Okay, in the interest both of punctuality and because I think there is an awful lot of importance and interest that should come from this session, I want to thank you all, and we'll move on to the Ryan Specialty segment. There are some pending changes in terms of senior management positions. So I'm sort of going to dispense with that and introduce people on the stage. Obviously, to my immediate right is Pat Ryan, who has, if you don't mind my saying so, demonstrated more vision about the insurance industry over the course of his career than I would say anybody else on the planet. We've got Tim Turner, who will be becoming CEO, Jeremiah Bickham, moving to the president role, and Miles Wuller. Let me try that again. Miles Wuller, who heads underwriting management for Ryan.
And we also have Janice Hamilton, who will be taking over for Jeremiah as CFO, and behind the screen here, from my perspective, Nick Mezick, who heads investor relations. So we've got a wealth of knowledge here. And I wanted to start maybe with a small ball question, and that is: we had the US Assure acquisition announced, and its financials are absolutely phenomenal, just in terms of growth prospects and the margins that it generates. And we're, in my seat, we're not privy to how representative that is of some of the acquisitions that are out there. It's not the most recent acquisition you've announced, but just in terms of the positive shock value of its results, what else is like that out there?
I think it's fair to say that, program businesses that are well established, provide a tremendous value to the marketplace because they're specialists, they're experts in a given industry, product, and in US Assure's case, construction and builders risk, in a market niche of very small contractors. That's a family business. Second generation are now late 50s, broad family ownership, time to sell. Too many family members not involved in the business. There are lots of others out there like that. This is very unique in its scale, and its market leadership position in, in that sort of very small contractor niche. And as a result, of having one market for 44 years, Zurich, several people looking at it thought that was a disadvantage. We thought it was an advantage. Zurich's a great company.
Their average premium is $4,400. Most people say you can't make a profit handling a $4,400 average premium. They started trading electronically in 1997, so very advanced technologically. And so that was representative of everything we wanted in a program: industry specialists, product specialists, electronic trading, and a very strong market niche. Now, to answer your question, they are unique, but there are others like that. They're family businesses. They're businesses that were started by entrepreneurs. Now they're looking at what's gonna be happening and major investments that are required in the next few years, AI being obviously one of the drivers. And so there's a growing number of businesses that are now deciding, probably time to look for a partner, time to maybe take chips off the table. So we were very excited to be selected.
It was interesting because Zurich selecting buyers that they would approve, did not want any sponsored companies, and they didn't want any captive carriers. They didn't want to give it to their competitors. So by virtue of our status, stature in delegated authority, we were one of the few selected to get the opportunity. But we said for all of our time in business, almost 15 years, that programs have not been rolled up. Binding authorities have not been rolled up, contract binding. So there's a lot of opportunity in rolling up those two areas. And then discrete MGUs, there's still a lot of those out there. So as we said on our last call, pipeline's robust and new quality opportunities for the reasons I just mentioned.
Meyer, I do just want to jump in before people in their models get too excited in the audience. There's not an infinite amount of delegated authority businesses that can operate sustainably in the mid-sixties. This is one of the unique attributes of this really scarce property. It's largely, as Pat said, largely attributed to two things: high amount of profit commission revenue, which is high margin revenue, but also the really unique, really broad, high-efficiency digital trading platform, where the majority of the policies don't even have to be touched by a human. However, there are delegated authority businesses. I would say the majority of the ones that we're targeting are margin accretive to Ryan's consolidated margin today. And so as we've talked about in the near term, a target margin of 35% for consolidated Ryan, that's at today's business mix.
If we continue on an M&A pace that we think is possible and that business mix shifts significantly, the target margin of 35 could come up.
Okay, that's tremendously helpful. I want to do one more question on US Assure. We obviously have a lot to cover, but can you talk about the processes involved in the integration and adding products to their platform?
Yeah, no, appreciate it. So look, as my colleagues highlighted, this is a very rare and unique asset that we're gonna be thoughtful in the integration. To give a sense of their reach and scope and scale, this is a platform that has 145,000 bound policies on it. Average premium is less than $5,000. There's 20,000 unique retail agencies coming to the portal, and a multiple of that when you think of the actual individual users. So we bought this very much for the platform and its reach into the marketplace, so we're gonna be very thoughtful not to tinker with that. The things that we would touch, they're things that are usually quite helpful to entrepreneurs.
Like, so we're gonna take over benefits, payroll, managing T&E. That gives the average entrepreneur 20%-30% back in their time to focus on underwriting, distribution, innovation. And then there are certain control features you'd expect us to take over, things like, handling of cash and accounting. But the goal, Meyer, is to bring incremental resources to their platform, incremental tools onto that distribution. So I'm gonna answer your question about new product in two ways, and we've touched on this on our call. We expect to be immediately accretive by converting. They have tens of thousands of kick-outs per annum, so these would be submissions that do not fit into the admitted marketplace. Then we look across Ryan's expertise of E&S broking and high-hazard E&S, builders risk.
We will immediately be able to be more useful to their existing retailers, offering them E&S solutions on those quotes, driving revenue and driving a higher conversion rate. And then in the future, this is a, now a known, universe of small retailers representing small builders. We're confident that they have use for, business owners, package policies, contractors liability, and so the next evolution will be to push new product back down that channel.
Is that also on the same platform, or is that going through the other resources that Ryan has?
That's a great question. There's a fair chance that some of these products we have elsewhere within our network, and if we've already made the investment, the retailers are coming to the portal today, and if we can't deliver them on that portal, we will have that entry point reference other existing Ryan platforms. So we expect it to be seamless, and but we'll avoid any duplication.
Okay, fantastic. I'm gonna stay on the M&A theme for a little bit because there's another interesting acquisition done relatively recently, which was Castel, highlighting really two things, some of which have subsequently been proven. Insurance companies, in many cases, are divesting MGAs, which is a great opportunity, but also the international component of it, where you don't really have an E&S marketplace, but you'll certainly have a need for specialty underwriting expertise, and I was hoping we could broadly discuss your appetite for organic and inorganic growth outside of the U.S.
Yeah. So we are overseas for almost our full fourteen or fifteen years of existence. Castel did actually allow us to double our underwriting presence overseas. So Castel brought a few things. Number one, perfect cultural fit, as my colleagues touched on earlier. This is a team of entrepreneurs, builders. They understand their fiduciary duty to carriers while still posting good growth results. And so this acquisition brought us twelve new MGUs overseas. Ten of them were incremental products to us, completely expansive. Two of them were allowed us to double down in product space we believe in, renewable energy and SME rep and warranty. So, new products, it allowed us as an incremental management team on the ground, Europe.
So I don't need to tell anyone this, it's not the United States of Europe. The individual rules of law, language barriers, buying habits, it's very important to have an on-the-ground executive team that's over there, doing door-to-door sourcing of incremental teams and acquisitions for us. We think having those resources strengthens what we have, increases our utility to the marketplace over there, and it's gonna become an attractant to incremental teams. I think within that, Meyer, you touched on Lloyd's. Lloyd's is a major source of capital for us and an esteemed trading partner, but we also service the company markets over there as well. We are balanced between Lloyd's and the companies.
Okay, but if I'm interpreting your comments correctly, that you seem very optimistic about the international opportunities.
It is a focus for expansion and rolling up. So actually, if you from a timeline perspective, delegated authority has been in Europe longer than it is in the U.S., just as a function of Lloyd's. It has a several hundred year head start. However, it remains smaller, more pocketed. It has not been rolled up meaningfully by a scale player like us that can bring the incremental resources to those teams.
Okay, fantastic. If there are questions in the audience, please don't hesitate to raise your hand and let me know, and we'll get you the mic and proceed with questions, but in the interim, one of the things that Pat mentioned before, and that you're working on now, is actually rolling up underwriting management, delegated authority businesses, and I was hoping you could talk about what are the scale advantages that are associated with that, and what are the opportunities and advantages that strategy brings?
I think first of all, on the scale, building the support system that large carriers have inside the MGU is critical. So we invested from the very beginning in actuarial support, and cat modeling data scientists. It takes a lot of investment to really be able to support an MGU the way a carrier is entitled to have that support. So it's very capital intensive. Now, fortunately, we were able to invest a major part of that capital before we went public, so we were in full stride in terms of being able to support it as we went public, before we went public. So I think scale is really very, very important, but it's hard to get scale. And so first person I hired was this guy. The second person was an actuary. Why an actuary?
Cause we wanted to build the infrastructure to be able to do delegated authority the proper way.
Fantastic. I kinda wanna say that everyone should hire actuaries, but there's a little, internal bias as far as that goes. When public company D&O pricing went soft in mid-2022, there's a lot of theories in terms of why it was that particular line of business that went soft. You know, there was an argument to be made that pricing had overshot the mark. There was an argument that the spike in interest rates led to a decrease in capital markets activity, so you had more companies competing for a finite or a shrinking pool of business. And there was also the occasional finger or two pointed at MGAs and MGUs. And I was hoping maybe if we can broaden that question: for underwriting management to be successful, it has to be profitable for the capital provider.
I was hoping you could talk through how Ryan ensures that your current and your growing stable of MGAs, MGUs, even on the binding authority side, how they maintain that level of profitability.
Yeah. Well, there is a strong governance and oversight mechanism, and it starts in that investment that, you know, full credit to Pat for having the insight to let us start this investment 15 years ago. So when you look at us today, we have a team of 45 staff dedicated to supporting these businesses, and those folks range from pricing actuaries, reserving actuaries, cat modelers, data scientists. We have folks dedicated to audit, governance, and oversight. And so what's happening is we actually set our own reserves quarterly for our business.
That is our duty of care to the carriers to make sure that we are achieving rate targets, giving them the right spread of risk, we are fully within the parameters of the underwriting guidelines, and then ultimately, we're creating our own scorecard as we go, called our ultimate and combined ratio. Our thesis is, we never wanna surprise the carrier. We want to be taking action on our portfolio and underwriting methods well before we need to be told. I think through seasons of doing that, our staff are conditioned that they need to be self-serving in that manner. If they need to hear from our Chief Underwriting Officer, Chief Reserving Actuary, or myself, they've already probably lost.
It all starts with our numbers are distributed quarterly to the entire management team. They're not preconditioned. People do not wanna be on any kind of watchlist. They're expected to take action, and it's through governance. It's also a point of pride, Meyer, 'cause we're kinda like everybody in this room. We all have our own personal track record, and the results of these underwriters do follow them. That's gone a long way, and we now have that record where the carrier partners are seeing that and are growing their footprint with us.
One final, maybe, question on the delegated underwriting management side of things. You compete with other MGAs, MGUs in two ways. You're competing for business, you're competing for capacity, and I was hoping you could update us on what the current state of trade is for both of those arenas of competition.
Yeah, appreciate that. So we pride ourselves on being a destination of choice for both employees and acquisition targets, and it's for all the reasons that we mentioned here. So if you're an employee making a jump to us, you are assured a broad toolbox of that you can reach into, be it technology, actuarial. You can receive introductions to carriers at the C-suite level from any of us up here, introductions to distribution at the C-suite level from anyone up here. So what we offer new hires and acquisitions is increased certainty, increased speed to market, and a deep pool of resources to draw from.
And what is happening is people that have either gone it alone or gone from a smaller competitor, you know, they're targeting a pie that maybe is this big, and in our universe, they can target a pie that's a multiple of that. And it's come to life, and it's even more prevalent and apparent as we're a public company, and it's actually accelerating our rate of hiring. And I would say, Meyer, our track record of underwriting results is also has a compounding effect on our ability to launch new programs, right? Because the carriers we trade with, once we've delivered successful to them on product A and B, they want to be in line on product B and C.
We've even had carriers where we've offered total portfolio solutions, where people are taking a slice of our overall result because we are one of the few platforms well-diversified, growing, and delivering significant underwriting profit to those partners.
All right. Thank you. I'm gonna move on slightly. I think because I should only speak for myself, the shocking financials that you as shareholders probably we didn't spend as much time on the call talking about the exclusive arrangement with PCS. And I was hoping you could talk us through, you know, what led to that, and what are the future incremental opportunities for Ryan with these exclusive distribution capabilities and relationships?
Well, the genesis of that was, AIG had witnessed that we had some unique talent in our high net worth line in terms of underwriters in our contract binding business. That talent was attractive to them, and our distribution of those products was attractive to them, and they felt that they needed a distribution partner. Now, the market is obviously able to come through, but they have to enter through us as the exclusive distributor. It was a judgment that was made by senior management at AIG. We worked with them on the potential.
We believe that the E&S market is the solution for a lot of the problems that admitted carriers have. You can see that the change of risk profile on wildfire, wind, on convective storms, that the losses are just accelerating way beyond what admitted markets can adjust to. And so the belief is that the business has to go into the E&S market. And not everybody believes that, but we do. And I believe that AIG has demonstrated that they do, and so that's really how it happened.
Thank you. And in terms of, like, future opportunities like that?
Well, it's hard to predict, but we pride ourselves on continuing to improve our offering to our retail broker clients for their insureds, and then for wholesale, competitive wholesalers, we have many relationships. We just keep developing solutions that we anticipate are gonna be needed, and people have identified us then as somebody they want to partner with. Nationwide Mutual did almost six years ago, and that's worked out really well.
Mm-hmm.
AIG just did it recently. We just announced the deal with, Mag Mutual on some healthcare products to work together on. So I think as we've demonstrated our ability to be innovative and to take that to market in an effective way, capital providers are saying, "Well, let's do it together," and that's attractive. Can't predict any more but we're certainly preparing for more.
Right. I did want to say, as a sell-sider, it's the easiest thing in the world to predict. Of course, the problem, hard part is being right. Take a step back, because there were a number of perspectives that really led to the establishment of Ryan in the first place, certain trends that you foresaw. And I want to get an update in terms of where we are in terms of them playing out. So we'll start with wholesale broker panel consolidation, 'cause that was a big deal, and we still have a fairly fragmented retail market. How far along is that process as a growth driver?
In the wholesale, open market wholesale, there are three large ones. There are some other that are owned by retailers that are smaller. And then there are some very small ones owned by retailers. There are not many, sizable boutiques, but there are a few. Contract binding is not very mature in the roll-up. There's a lot of contract binding businesses out there that we believe, for the reasons of investment and capital that's required, will become available. Programs is the same way. And then discrete MGUs. There are some very attractive, discrete MGUs out there that are, as I said earlier in my comments, family-owned, entrepreneurial-owned. And there have been some very successful entrepreneurs who've developed MGU solutions but they're looking at how much capital, they wanna put in. So, I would say it's mature on the open market wholesale, and immature on the others.
All right. Thank you. A similar question with regard to climate change, because another point that you've made, and this is before the IPO, and it's absolutely proven out since then, is that the increasing riskiness of the world, I don't think that's how you phrased it, but just recognizing that climate change is producing a steadily growing risk, universe that will require more and more specialized underwriting, that will require more and more reliance on the wholesale channel. Last year we had a pretty big shift of property business from standard to specialty markets. How much of that momentum, or, I should say, white space, is still there to play out?
It continues to flow into the E&S market. We have from all measurements, we see double-digit growth in cat property. But it's not just wind, you know, it's not just wildfire, it's convective storm. The estimates now on the annual reserves are $171 billion. Just a very impactful segment of business that really keeps the underwriting community disciplined, very disciplined, and that's what you're seeing today. While there might be some minor rate deceleration in cat wind, we're not seeing any change in flow, and we're not seeing any migration of the non-admitted cat property business going back to the standard market, i.e., no disruptors. You'd have to have what we call a disruptor, an admitted market, comes in with a outsized limit and knocks off a couple of E&S carriers, and it moves back into the standard market.
No sign of that whatsoever, and we have to remind ourselves we're in the middle of hurricane season, the second half being the most volatile. September and October, the largest storms in history have happened in October, so there's three brewing in the Atlantic as we speak. Wildfire season really starting to percolate, if you will. This week's very tough week for California, 100 degrees Fahrenheit predicted every day. That Los Padres National Forest, with what they call the Ring of Fire, is really becoming quite volatile. And then everything in between, the convective storms, the flood doing as much damage as cat wind or wildfire the last two or three years. So no letup on the, you know, the volatility of that class of business on the balance sheets of the big standard companies.
So again, we see a tremendous amount of discipline and limit deployment. That's a big deal. No, no one's putting out an outsized limit on these big risks, and so that inures to our benefit, our services, and our ability to create large amounts of shared and layered towers of cat capacity remains in high demand.
How, if at all, does the profile of the property business that moved to E&S markets last year differ from the business that's moving this year? What dictates who goes quickly, and which ones take longer to actually make that decision?
Certainly Tier 1 wind would be the loss leader in the cat world. So anything coastal with a high concentration of value is gonna need a wholesale broker. Anything close to the Los Padres National Forest, even personal lines, as we know, is pouring into the E&S market. Anything that needs to be layered and structured with a bigger limit needs our services, so there's no change in that demand for those services. In fact, there's more consolidation of the use of intermediaries benefits us, as you know. We're seeing movement into our divisions and our specialty areas, retailers continuing to consolidate, and that's moving into, you know, Tier 2, which we would call the 400 excess of the top 100 retail agents consolidating.F
A lot of PE roll-ups in that layer, and then tens of thousands of retail brokers that we picked up in the US Assure acquisition, that we now have the ability to market, you know, Tier 3 solutions, smaller solutions into that layer. So a lot of movement, a lot of these volatile factors, keeping the market honest and creating more opportunities for us to expand.
Okay. That's, I mean, I don't wanna say it's good news. It's bad news that we've got this weather out there. It's good news that the opportunity to manage that risk intelligently exists, so, there's some comfort in that. Another category of what seems to be ever-increasing risk is cyber. We did have a little bit of softness in cyber pricing. I don't know how that has interacted with a shift to, needing wholesale brokers. Hoping you could talk through what you're seeing there over the last year and this year.
Yeah, so I think 2022, just to rebuild maybe the last three years, so the industry achieved substantial rate in 2022. Last year, there was actually one of the highest years for recorded ransomware. However, there was not really a broad-based, catastrophic, systemic event across the industry, and that actually did attract new capital and started to put pressure on rate as we came into this year. But I would say, CrowdStrike was probably an awakening and perhaps epiphany moment for the industry. So some of the early estimates went as high as $4 billion.
It's come down to perhaps $1 billion, but I, I'd want to make a couple comments. Number one, cyber has a much longer tail than folks tend to estimate, right? So I think a lot of folks would say the, the computers were down for five hours, try to calculate some business interruption. It really doesn't end there, 'cause when you think of something like CrowdStrike, the secondary losses are, a s an example, I would give you, maybe an employee had an assignment due, they forwarded something from their iPhone to a personal computer, and you now have work product on a personal computer that gets hacked in nine or 10 months.
So I just want to give the example that just because CrowdStrike was fixed in forty-eight hours, that does not negate the tail of some of these attacks. And so I think what's gonna happen is, it is hopefully found some firming in pricing, and it's definitely my prediction would be, it's gonna change buying habits, particularly in the boardroom.
Because if you are a, if you are a corporate risk manager or head of IT, that has now had an outage been exposed to an outage like that, and that wasn't malicious by the way, that was purely operational in nature, took many people down. I think we're, I'm predicting kind of an epiphany in buying habit, and most published data would say that 80% of U.S. companies remain either under-insured or uninsured, and that's why we've had conviction in this space, you know, regardless of minor hardening or softening and rate.
Great. And again, if there are questions in the room, please just raise your hand and let me know. If you go back to 2022, Ryan did a lot of hiring. And it's often the case that that hiring is a bit of a leading indicator of future productivity. And we've seen that really at a number of companies over the past few years. I was hoping to get an update on how that cohort is ramping up, and maybe how much more productivity gains there are until they're at full speed.
Our model is typically, when you're talking about production hires, Meyer, they've reached breakeven by the end of year two, and by the end of year three or sometime in the third year, they're at a target or accretive margin. And the entire, when you look at the class of 2022, which was outsized, they are on track or ahead of schedule in terms of delivering that. And again, we've got some theories about what led to the greater hiring opportunity. We haven't seen an opportunity at that proportionate scale since, but I want to reiterate, like, that type of organic hiring, we are so effective at it, it is so accretive.
We've got such a high batting average at developing talent. It's the best investment we can make. So if there's another opportunity that comes along for whatever reason, dislocation in the market, whatever, we're gonna make that trade-off for short-term margin impact, for the long-term sustainability of our growth.
And should we think of that as primarily relevant to the wholesale specialty, or does that also impact underwriting management and binding authority in terms of both recruitment possibilities and the timeline for product, for productivity?
They're surprisingly very close when you're talking about production on the underwriting versus broking side. The X factor on the underwriting side is when you hire them, where you are in getting capital behind them. Our speed to market in terms of putting facilities together has gotten faster, so that's less and less a constraint for the underwriting producers to ramp up. So the average, you know, time to covering their cost and margin accretion is actually very, very similar across both specialties.
Okay, that's very helpful. I'm sorry, is there a question in the back? Yeah, John, sorry, go ahead.
Thanks. Quick question. Historically, the E&S market's been a little more volatile than the standard lines, and it feels like we're due for a correction. But yet you point out all the structural changes and, you know, AIG coming to market, looking to place more. Like, structure is now running the show versus price. Is that? Do you not see this? Do you see the cycle smoothing out? Thank you.
No, I would say this, that we firmly believe that the cycles that we've witnessed... I've been through three myself, Pat's been through five. There's so many different factors today that lead us to believe that we're not gonna see that same ebb and flow, that same swing back the other way, and it starts with these structural changes. One of them is on the supply side. So the markets themselves, with data and analytics, have learned that, you know, selling monoline, non-admitted P&C products through wholesale-only distribution lines, was much more beneficial to them to do it that way. Lexington led the way. Lots of studies have been done on this. McKinsey put out a few really good reports about it, and so that started the shift. In 2008, 2009, markets started to tighten up their distribution lines.
In the last soft market, there were less than a half a dozen wholesale-only distribution companies. In the last fifteen years, standard companies have bought E&S companies. So you saw AIG tighten up to Lexington, Liberty with Ironshore, Travelers with Northfield, Northland, Hartford with Navigators, and so on. Dozens of them bought into the E&S wholesale-only distribution line. So today we have over 105 wholesale-only distribution companies. That's really strengthened those distribution lines and made it very difficult for outsiders to come in and penetrate those lines. That's a big structural change. Conversely, on the retail side, data analytics led them to see the gross inefficiencies in using as many as seven or eight hundred intermediaries 15 years ago. That was the norm for a global or a national retailer. So they knew it was expensive around regulatory compliance and E&O, big factors like that.
And so they moved with this new RFP era that started in 2009, 2010, 2011, that we saw happening and capitalized on it. Part of our structure was all about practice group vertical integration to really get the retailers' favor as they consolidated, and we did very well at that, if I do say so myself. But that's continuing. Those buying habits are moving to more consolidation as it's benefited those retail brokers immensely. They drove those inefficiency costs out of the model on brokerage. They elevated the execution of the deliverable itself. The products and the solutions are better with that consolidated approach, and so we see that being a structural change. We see that starting to happen in delegated underwriting authority, which is 40%, maybe 45% of the total addressable market and non-admitted. That's just underway.
There's very few models, ours would be one of them, that could take a consolidation of the use of delegated underwriting authority. You have to be big enough and deep enough to handle a large retailer moving binding authority business or moving program business. You can't just move it on a broker record letter in many cases. You have to be able to duplicate those facilities and those proprietary products that exist. So it's a, it's an opportunity, a tremendous opportunity that, that lies ahead for us. So as we build out programs, binding authority, and, and MGUs, MGAs, it's with that opportunity in mind. We want to be the leaders, and we want to capitalize on the consolidation of that business. We, we believe those structural changes will make it very difficult for that market to swing back.
We've got just a few moments left, but I wanna pose one question, just looking forward. We do have some senior management role changes coming. What should we expect from that, those of us on the outside?
Not much, I can assure you. He's still the head coach, still making all the big calls on the real large decisions every day, but if anything, you know, we help take a few things off Pat's plate, right? Lighten up the load. You know, we're growing by billions of dollars every year. That has a tail on it. There's latency to that. Lots of challenges come from growing at the rate that we're growing, so it allowed all of us to spread out those challenges and take a lot of that off of Pat's plate and to create more depth and breadth at the executive leadership level so that we can continue to grow exponentially without slowing down and without creating inefficiencies in our ability to service our own people, our clients, and our markets.
So not a lot of changes, some subtle ones, but believe me, no one goes harder than Pat, as you know, so don't expect any real changes. It's a succession plan that is built for the future. We wanna make it as seamless as possible for our investors and our shareholders and our people, and that's exactly what we hope to achieve with this, these changes, but it's business as usual in terms of the big decision making.
Let me add something to that. We have functioned as a management group very effectively. I'm very proud of the career progression that my colleagues have realized. We have developed a tremendous amount of talent, young talent, in their thirties and forties and even many in their twenties, so there's tremendous career progression. Our whole organization has bought into the culture. The culture is truly differentiating. The culture empowers people. The culture is pay for performance. People perform at very high levels, and there's a pride in the professionalism. There's a pride in the trust that people put in us, so nobody believes we should change the culture. People believe that we have the right strategy, that we've carved out a role that is sustainable, that... You know, people say, "Well, you're a wholesaler." That's true.
We are a wholesaler, but we're way more than that. The original founding thesis was to be in the specialty lines. It wasn't to be in the wholesale business. Wholesale was a method of being in the specialty lines, the most effective one, but the strategy remains the same, differentiated intellectual capital and specialty lines. All of our team beyond this group are bought into that. Another very foundational principle was keep hiring talent. Bring in young talent out of universities and colleges and train them in specialty areas, specialty lines, as brokers or underwriters.
Keep feeding talent, and the opportunities will follow. And so all of that says that the future is continuity, and I'm very proud that we've got a platform that we believe is sustainable and that the talent that we have developed believe in that, and they wanna not just sustain it, continue it and expand it. So that's the future.
If the future is anything like what we've seen so far, it's gonna be fantastic, and that seems to be the way to bet. Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking the Ryan team. Thank you.