It's still morning, so good morning. Our next session is with Jack Roche, CEO, and Jeff Farber, CFO of Hanover. The format is gonna be the same as what we've done through all these sessions. Jack is gonna start with some opening comments, and then I'll present some questions. If there are questions in the audience, again, we really wanna make sure that we're getting the information that you're looking for. So don't hesitate to signal, raise your hand or whatever. Despite the bright lights, eventually we'll see that there's a question and respond to that. With that, Jack and Jeff, thank you very much.
Well, thank you, Meyer. Thanks for the opportunity this morning. We're excited to update you a little bit on our company and address some important questions as these are truly dynamic times in our business. I think those of you that have followed us say that we are constantly trying to really digest and articulate how all these dynamics are facing us in the P&C sector, and our belief that the better companies, frankly, will benefit, frankly, from some of these dynamics that are facing our industry.
We believe, as a company, that we've elevated to that level, that the last five years of our performance has kind of lived up to all the work that we've done over the last decade and a half to reposition the company, both from a product set standpoint, from a distribution strategy standpoint, and ultimately from a consistent return perspective. All of that, in our minds, sets us up for the next five years, where we should be able to embrace the change that's around us, use the enhanced skills and capabilities that we work so hard to build, to frankly outsmart the competition. In our business, I think as we've talked about over the last several years, the better companies in our business tend to overdistribute or they've become distribution agnostic.
That doesn't make them bad. Matter of fact, some of those strategies are quite sound. What makes us unique as a company is that we are entirely focused on the top agents in the country, a subset of those, big, medium, and small, ones that our underwriting capabilities, our products are a good fit, and they have a desire to build mutually beneficial partnerships, to help transform the way customers experience our business. I know we'll get into this with some of the questions, but we've never been more prepared to take on the changes that are coming to us, and to turn those into true opportunity for our firm.
Fantastic. Let me start with a basic question in response to what you've said, and I'm gonna start on the Core Commercial side of things.
Mm-hmm.
If you could highlight some of the differentiators between Hanover and competitors and give us an update on the competitive marketplace. Underlying that question is the premise that, on the one hand, there are a large number of regional carriers that are operating in a similar space that probably don't have the same capabilities. On the other hand, we're seeing some major players, and I'm thinking, as I say this, Progressive and Chubb looking at small commercial as a growth opportunity. In that context, how does Hanover compete? How does Hanover win?
Sure. Well, we certainly look at the Core Commercial lines business as one of the core elements of our portfolio and our company. It is the business that frankly attaches us to the distribution on a day-to-day basis. The small commercial business is incredibly relevant to all size agents, particularly given the consolidation of the business. Middle market will always be relevant because the top producers are out trying to write good-sized accounts and not just feed a small commercial model. In that, we have very much differentiated ourselves over time. In small commercial, we're one of very few companies that does BOP accounts for the smaller portions of small commercial and CPP accounts or package accounts where it takes a little bit more underwriting. There's a little bit more coverage variation.
The combination of doing both of those, particularly for agents now that are looking at doing more with less from a carrier standpoint, just gives us a wider universe and an ability to help those agents and not just be their BOP market or like the regional carriers are, tend to be just the package underwriter with very little differentiation, frankly, in their pricing or their coverage. We're unique. On top of that, we put in really a state-of-the-art platform in TAP Sales, which is taking us to an all-new level in terms of agency engagement, expanding the people that we do business with within agencies.
As you look at the middle market side of the business, we, you know, 15 years ago, started on the journey to replicate what you saw a lot of in the Philadelphia model, where you look at specific niches where you can have coverage differentiation and some risk control differentiation that allows you to be less of a commodity player in that sector. Because the middle market sector, for those that don't have some real differentiation in their offering, get very mediocre results. We avoid the commodity aspect of middle market. Because we have, you know, 10+ niche areas that we focus on, to the agents, we look like a broad market, but we do it in a very distinctive way.
I think when you look at the two of those sectors together in Core Commercial, we compete quite well, and we certainly distance ourselves considerably from the regional carriers in the way in which we've built our products.
Great. Can we get a little more color on how the agents are experiencing the upside of the TAP Sales platform, how you measure utilization, maybe what comes next in?
Sure
In the product.
Yeah. We've expanded our geographic footprint to 48 states, which is where we wanted to be. We had holes previously in our point of sale last generation point of sale offering. We are able to do more monoline coverage in particularly in the coastal states, so we can avoid some of the property areas when that's when the lines of business travel separately. But I think most importantly, particularly at a time when agents are struggling to get staff or to keep staff, they need a system that is very intuitive and is quick because the unintended consequence, at least from an agent's perspective, a point of sale approach to small commercial is they have to pick a carrier and hope that as they enter in the data, they get the answer they want.
It's not like Personal Lines, where you go in and get a comparator, and you get five or six starting points to choose from. When you can have a really good consistent offering, you're competitive with your pricing, and you have a system that this new system takes out literally half the input time for a CSR, it's a game changer. It's not only a game changer in terms of the efficiency for those existing users of our system, but as we had hoped, it's starting to be contagious. People are starting to say, "Hey, you really got to try the new Hanover system.
TAP Sales is top of the line." It's that combination of being able to get at more small commercial business, touching it less, but being very thoughtful from an underwriting and pricing standpoint and creating a totally different account manager experience is really what's causing us to grow that business at the level we are today. In terms of what's next, we're going to further spread that within our current agency plan. As we've talked about on our calls, we're gonna continue to add new agencies because in small commercial, there's less franchise value conflict than there is in the middle market and specialty sector.
In Personal Lines and Small Commercial, as we bring on, you know, more agents and still stay selective, we can continue to grow those businesses by getting new users into our state-of-the-art systems.
Do the newly appointed agents only have access to TAP?
It really depends on their makeup. Certainly, there's some, you know, high-quality agents that weren't part of our original design that we're comfortable giving them access to the broader enterprise. There are smaller agents where we think that's the right starting point. Let's see if we can get real momentum inside the point of sale environment, provide them a lot of support virtually and with our sales team. If that takes off, we'll think about, you know, bringing some of the franchise in a more fulsome way. It's interesting, though, as more and more agents, even smaller agents, become specialized, aspects of our specialty business on the lower end become part of that value proposition.
When we say small commercial, we're not just talking about the point of sale and the package business, but increasingly, we're talking about allied health or small lawyers or small accountants. That we will fully deploy to new agents if that's part of what they focus on.
Within the existing agency book, is that trend of specialization a material issue, either positive or negative for Hanover?
It's a positive for us. I mean, we place bets on being more customer-centric, more coverage-centric, more insight around industries. As more and more agents realize that that's the better way to grow your book of business as a producer is to know something, to create more referrals, to be insightful, and to line up with carriers that can bring real value and not just be a quoting machine. For us, it's a positive thing. I think you're well aware of we have developed over time this Agency Insight tool that gives us unprecedented insight into the distribution, right? Most of our agents engage in this consultative tool where we get to look at a good majority of their book of business.
Not just how we transact with them, but how they're transacting with other carriers. We can look at that universe of customer base and see that over time, more and more of them are gravitating towards a specialized product of some kind. I think those trends are favorable for us because again, we are coverage and industry focused, but we also are probably one of the more capable companies from an operating model standpoint. You can't touch this stuff at the same level as a middle market account. It's the combination of distinctiveness of your product and your ability to be cost-effective.
Okay. Excellent. Again, if there are questions in the room, please let me know. I wanna move next to specialty within commercial.
Mm-hmm.
We should probably start by saying how does Hanover define specialty because it is, it can be a little bit of an amorphous term.
Sure.
Go from there and say, okay, and therefore, the growth strategy is. I'll leave it with you.
Sure. Well, from an industry perspective, we look at probably north of $100 billion of specialized business as kind of the land of opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
We look and try to decide where do we care to play based on a risk-reward basis? What's the volatility of the business? What's the ability for the better companies to perform? That's led us to a kind of a small to medium-size account profile in a number of areas, both line of business and sector. For us, that business is now well over $1 billion. Inside the firm, that's just the specialty business that we call specialty commercial because it has a dedicated operating model. If you look at us more broadly, you know, a good portion of our middle market business is the niches and segments, but we use kind of a hybrid model where we have experts within the system that work with our deployed middle market underwriters or small commercial salespeople.
I look at between what we have in Core Commercial and what we have in specialty commercial, we're roughly, you know, we're rapidly approaching, you know, a $2 billion view of the specialized business. But if you stay right within specialty, we're a significant player in the marine business, particularly in the marine. A top player for agents, professional liability, including accountants, lawyers, architects and engineers and miscellaneous professional, management liability, private D&O and down. We're in the surety business. We're in the allied health business. We have some new products in the financial institutions and what we call specialty GL or specialty general liability business, which focus on product liability for small to mid-sized manufacturers.
We have a number of specialized businesses that are diverse, but frankly, well-performing and now growing, at a nice clip.
Great. Thank you. One of the points that's certainly come up, I think, over the last six months across the board in the industry, is just the dynamism, how many different things are changing right now. We've touched on some of those, but I was hoping you could translate those into your financial targets for the year, for the next two years, giving or keeping in mind how many different things are changing.
Yeah. I'll make a couple of comments on that, and I would welcome Jeff to kinda chime in on some of the goals that we've set out for ourselves over the next several years. There's no doubt that kind of the traditional model of a P&C carrier to just kind of reflect on prior trends and do a roll forward analysis and pricing your product in a traditional way is completely insufficient. It's not that history and actuarial science has gone away or is gonna be irrelevant, but the most successful companies are targeting a specific type of business sector, whether it be line of business or industry sector, and are being much more hypothesis-led in terms of where they think loss trends are going.
If the last five or six years has taught us anything, even if you put aside the pandemic, that loss trends are not moving in a predictable way. No one would have ever expected workers' comp to be as profitable as it has been. No one thought that commercial auto was gonna be a decade-long problem. Property volatility, weather and non-weather, social inflation pre-pandemic and likely post-pandemic. All of those things are real issues that an insurance company has to understand and relook at, am I playing where I think I can be successful, and how am I gonna differentiate myself, and how am I gonna be better than the competition in predicting those loss trends? Inside of our company, that's what we built. People know us by our agency strategy.
They know us by our products that we've developed and some of the acquisitions we've made to get here. What we're trying to make more obvious, and we attempted to do in our investor day meeting last September, was to show the insides of the firm. Very sophisticated, very collaborative, and completely focused on being better than the competition in anticipating those trends. Maybe I'll pass that to you, Jeff, in terms of really the goals we've set out for ourselves.
Yeah. Your question really was around short-term and medium, you know, term goals. There's no question on a short-term basis, we've increased our combined ratio guidance by a point to 90.5%-91.5% for this year, and that's just simply reflective of the inflation impact in the personal lines business, both auto and home. Having said that, our long-term goals remain unchanged at this point. To remind you of those which we put out in September of 2021, it was 7%+ premium growth on a written premium basis over that period of time. 12%-13% EPS growth and north of a 14% ROE. Really, the levers are relatively straightforward. It's much about growing at 7%+ and capturing the leverage on our fixed costs.
We're really comfortable with those projections, and there's nothing that we see today that causes us to feel not as strong about that. In addition, notwithstanding what, you know, Powell may have said earlier today, which I didn't, you know, catch up on, the interest rate impact is really, really powerful, particularly in the later years as you move out. You know, we're buying bonds today at almost 2% higher than where we would have planned for 2022. That new money yield has a modest impact this year, has an increasing impact next year, really has a powerful impact in the later years of those five years. I do suspect that some amount of that may be competed away in the industry. We'll have to see how that goes.
With our portfolio, it rolls over one-seventh a year. It's 85% fixed income, and we're very optimistic about our long-term goals.
Yeah. Thank you. I want to follow up on a couple of points that you made, just to flesh them out a little bit. Specifically anticipating loss trends. I was hoping you could talk about some of the tools that you've got for that.
Yeah, we really focus, for the most part, on long-term loss trends, right? We try to price, you know, for long-term, have some consistency in our pricing, think about where the profit pools are. I think the world missed, you know, the impact on inflation in terms of you know, how long it would be here. People use the word, you know, transitory. Obviously, it proved not to be transitory, regardless of your definition of transitory. We've got a pretty good handle. We've got a real good drill with our claims process, our actuaries, our finance people, our business people, to really have a very strong analysis of the data, what we're seeing, how we're thinking about trends, and try to have that feedback loop process really throughout the organization.
Yeah. I would build on that to say that inside the business. Think about really strengthening the claims analytics to be able to get at those trends and the leading indicators of those trends, so we're not overly reactive. As I said before, hypothesis-led, so we're having dialogue about, "This is what we think is gonna happen. Is the data showing that, or do we need to think about it differently?" When you get inside the business, we have completely replatformed our personal lines business and now our small commercial business, and part of that is to be able to import more and more analytics and more and more data sources that enhance the underwriting of the firm. It's meaningful. And so now we don't just hook up to every data source and dilute the efficacy of our models.
We test them and make sure that they're gonna be additive. But in addition to that, in areas like middle market, we've used a cloud-based data environment to be able to better understand where our insurance to value might be inadequate or where property values are changing on a geographic basis. In this environment, that's important, right? You can't just have a homogeneous kind of a view of the world. There's a lot of differentiation in terms of how the costs are moving and where the property values need to be adjusted. That's just one example where our folks we just came out with an enhanced tool to help with average wage for workers' comp.
Mm-hmm
Differentiating our pricing based on, you know, people that use the same class, but this company's, you know, got $200,000 average payroll, this one's got $120,000 average payroll. There's a lot of tools that you can use if you test them right and make sure that there's some efficacy in the pricing. I think our teams are really moving at a nice pace in that regard.
Excellent. I hope it's not an unfair question. It's hard to know what other companies are thinking. We only see that with regard to their pricing and how they're competing for business. Can you talk about how the competitive market seems to be evolving, and whether the, I'll say, caution, I don't know if that's a mischaracterization of your viewpoint, but caution about elevated loss cost inflation persisting seems to be informing competitors' behavior?
Yeah. I mean, I think, Meyer, it really depends on the sector that you're in and who you're competing against. I think you know, in the middle market space, our concern is always that there's a lot of capital that gets deployed there by both nationals and regionals and mutuals that have different return expectations. So we're particularly careful about what sectors do we believe we can compete in, and why would we be able to generate strong ROEs in a consistent way and differentiate ourselves. If you think about it that way, it makes the game a lot easier.
Right
Because many of those companies don't have that kind of sophistication, either in their pricing models or in their coverage approach. We're as we look at loss trends into the future, you know, we think about the short-term issues of inflation and how that's hitting us. While we're clearly feeling some of that pain, we're an account writer. Almost 90% of our Personal Lines book is an account, and we have a different kind of phenomenon in terms of the customer base. We're not just, you know, cranking a home or an auto algorithm. We're thinking about what's the best way to catch up to that inflation and not fully disrupt a really strong customer base that we've built over time.
In the specialty side of the business, you're hearing a lot of folks talk about social inflation and what that could be. We think about it also, and we have a lot of ways in which we're studying the data, but we built our specialty business to be less susceptible to severity based on the limits profile and the size of accounts, which obviously are related. If social inflation emerges worse than we anticipated, it's not that we won't feel that.
We'll be able to catch up to pricing for it, I think, faster than those that are, say, in the high end of the E&S business, who admittedly have gone through a hard market, but really will take a preponderance of the pain if social inflation emerges even stronger than the pre-pandemic trends, which most people believe is what's gonna happen.
Okay. No, that's perfect. If there are questions in the room, again, please let me know. I wanted to follow up on your comment on the account-based pricing in Personal Lines. I was hoping you could talk through how that's informed your strategy and your activity over the last two years, where we've gone from this unprecedented COVID period of really low frequency to the post-COVID period of really high severity, and how you're balancing the account concerns in that context.
Yeah, I think, you know, pre-pandemic, we were on a roll. Our Personal Lines business was really as high quality as anybody in the IA channel. You know, as I said, mostly an account business, home, auto, oftentimes umbrella, toys for kind of Middle America up to kind of the lower end of high net worth with our Platinum product. Obviously we had a short-term benefit by everybody having to stay at home and not be able to drive their car as often. We were one of few companies, frankly, that decided not to turn that into a hyper competition or low negative rates just because of that time period.
Right.
We took some risk, and we did lose a little bit of retention. We watched that very carefully to make sure we weren't getting adversely selected. We decided as a team to not succumb to that pressure because in this business and what you're experiencing now is it. Your starting point by which you have to now reprice your book of business goes down. That makes it harder when the frequency starts showing up or new trends start to show up to get approvals from the DOI, and frankly, to not disrupt your customer base.
We look back fondly, frankly, about that while it was a little bit nerve-wracking at a time when people were starting to price the business quite aggressively, that ability to hold serve a little bit is paying dividends and will allow us to refill the bucket, I think, more effectively. To your point about home and auto together, we have to think about the customer. We work really hard to synchronize the home and the auto algorithms and pricing models, not to generate worse returns, to generate better returns, but to make sure that we don't churn our own book of business. That's our process going forward, well, and that's why you're seeing our home rates, including insurance to value, are going up much faster because we need it.
Right.
To get the margins to improve. B, because frankly, it's not as visible and it doesn't stimulate the same level of marketing than the auto product. We'll continue to move our auto pricing up aggressively. We've already moved our home pricing up aggressively, but those aren't independent decisions for us. They're made together with some real thoughtfulness.
Okay. Excellent. I wanted to touch on Personal Lines again, because in general, and again, feel free to disagree with the premise, in general, there's more regulatory scrutiny on Personal Lines changes. I guess there are more voters that buy personal insurance, to the extent that that matters. You don't have California auto exposure.
Mm-hmm.
I think you have no Florida property exposure, so those particular landmines aren't there. How is the overall regulatory environment treating you?
Yeah, I think we're, you know, we're in relatively good stead. It helps when you're generating good margins and that your needs aren't quite as high in certain lines. That's where I think companies get in trouble is, you know, growing in our business has everything to do with being healthy and being distinctive. When you get unhealthy, you have to re-underwrite your portfolio or reprice your portfolio, and you go backwards. It and part of it is that when you need help, you're not gonna get help in the consumer-oriented areas like Personal Lines.
I will tell you, though, that being in the account business, being in the IA channel, right, I think gives us a little bit more support in that we have somebody explaining some of those trends, and we're not just pumping it directly to the consumer. I think sometimes people don't fully appreciate the value of the IA channel Personal Lines business, that they got somebody to talk to that can say, "Hey, I understand this is painful, but here's why we're not gonna remarket your business," or, "Here's why you should accept some price increases or insurance to value charges." Back to your original point, I don't know, Jeff, if you have any. From a regulatory standpoint, it's one state at a time. There are always states that are more challenging than others.
We have elected not to play, though, in some of the states that frankly do not allow companies to think about achieving their cost of capital. We're just not gonna play in those territories.
Yeah. I think we're feeling very optimistic at this point about our ability to get the rate we need in the states and the jurisdictions that we're operating in.
Okay. One state-specific question, if I can.
Sure.
Michigan, where we had some PIP reforms, I just wanted to get your sense in terms of how those are playing out.
Yeah. Obviously, the reforms have been implemented since July 2nd, 2021. The actual fee schedules were, you know, that were delayed to 2021. That's been moving along fine, and helping us, frankly. We can see it in the severity in the PIP line coming down. You know, the recent court case in Michigan is contesting some of the retroactive aspects of those reforms. That will now likely end up in the Michigan Supreme Court, hopefully sooner than later, so it can take the uncertainty out of that.
That's part of what we contemplated in terms of how much were we expecting the benefit to come through PIP, and versus, you know, what might be contested somewhere down the road. All in, we're still very confident that the industry's reforms will hold up, even from a retrospective standpoint, but that's gonna have to play itself out over the next several months.
Right. You think the timeframe for the Supreme Court is months?
That's our hope and expectation. We don't control that. Yeah, that's our latest view is that this will get elevated pretty quickly because of the importance not only to the consumers who have benefited pretty substantially from this, but also the governor as the advocate of the reform to begin with.
It's mostly an MCCA fund issue, as most of this is really a pass-through from customer to the fund. As you probably know, or many people may not know, that there was a rebate from the fund back to existing customers that happened, you know, in the last several months, which in theory, you know, some of that, you know, might have to either be reversed or surcharges may have to go up. That would be a difficult situation, I think, for some of the members of government.
Right. Yeah. Depending, I guess, whether it's before or after the election, but there you go. Again, if there are questions in the room, please let me know. Robbie? Oh, there's a mic coming. Thank you.
Hi. Thank you. Maybe just one more on Personal Lines and long-term loss trend. I think you guys have a handy chart on frequency and it narrated, you know, sort of the upmarket positioning of your Personal Lines business. I wonder if you could just tell us how sticky you think some of the frequency benefit might be, and does it entail sort of slices of the market being permanently repriced as behaviors have maybe permanently changed? Thank you.
You wanna start and I'll.
Sure. You know, we're seeing a stickiness to it. It obviously isn't the 30% it might have been in this spring or early summer of 2022, but the chart that you're referencing shows a 13% or 15% frequency benefit. We've been assuming that the frequency increases or the frequency benefit declines in our estimates, our guidance, our picks as we think about that going forward, but we'll see. I am a believer that there is some permanence to that. Who among us doesn't work from home occasionally on a Friday or a Monday? I think our customers are really no different.
You know, when the weather gets bad in December and you've got five inches of snow, and you might have taken the car out and said, "I really need to be in," that'll be a day that you won't go in. I think some amount of that is permanent.
I think part of what you asked too is there's driving patterns that have changed that are not just about miles driven, but how those miles are driven. We study that not only within the industry and what folks are saying, and the associations that we're part of, but we certainly study it within our book of business. You know, that loss frequency benefit is the combination of both of those, right? Who's on the road, and what times of day, and how are they driving? That is what's encouraging to us is that we are seeing some more sustainability to that aspect of the claims makeup, and we'll continue to watch that.
If it changes and it starts to erode or move back to more kind of traditional levels, we obviously would adjust our pricing dials, but we'd also look at how is that relative to competitors. It is possible that those levels come up, but they're still better, frankly, than some of our competitors, which is really helpful in a competitive environment when your pricing isn't gonna be as high. We're gonna be in a Personal Lines hard market for some time, right? This is not something that's gonna reverse itself overnight. The question is, did you have a better starting point, and how are the loss costs coming through the system? If you have advantages on both a relative basis, those are the companies that are gonna win.
That's where we believe we're positioned, but we need to execute, frankly, over the next 12-18 months and prove it.
All right. All set. Just looking around to make sure I'm not missing any other questions. I want to talk about reinsurance pricing or, sorry, reinsurance purchasing strategies. It sounds like, particularly on the property side, reinsurance costs are going up. Underlying that is the fact that retained losses are also going up because of inflation. Maybe the time frames are different. How are you thinking about that as we plan for next year's reinsurance?
We've been a consistent buyer of reinsurance for a long period of time, both property and casualty. We have bought opportunistically in markets where the insurance opportunity to buy is cheaper than the technical price. We've, you know, bought down to very, very low levels. When it goes the other way, we ventilate, so to speak, to increase the deductibles. This particular renewal was our property renewal 7/1, our casualty renewal is 1/1. We used reinsurance more fully at the top of the stack, so we bought some additional reinsurance in the traditional market. We also had a cat bond that we issued, which is the first of its kind, if you will, for Hanover, and really gives us an awful lot of capacity.
It expands the panel and who the purchasers are, and it's very efficient capital. Lastly, assuming we don't have a greater than one in 200 hurricane type of event in certain, you know, aspects where we happen to be concentrated, it lasts for three years. There's a stickiness to that which is certainly appealing.
Sort of a related question. I don't know whether it's climate change related, but one of the things we saw with Ida was not just huge winds in Louisiana, but flood losses in New York and New Jersey. Impacting areas where you've got a little bit more exposure. How does that change if it's sustainable impact you're thinking about kind of risk, weather, and catastrophe exposure?
Yeah. First and foremost, it makes the work that we've been doing on property aggregation and, you know, trimming micro-concentrations even more important.
Right.
Because at the end of the day, with more convection storms, with more unpredictable kind of paths, and more rain-centric storms, you just can't have all your eggs in one basket. You have to kind of penetrate your agency plan, but do it in a way where your spread of risk in any one area is not overly concentrated. We evaluate that on two levels. On a ground level, what has our loss share been to our market share? That is one way in which we evaluate whether our property aggregation work that we do. It's very granular. That's very proprietary that we built and we're told by our reinsurers and others that it is kind of state-of-the-art.
Where it pays off is when we have a storm that goes through and our loss share is at or below our market share. That's consistently been the case, not 100% of the time, but over the time. The other part of this is how we grow the portfolio from here and get a little bit more casualty-centric. That's why the specialty business is increasingly important to us, not only in terms of its relevancy to the agency plan and them thinking of us as a high-quality company, but allowing us to be less weather-centric over time, both geographically and from a product mix standpoint. You're gonna see us. You know, Bryan has a lot of plans to take our specialty business to the next level.
Part of that is to really grow that specialty casualty business that I think over time helps us get the mix even to another level.
It's hard to deny that the impact of weather, whether you think about increased rain events or hail events or wind events, hasn't been increasing and isn't gonna increase. The aggregation work that Jack is talking about, coupled with the pricing that one needs in terms of increased weather loads, is on our mind for sure.
We're also very active members of APCIA. I'm on the board and participate in many of the committees. We believe as this industry has to get used to its new collective voice to push for more public-private opportunities like we have in terrorism.
Right.
I know it's not popular, but it's important. We think of things like cyber and rain events. We have to keep advocating for that kind of public-private partnership in order to get at the longer term issues. Otherwise, companies are gonna have to risk avoid, and that has a real material effect on customers' view of our industry.
Right. I'd attach pandemics to that list. Haven't heard that much recently on that, but.
Yeah. It's incredibly disappointing that we have not been able to get the attention of the politicians and haven't been able to put our voice strong enough. I think that's another example of how we have to make progress.
Fantastic. With that, we have come to the end of our time. I wanna thank Jack and Jeff for a phenomenal session. Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the day.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.