Okay, good morning. We are going to do our best to stay on schedule today. I am very excited to kick off day two of the conference with Beth Costello, CFO of The Hartford. Thank you very much for joining us. Usually start off asking if there are opening comments or anything that you wanted to hit on before we get started.
Yeah. Well, thank you, first of all, love being here. Very happy to be here today. I will just make a few comments which are very consistent with comments that Chris and I have made in the past, which is we feel really good about how The Hartford is performing, how we started the year. The first half of the year, I think our results speak for themselves. Very strong. We continue to focus on delivering high ROE for our shareholders, deploying our excess capital, and when we look at all of our businesses, really happy with how each one is performing and the outlook going forward. Again, happy to be here.
Okay, fantastic. I am going to start maybe counterintuitively on the Employee Benefits side rather than P&C, just because you have got this recent acquisition coming from Equitable. Two questions. One, I was hoping you could elaborate on the technology, because in the press release you called that out. What does that provide? Then the second, maybe more mundane part of the question, legacy Hartford's Employee Benefits results seem to have been better than Equitable. What is the pathway to getting them to Hartford-level returns?
Yeah. Well, great question. First of all, we are very excited about this acquisition, and excited about the people that will be coming with it. As you point out, the technology is something that we found very intriguing. We have talked before that when we look at our Employee Benefits business, obviously a very strong national accounts player. But getting into the under 500 lives and below has been an area of focus for us, and technology is a really important part of that. The technology platform that comes with this acquisition, we feel really will position us well in that marketplace. I would have you think about the technology as sort of an underwriting platform.
Okay.
It is from quote, to bind, to installing the cases and so forth, access from a digital perspective for employers and employees, being able to access the information. It is just really is a full suite, and as I said, to really compete in that part of the marketplace, we felt that that technology was really important. Also comes with a dental and vision product set, which again, when you get into the lower part of the Market and Employee Benefits, those product lines are very important. So, team is really excited about it, and as I said, we have talked about this being an area of focus, so it really was a way for us to accelerate that strategic focus that we have.
As far as overall profitability, obviously bringing it into our ecosystem, applying our claims tools, our efficiency initiatives that we have, all of that will put us in a place to bring the profitability of that business up over time. So the team is really excited about it, and as I said, really excited about the employees that will be joining us as well.
Okay, fantastic. You mentioned some of the ancillary products that they have. Can you talk a little bit about the cross-sell prospects, whether with the current Employee Benefits group or maybe even on the P&C side, how those new product sets can be disseminated more broadly?
Yeah. As it relates to the acquisition itself, cross-sell was not a big part of the equation as we thought about it. More broadly, as we think about going into the smaller end of the Employee Benefits market, coupled with obviously our strong presence in small business on the P&C side, we see some natural synergies there over time. Nothing immediate, but over time, when you think about us competing for small business on the P&C side and being able to offer this product set on the employee benefit side, we would see some benefits to that over time.
Okay. Do you have a sense in terms of client overlap with the current small business on the P&C side?
We do not. Until we close, as you know, a lot of times you do not get that level of information. Once we close, obviously we will have a better insight into that. But as we think about the growth potential over time, we would see that there should be some overlap there.
Okay, fantastic. This question is going to come up later also, but in terms of Employee Benefits, how do you think about scale? Obviously, this helps a little bit and giving you another customer segment to target. But fundamentally, where are you relative to competitors in terms of adequate scale and what is next?
Yeah. Well, if you step back and you look at our Employee Benefits business and where we rank overall.
From a fully insured disability, paid family leave perspective, we are number one. All-in, when you add in all product sets, we are number three. We definitely have scale in Employee Benefits. As I said, our market set tends to skew to national accounts, and this opportunity and the, what we call priority business, which would be less than 500 lives, is definitely an area of focus for us. We feel very good about the scale that we have. It has allowed us to, I think, develop very strong capabilities across the board. It has allowed us to invest in the platforms. Which again, as we have talked about before, is really important, especially in today's world as technology becomes more and more important. Again, overall, feel very good about our ability to compete in this space, and we see ourselves as a market leader.
Okay. That is helpful. I am going to move to P&C now, but I want to make sure that everyone in the room has the opportunity to ask whatever questions they want. If you do have a question, please raise your hand, and we will get a microphone to you. Switching to P&C, one of the goals of our conference this year is to really concretize what leading companies are doing in the realm of artificial intelligence, both in terms of, to the extent that you are comfortable, specifics about how things are changing operationally, and where those of us on the outside, maybe I will say where and when those of us on the outside are actually going to see financial results that could not or would not have been achieved without these investments. It is a very broad question.
That is a very broad question. We have 33 minutes.
It is. We can take the next hour or two to go through that.
Yeah. There's a lot in that question, so if I don't get all the pieces, you'll come back to me.
I'll remind you.
Remind me. Stepping back from it, when I think about the question on how are the benefits of AI going to show up or where they're going to show up, my view is it's going to show up across the board. We've talked about before that when we think about, and we focus on our AI investments, it's in three areas: underwriting, claims, and operations.
Broadly, and we have a very robust invest agenda across all of those areas, so we're continuing to invest in this technology. On the underwriting side, first of all, remind people that when you talk about AI, there's lots of ways to define it. I would point to our small business platform if you want proof of our ability to execute. As you know, 75% of new business quotes that come through in our small business business are quoted on the glass, no human touch.
That's right.
We've been doing that for years. That is powered by AI.
Right.
We've done that and achieved phenomenal profitability. As a proof point of where can you see it, you can see our growth rates in small business, and you can see our underlying profitability. All of that being fueled by these engines, and we think that we have the ability to continue to improve that quote ratio, and focus on that. We've talked about bringing some of that automation into the middle and large business. You've heard Mo talk about initiatives that we have there, where we're automating parts of the underwriting process. What are the benefits that we'll see with that, and what are the benefits that we are seeing? Well, one, it will improve underwriter productivity.
Two, it also allows us to provide quotes back to indications of price back to agents and brokers more timely. We can see in our data that the faster that you are able to respond, your hit ratios are higher.
We will see that over time. We also think that when you can automate parts of the underwriting process, you also have the opportunity to reduce what we have often referred to as leakage in the process. What do I mean by that? An underwriter doing a lot of different things are supposed to be doing steps one through 12. People are people. Something gets missed. That might result in us binding a risk that otherwise maybe we would not have wanted to. Someone's bias may get into the mix and have them look at a particular risk and decide not to quote it because of prior experiences, so we have a missed opportunity. Mo has spoken about in the past that we have looked at this leakage concept and believe that if we can automate processes, we would reduce that. Where will that show up?
It can show up in top line, can show up in outcomes on claims if you are better able to match price with risk. We are implementing these tools as well. Also frees up time for our underwriters so they can spend more time working with brokers or working with agents to produce additional opportunities. We think that that will also increase throughput over time. Shows up in the top line, shows up in the claims process. Also in that example, would show up in an expense ratio because you can have more business done per underwriter, so that improves operating leverage. A definite focus there. Those are just a couple examples on the underwriting side.
On the claims side, things that we, again, can do to automate intake of claims information, provide quicker responses to first notice of loss and things of that sort we think will, over time, will improve outcomes. Also will improve productivity on the claims side. Same thing, there is a component of the loss ratio, that is the claims handling expense. Again, if you can get more throughput done, we will see benefits there as well. Also, we have talked about this before as well, that we have done a lot as it relates to ingestion of claims information. Specifically, we have talked about medical records and being able to ingest those, summarize what can sometimes be pages and pages of medical records to, again, help focus the claims handler on what is most important, which ultimately will result in better outcomes for our insureds. Ultimately, we believe, better loss outcomes.
Also, we use AI to evaluate on medical bills as well that we're being charged what we should be charged, especially in the workers' comp area on the medical side. The fee schedules are very complicated.
They differ state by state, what is covered and what the costs are. Having an ability to automate that to ensure that we're paying the appropriate price, we've seen benefits on that as well, where we've talked about before that for every dollar that comes in from a medical spend, we're probably spending $0.30-$0.40. All of those pieces show up in the result on the claim side. Then finally on the operations side, so where we can continue to digitize the way that our customers do business with us. You could look at it as self-service, but you could also look at it as being able to get customers answers faster, improving the customer experience. We've just put in AWS, what we call a Customer Experience Platform, so how customers come to us, whether by phone or digitally.
Again, that improves the customer experience, it improves productivity. All of those things, I think, again, will show up in retention, will show up in expense ratio. So it's a long way of saying, it has been showing up in a lot of different ways. It will continue to show up in our results. I believe that companies that have the ability to invest like we do will ultimately have greater success because it's just going to continue to improve the overall process, and I think make agents, make brokers, make ultimate customers want to do business with us.
Okay. No, it's-
I have one more thing to say.
Yeah, please.
Sorry.
No.
We talk a lot about the spend that we have. Our IT invest spend, a little over $500 million a year. But even in that spend, we are getting efficiency. What we can do with $500 million today is much more than we could have done with $500 million three, four years ago. We're investing in the productivity of our technology as well, which is allowing us to do more, and not have to increase the dollars as much as we would have had to in the past to get some of these results.
Okay. I'm glad there was a long answer, honestly, because I think it's important to highlight all of the details. Again, really, I think we're at the point where you're seeing enough success from what you're doing that we can actually talk about it. It's no longer this theoretical concept-
Yeah.
For some time in the future.
It is, and I think the caution is, as I said, it's not going to be one particular area that you see it.
Right.
To me, it's the whole ecosystem that we're looking at relative to our business model. The benefits that we're going to see are going to show up across the board, and I believe will ultimately position us for success.
Conceptually, just as a follow-up, is there any way of track. I guess there are a couple of indications, but how do you think about compare? And you made a point that's really important, and that is companies with the resources and probably the data systems to invest in this are going to pull ahead. How do you track that? In other words, the premise of the question is you have a lot of smaller competitors. They're not public. We don't see them here. But from my perspective, there's no way they can keep up. How do you see that in terms of the easiest wins? Because they are, I don't mean this as a personal criticism, but they're weak competitors.
Yeah, I think ultimately where it is going to show up is an increase in market share. I will go back to our small business division, where you can see the gains that we continue to have there and the growth that we have there. I continue to believe that that comes from the execution that we have, the ease of doing business with us. We have talked about that before, that that is so important in that segment of the market. Their overall results are just outstanding. So I think that is where you will see it over time.
Okay. I am going to be moving away from AI because while it touches everything, there are other things to talk about. I wanted to see whether there are questions in the room on that. If not, I am going to move to the reserve side because that was an area of, I would say, modest disappointment in the second quarter. You talked about being a few instances on the other liability occurrence side. I was hoping we could get a little more detail on what you saw, and more importantly, your confidence in it being addressed.
Yeah. So I would say, and I think I characterized this when we reported our results, is we had some modest adjustments that we made in general liability and a little bit in commercial auto. I think in the context of the overall reserve base, very modest for those lines. Obviously, when you look in total, our reserves continue to be in a very good place. We have talked about this before. We are continuing to watch trends in liability lines as it relates to what is characterized as social inflation. In the liability area, on the occurrence side, which is most of where our general liability reserves are, it was really in the excess and umbrella areas where we were just seeing elevated activity. When we do our reserve reviews, we are doing our reserve reviews on our liability lines by sub-line.
We look at the excess lines, we look at the umbrella lines, we look at it by the very segments. We are kind of doing it grounds up. As we evaluated it, and we looked at just some of the increases we were seeing in multiple areas, multiple lines, we felt it was prudent to make some adjustments. I think I said these words on the earnings call that these are lines we are going to be cautious about. They were modest adjustments and felt was the appropriate thing to do in looking at the trends that we saw and incorporating that into what we view going forward.
On the commercial auto side, there again, that was in the more recent years. When we looked at the severity associated with some of the claims, what we were seeing was that claims that in the past had settled for lower amounts were creeping up on the severity side. Again, we felt it appropriate to take some actions there. We continue our process. It is not just our actuaries. We have our claims folks in the room as well. We have our business leaders in the room as well. Because we want to make sure we are incorporating anything that we are seeing then into what the underwriting side is doing as they are in the marketplace, and again, making sure that we are getting the rate that we need to offset the trends that we are seeing.
It really is a cycle that we go through to look at all of the pieces and ask ourselves the questions on, okay, what is our expectation going forward? How do we incorporate that? We took the actions that we did.
This is a process question in terms of a follow-up. No one wants to go through this more than once. No one wants to go through it at all. What questions do you ask the actuaries and the claims folks just to make sure that the strengthening in the second quarter covers it and this topic goes away?
Yeah. That is the questions that we have is what are we seeing? What do we expect to see in the future? How do we increase our loss picks accordingly? We review our reserves every quarter for a reason, because activity comes in, and we evaluate it. Again, you are always trying to make that determination of what you are seeing today, how is that going to manifest itself in the future? We do that on lines like this every quarter, where we will look at them and make adjustments accordingly if needed, up or down.
Okay. Fantastic. On the topic of social inflation, obviously you have claims data, you have internal data. What external data do you look at to see whether perhaps social inflation is abating? We've had a couple of states with some level of tort reform. There are certainly some companies out there that have said, "We think it is stabilizing. We think rates are fine." I will leave my own personal views on that, but I am more interested in the internal process. What is it that you look at besides your internal claims information just to get a sense of what the broader outside world looks like?
Yeah. Obviously, we are looking at a lot of different trends that are out there. We are looking at what is happening from a jury awards perspective and what we are seeing there. We obviously continue to see a lot of advertisement that plaintiffs' attorneys continue to do. We look at that. We look at it by jurisdiction. Some of the reforms that you are talking about, we are watching those closely. Again, we do not want to be premature in incorporating significant change there into our views, whether it is in reserves or in pricing. We want to see it come through. We are encouraged by it. It is triangulating on a lot of different things that we are seeing within the environment.
Our government affairs group continues to be very active in pursuing reforms across the country, because we think that it is important, because it is a cost that everyone is bearing as we look at some of these awards.
I am very curious. With that, is there receptivity on the part of, I guess it would be legislators, or maybe there are regulators also, but legislators to this idea? Because I agree fundamentally with the premise that everything you buy is going to be influenced by the cost of liability insurance. But voters have to see that before some people will actually do anything about it, and I was hoping you would talk about that level of receptivity.
Yeah. I think it varies. I think there's some that maybe are more than others. Obviously, we have a lot of different constituents that are also on the other side-
Yes.
That are putting forth their point of view on that. Again, I think the fact that you've seen some states take action is a very positive sign and shows that there is receptivity to that and the impacts that it can have. But my personal view is I'm not sure that you're going to see something that's going to change dramatically overnight.
Okay. Is it too simple to say red state, blue state?
I'm not going to go there.
Okay, fair enough. Let me ask a question where hopefully there is more comfort. Does the social inflation experience vary between small commercial, middle market, and specialty?
It is there across the board. Maybe not to the same degree, just given size of limits and things of that sort. Yes, as we look across, we see pockets of it across the board. You see it in Personal Insurance, too.
Right. We will definitely get back to that because I think it is an important question. One more on the reserving side, though. There seems to be a pattern of reserve releases. Workers' compensation, it is consistent. It is perfectly consistent with what we have seen for reserving for The Hartford and beyond. We see every other quarter there are, and this is just the outcome, not the inputs, reserve releases in bond, reserve releases on the catastrophe side. I was hoping two questions. The less important one is what does that tell us about the schedule? The more important one is what does that tell us about The Hartford's reserving for these lines of business?
Yeah. Some lines of business we do not look at every quarter in great detail. Bond and our cat reserves are two of those lines. As you point out, we are on a six-month review. On the off quarter, we will look just to see if something dramatic has happened. Assuming not, then we do the more detailed reviews every six months. We have seen releases in both of those lines pretty consistently. A couple things I would point to. On the bond side obviously, we make our initial loss picks, but we have just seen very favorable experience, especially on the contractor side, where you have not seen a lot of contractors go bankrupt. Projects have been completed. As you evaluate all of that, as those things happen, then we reduce reserves.
But obviously when you put out those limits today, you have to take into consideration a variety of outcomes.
Right.
And so we've seen very favorable results there. On the catastrophe side, what we've seen there, a couple things. One area as it relates to hail activity, and if you go back several years, we had seen much higher hail severity from a loss perspective. And so when we book our catastrophes, again, you're booking it based on the information that you have, our estimates reflected that activity. Now we've done some things as it relates to our claims practices as when there are hailstorms to be more proactive in reaching out to claimants to make sure, to find out, do they have, for example, roof damage from hail. Sometimes you can have a hailstorm, someone has roof damage, they don't know that they have damage, and then that becomes the cause of loss.
And if it's not taken care of, you can end up with a much more severe loss because the roof doesn't improve with age if you have damage.
Right.
So being more proactive to understand where hailstorm activity happened and reaching out to our insureds to get on those claims more quickly, we believe has resulted in less large hail claim activity. And so some of that has come through. Same thing with other storms where large loss activity has just been a bit muted. But again, we want to be thoughtful when we put up our initial estimates, and we've seen those benefits come through, as you pointed out. And those are just a couple of examples of what's been happening on the cat line.
Okay. That's very helpful. You mentioned hail, which has been the locus of a fair amount of fraud. Do you have any sense in terms of whether, let me ask this differently, what experience have you seen in terms of the ability to identify and combat that?
Well, we do from an underwriting side, and roof scoring has become obviously more important in more recent years to really understand condition of roof before you place a risk. I think that that has also helped. Not that I would say that that's necessarily always fraud.
Obviously, depending on where a home or a business is located, the condition of the roof matters, especially as you think about some of the storm activity. So definitely, being more proactive on the front end relative to the roof scoring, and on the back end from a claims handling perspective, using our claim adjusters to really evaluate the exposure and get some of this damage addressed more quickly.
Okay. One final follow-up on the hail question, if you will. Has your coverage changed? Talk about roof scoring. There are some insurers that have said, "Okay, if your roof is damaged, we'll pay you what it was worth before the damage instead of buying you a new roof.
Yeah. I guess on that specific, I am sure there are some things like that that we have done, but not anything that I would point to kind of wholesale. I know the teams from an underwriting side are constantly looking at what levers can be pulled as we think about those exposures. I am sure there is some of that going on, but I cannot really comment on how broadly.
Okay. If there are questions in the room, please raise your hand, and we will get the microphone to you. I wanted to dig a little bit, it is not a huge line of business, but global reinsurance. Reinsurance is a huge category. I was hoping you could nail down for us or describe what you are writing, what you are attracted to, what you think prospects are going forward.
Yeah. It is a nice business for us, the coverages that we provide, think property, some specialty casualty, CPRI, political risk type exposures. I think the nice part about this business, as you can see from our size, we are not a big reinsurer.
Right.
It really does allow us to be very selective, and where we place limits allows us to really have a very deep understanding of the insurers that we are providing the reinsurance to. I think that the way that that team has managed that book kind of shows up in their results, and it allows us to be very flexible. It is a nice little business for us, is how I would characterize it.
Okay. I was in Monte Carlo earlier this week. There is a lot of capacity for reinsurance, even on the casualty side. What is the selling point to the global cedents? What is it that they get from The Hartford that they wouldn't get elsewhere?
Yeah, some of it is sort of our ability, as I said, to sort of be very selective and develop relationships with insureds, and allow us to participate in that market. Again, we're not looking to be broad-based and be everything to everybody, but we have a very sort of niche business, and we're able to kind of fill in protection for insureds that need it and feel good about how we're deploying the capital that we put to that line.
Okay. Fantastic. I want to make sure I get this right. Within the financial supplement, you talk about global specialty having Lloyd's and other international markets, and I am very curious as to what the other international markets are? Like, where is The Hartford that we don't necessarily think of?
Yeah. It's relatively small. Think of it, we have a U.K. branch, we have a Canadian branch, so very small activity like that. It could be an area over time that you might see more in, but it's really in those particular areas right now.
Okay. We should think of those as being the specialty products-
Yeah.
That would also be done in Lloyd's and elsewhere. I want to spend a little bit of time on personal lines. First, the fundamental question, and this is a bad question because you've already got the AARP business, so you're not starting from scratch. What are the ambitions and scale required in the agency side?
Yeah. We are starting from a position, obviously, of having the AARP business. As you know, as we've talked about for several years now, we've done a lot to upgrade the platform that that business is on. So from the technology that we have, the pricing sophistication that we have kind of across the board, and we've talked about that and rolling that out on the direct side. On the agency side, we are then now taking that product to the agency segment of the market. I think it's important to remember that we're also not starting from scratch there. We have very strong agent relationships on our Business Insurance side. We've heard from agents that they would like to have a Personal Insurance product that they could sell from The Hartford.
We're leveraging that distribution relationships we already have to bring in this product. Again, still very much focused on a similar profile to what we have in AARP. We're not looking to be the insurer for everybody, kind of being in our sweet spot. We believe that we have the pricing sophistication to be able to compete in that marketplace. I mean, obviously, agency is different than direct. Agency oftentimes leads with the home product. Part of being able to launch into the agency market was improving our home capabilities and products and things we were just talking about as it relates to roof scoring and things like that. So, definitely is a focus there, and we've been very pleased with the rollout so far.
We're in 23 states and continuing that rollout, getting very favorable feedback from agents and happy that we have the product that they want. I look at it as we're leveraging our relationships that we have on the Business Insurance side, and we're leveraging the capabilities that we have from the direct market and bringing that into the Personal Insurance agency market.
Is it reasonable? You talked about the agency overlap, and I think that makes perfect sense. The Hartford is the crown jewel of small commercial. Is there potential overlap in the customers?
Yeah, potentially. Yeah, absolutely. We could look to see that because again, as you think about an agent who is working with a small business owner, looking to then provide the Personal Insurance side, we think that there definitely could be some overlap there.
Okay, fantastic. I am going to scan the room again to see if there are questions. I want to spend a little time on personal auto because I've been spending a lot of time actually on ISO data, which shows almost surprisingly low levels of frequency. Again, this is for the industry as a whole, for the 50% odd of companies that report to ISO, where frequency for most auto sublines is back down towards or approximating COVID levels, which surprises people because there's a lot more driving going on now. I don't know whether that matches every individual company, but I was hoping you could talk about that, and then I want to follow up-
Yeah.
On the severity side.
Yeah. For our data, from a frequency perspective, we are definitely still a bit below pre-COVID levels. I would say we're a little bit above COVID levels. We're kind of like in between.
Right.
Maybe that's a little different than what you might be referring to. But when we sort of see it, that's kind of where our data puts us.
Right. Okay. On the severity side, and again, recognizing that it may not be a perfect mapping, severity, other than bodily injury, which to me is the auto subline facing social inflation, we're also not seeing much in the way of severity, which that's lagging information. Does that match what you're seeing in your more specific customer segment?
Yeah. When we think about from a physical damage perspective, what we've seen from severity has come in a little bit better than we would've anticipated. Some of that we were anticipating probably a little bit more impact from tariffs and things like that, which hasn't really manifested itself.
Right.
But yeah, from a physical damage severity perspective, that definitely has been coming in a bit favorable to what we would've thought. To your point, on the bodily injury side, we've been watching that and severity there being a bit higher.
Okay, perfect. Last reserve-ish question is on asbestos, which is impossible to do. How are you approaching that asbestos issue? Because we're at the point now where the liabilities are back on your balance sheet. How is that changing your approach? How are you thinking about asbestos in a world where, broadly speaking, if we look at the industry, there seems to be sort of annual strengthening?
Yeah. We do our annual study, so that is one of our reserve reviews that is done on an annual basis, and we do asbestos and environmental in the fourth quarter. I would say that our philosophy there has not changed even when we have the reinsurance cover. When we do the review each year, a big part of the review is grounds up. We are looking at the large accounts that we have that we know have exposure, and we are doing very specific reviews of those accounts. Because you can imagine it gets very complicated, right? You have an account, but asbestos coverage and exposure can go over multiple years, and it kind of depends on what years were you on, where is the exposure, and they have complicated charts like this big paper to look at all of that.
It is a very detailed review, going account by account, thinking about what we would expect to see for new cases coming in. Asbestos, I have been around this for a long time now, and if you go back 20 years, people would have thought that there would not be any new asbestos claims coming in. But the dip had not started to happen the way people thought. We have started to see some indications of declines, but then you get talc exposures come in with asbestos. There is a mix there. Our view is every year, using the best data that we have, evaluate the accounts, evaluate the exposures that we have, and make any adjustments. Sometimes those adjustments are from settlements that we reach. We have a particular account, and we decide that we are going to basically buy back the coverage.
That can affect the results as well. There really are a lot of pieces that go into that. Environmental, same thing. We can have, in any particular year, maybe the cost for a specific site cleanup is more elevated than we thought. Sometimes things come in better than we thought, so that moves around as well. But it is why we take a year to do the study. It is not as if we start it in the fourth quarter. It is a lengthy review, where, again, we are making our best calls across multiple years, multiple coverages, multiple insureds.
Okay. We have time for one more question, so if there is one in the room, we will take it. If not, I want to talk about the changing distribution world. I do not want to lead the witness by saying that I think that it is a great opportunity that the big brokers are coming into middle market and small account. How are you thinking about that?
Yeah. I think given where we are positioned in those markets, given how we're positioned with the larger brokers, net, we see it as very constructive for us and our ability to continue to get market share. We obviously watch all of that consolidation very closely. But net-net, I would agree with how you led the witness-
Oops. Sorry about that-
That it's a positive.
When do those conversations happen? In other words, there's this theoretical mindset I have where you can go to Aon and say, "It makes sense for you to do more business with us through your side.
Our team is actively engaging with our top brokers and agents all the time, having those conversations, and having them as a conversation across our various lines of business. One thing that we're very proud of is that when we show up with our brokers and agents, we're showing up as The Hartford.
Right.
We're not showing up as small business, middle and large, global specialty, and it's really important to us to make sure that our distribution partners understand the full suite of things that we can do.
Okay. Fantastic. With that, we have come to the end of our session. Beth, this was fantastic as always. Thank you so much.
Thank you.