility that we wanna have. When I step back and look at the excess capital that we're generating, the amount of capital that we're taking out of our subsidiaries, that, you know, has been increasing as their underlying income has increased. Group Benefits had a little bit of a divot given some of the impacts that it felt from COVID, but sort of back on a nice trajectory.
I think, you know, overall puts us in a, in a really good position.
All right. Let's personal lines a little bit. If I go back 15 years ago, I think The Hartford probably had a margin around 4% in personal lines, and now it's, I think about 2.25%. I don't know exactly what is that. Is there a economies of scale requirement for you to be successful? Can you be... Obviously, you wanna grow that business and we'll get to that possibly in a second. Does the current scale of the company inhibit its success in any way?
No, I don't think of the scale of our personal lines business, right now as being an issue as we think about the overall profitability. As you know, our focus on personal lines is very niche. It's focused on our relationship with AARP, so it's a very, you know, targeted approach to the marketplace. We're not looking to be everything to everybody, you know, really focused on that, leveraging that AARP relationship. We've, you know, done things over the last several years, that I think positions us better for growth after we get out of this period of higher loss costs and getting to profitability and, you know, continuing to penetrate into that market.
What we felt that we needed to do was to really revamp our product set and our tools and just how we interacted with customers. I mean, as you know, right, customers expect a more digital experience of all of those things. We have been implementing a new Personal Lines system as well as a new product. We've been rolling that out in various states. Very pleased with the traction that we were seeing there. Again, we have paused a little bit on our marketing spend till we get back to profitability because we want to grow once we get to the place that we feel that we're covering loss costs. I would not say that our size prohibits us from competing effectively in that space.
Let's talk a little about those changes, that you renegotiated your relationship with AARP to allow you more flexibility in non-renewing certain risks that didn't fit your profile. We immediately dovetailed into this period of very high loss costs. Do we have any evidence that the new sort of binding constraints you have with customers has a positive effect, or it's just too soon, and then this other thing happened, and so we don't know whether the re-underwriting or renegotiating of the contract is going to have that success?
Yeah. Just as a reminder, one of the components that we changed relative to how we go to market with our AARP customers is that we used to offer what was referred to as a Lifetime Continuation Agreement, which basically meant that we couldn't just non-renew a customer. We had to offer a price. The price wasn't guaranteed, but obviously a very regulated industry, so you are somewhat limited in price increases that you can do. What we found in conjunction with AARP is the, that feature was really not something that was valued as much as it had been in the past.
Because we had that feature, to the point that you made on underwriting, we had to be just very, very, very selective day 1 when we issued a new policy to make sure we knew everything about it because we really kind of had one chance, so to speak, and then you sort of were in this Lifetime Continuation Agreement. Since the customer really wasn't valuing it was limiting us and our ability to really go to market in a much more customer-friendly way where you didn't have to keep asking question after question after question. It's good for AARP because they want to see us sell more policies to their membership.
It wasn't as if this was some big negotiation that they felt they were losing something because at the end of the day, they want a product that's contemporary for their customers as well. Yes, I would say that our early indications, in some of the states as we started to launch, is we do feel that it will have an impact. Again, to your point, more to be seen because we have pulled back a little bit on the marketing, and so the new business will ramp up again. We do think that it positions us very well to be able to compete, to be able to provide customers just a better all around experience.
All right. Pivoting over to Group benefits, sort of circuitously, back in 2019 when you bought Navigators, part of the rationale was that your distributors wanna work with fewer carriers who have a full shelf and a diversity of products. Hartford pivoted into some ENS lines and some specialty lines and could be everything to the distributor in some ways. When I hear that same sort of conversation with a number of life insurance companies, especially in Group Benefits. They talk about wanting to have that full shelf, whether it be dental and vision, supplemental health, AD&D, you know, all kinds of supplemental voluntaries. You are a scale player in life and in disability. Does Hartford benefits need to be a full shelf offering to be competitive over the long term in this space?
We start with, as you said, we're very competitive today with the product suite that we have, and we have been expanding some of those supplemental programs. You can see that in our disclosures that, you know, our premium continues to grow in those areas. Do we need to have things that you mentioned like, dental or vision? I don't believe we need to have them. We do look to continue to just enhance that product suite. I think one of the things that we're seeing more so than just those product features is that the customers that we're dealing with, what they're really interested in, is a seamless experience. You know, all of us work for companies.
All of us go through the process of signing up for benefits, which can be very confusing, challenging. you know, our HR departments, you know, continue to need assistance with that. continues to be a lot of push in various states for family leave provisions, which get very complicated. What we're investing in right now is a new platform in our Group Benefits business that will continue to make that process easier and easier. One of the things that we find that employers are particularly interested in finding better ways to manage is to manage leave absence of their employees.
It sounds simple, but trying to manage when, you know, people go on maternity leave, when they're on FMLA, when they're on disability, and understanding all of those components and making it easy for their employees to understand what their benefits are, when they're entitled to them, that's what we see as really continuing to be a game changer in this space. We're really excited about the investments that we're making in those platforms that will continue to just sort of make that, you know, ease of doing business. It's a thing I've mentioned a couple of times today 'cause it is a focus that we as a company have, is what is the experience our customer is having? How do we continue to make their experience seamless, easy, and that we're easy to do business with.
Taking a pivotal let's go to investment income a little bit. In 2022, for a lot of companies in your peer group, it was a rough year for investment income. Although the fixed coupon yields went up dramatically, the equity markets caused some losses on the limited partnership side. Your limited partnerships are constructed a bit differently than a lot of your peers. You had some contributions. It was not as difficult a year for you as some others. As we look to 2023, should we expect lumpiness in the results of your alternative investment strategies? How should we think about that in the context of, in general, fixed maturities in equity coupons and dividends being much better next year than they were in the past?
Yeah. On our limited partnership portfolio, really think about that portfolio is split roughly, you know, between private equity and real estate, JV funds. Both of those did perform very well in 2022, particularly on the real estate side. That was really generated by sales of underlying properties. We just, you know, definitely saw more sales than we had anticipated at the beginning of the year. You know, overall, that's what contributed to just a very strong return overall limited partnerships. Our private equity portfolio is really focused in sort of middle market buyout type of funds, and those two were very resilient through the course of 2022.
As we look to 2023, and we covered this on our earnings call, we expect that our returns in this space are going to be lower than what we've seen in the last several years, and we talked about it in the 4%-6% range. That's a little bit below what we would consider sort of our long-term average. We do think that that will change as we go into 2024 and 2025. Just looking at various conditions and we look at 2023, we do expect it to be lower. I really do expect to feel it more in the first half of the year than in the second half. The reason I say that is just even looking at the first quarter, we're not seeing that we're gonna have any real estate sales.
On our real estate JV funds, a lot of times when you don't have sales activity, you have a little bit of a drag just because of the way the accounting works on the depreciation on those investments. I could see our real estate JV funds being, you know, close to 0 to maybe even a little negative kind of in the first quarter and into second. As we look forward into the second half, we'd expect to maybe be above that 4%-6% to make up for that.
Really am not expecting to see a straight line, 4%-6% over the course of the year, a little more challenged in the first half, and then, you know, seeing better performance in the second half. As it relates to our fixed maturity portfolio, yes, we've been benefiting from increases in interest rates. We still continue to see our reinvestment rate higher than what our sales and maturity yield is. Again, as we go through 2023, do expect to continue to see some lift there. We had an ex limited partnership yield of about 3.2% in 2022, and we said we'd expect to see that increase about 50-60 basis points over the course of 2023.
Pivoting to the other side of the balance sheet onto the loss reserves. Obviously, during the 2021 years, there was a dearth of payments for claims in many ways due to court closures and whatnot, and that courts are reopened now, it's happening. One of your competitors on their conference call cited 16-19 as adversely developing. We haven't seen your 10-K yet. We'll learn about the different movements. Obviously, you guys very rigorously examine your reserves, but can you talk about your view as what's evolving in terms of the content of the loss reserves and what we've learned over the past year?
Stepping back at the highest level, feel very good about our overall reserves and how they're situated and, you know, overall strength of the balance sheet. You know, we disclose every quarter, you know, by significant line of business where we take reserve actions. If you go back and look over the last several quarters, we've seen releases continuing in workers' comp. That line's continued to perform very well. We've also seen releases in catastrophes where, you know, a lot of times a catastrophe happens, especially at the end of the quarter. You make your best estimate, you make estimates around what you're experiencing from large losses.
Some of what we saw, you know, coming both in the 22 accident year as well as in prior years is some of those large losses just weren't as large as we had thought. We saw reductions there. Other lines like general liability and commercial auto, we have seen some adverse developments, some of that related to court activity, and cases. You know, we make our best judgment, you know, quarter after quarter, and we'll adjust accordingly. Again, in the size of our overall balance sheet, I don't think, you know, significant movements, but definitely have been there, and that's gonna, you know, continue to be an area for us to just watch. Really good. You know, we look at our more current accident years and how we've established our initial loss picks.
We don't make changes in the more current years. We really hold them. To your point on we were seeing decreased court activity and things like that in those more recent years, we haven't adjusted them, so, you know, feel very good about how they're positioned.
You know, I feel badly that Chris isn't here. For this next question, I kind of am glad he's not 'cause it always provokes an eye roll on his part when I ask it.
I have a good eye roll too.
All right. You know, back, when Hartford was a different business, and offered variable annuities also, there was a cross-pollination probably with a large mutual fund complex. Today, Hartford retains the distribution rights for this mutual fund complex with a nice cash flow reduction. It somehow doesn't feel like it fits with everything else. That's okay. Sometimes we make investments in things that produce cash flow. Is Hartford the best owner of this business? Where does it fit in the overall Hartford story?
You know, obviously a question that we get often, and I'd say the answer is very consistent. We really view it as an investment. It is separate. It is, you know, there's no overlap with our other businesses. It's an investment that we look to get a healthy dividend out of. I mean, obviously, it's been impacted by broader market conditions, and so forth. Overall, when you look at what that complex has been doing, how it expanded its sub-advised relationships, so it's not just with one, you know, it added a second, you know, performs very well. As Chris and I have said in the past, we do evaluate periodically, you know, what is the best use of that business.
Where we sit today, you know, having it as part of our portfolio makes sense. You know, I liken it, I compare it to some of the other things that we had that were not core, that took up a lot of management time. This does not. It really is separate. It's an investment, and I think it's an investment that is producing good results for us.
Well, Beth, thank you very much. We heard the claps in the other room, and there's a clock here, so we know we're out of time. Please, Beth Costello, everyone. Thank you very much. I hope you have a great day today, and Aflac is coming up next.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.