Good morning, it's Meyer Shields again, KBW. Our next panel is with The Hanover, and we have President and CEO, Jack Roche. We have CFO, and EVP, Jeff Farber, and we also have Oksana Lukasheva, from investor relations, whose help, as always, in putting this panel together has been indispensable. We're going to start off with a few introductory comments from Jack and Jeff, then we'll jump into Q&A. As always, I encourage everyone on this chat to submit questions that you want me to ask to make sure that we're getting the information, with regard to The Hanover, that you're actually looking for, and we'll be checking that, we call it the dashboard, over the course of this session. With that, I'm going to stop and turn it over to Jack and Jeff.
Thank you, Meyer. I'll just take a second, if I could, to introduce myself, then we'll talk a little bit about our company and look forward to some Q&A. I joined The Hanover about 15 years ago as part of a company transformation. We were kind of a generic regional insurer with a desire to be more relevant and to create a more investable company. I've been in the insurance business for 35 years, running P&Ls and field operations for most of that. Joined The Hanover 15 years ago, attracted to the firm, frankly, by its strategy and its inspiring culture, and we'll talk a little bit more about that.
Prior to assuming the CEO role 3 years ago, I was responsible for running most of the U.S. operations, commercial lines and personal lines, field operations, and had a close relationship with our Chaucer folks overseas at that time. I'll talk a little bit about this transformation that I alluded to at Hanover. I think we're all very proud of what we've been able to accomplish over the last decade plus, creating a much more distinctive, diversified, and high-performing company. As I said, we were kind of a regional carrier, predominantly in 5 or 6 states, heavily invested in personal lines and smaller commercial. Not a lot of expanded footprint or specialized capabilities. Today, you fast-forward to 2020, we're roughly a $5 billion revenue shop, with a well-balanced portfolio, including personal, core commercial, and specialty lines.
We believe we're very well-positioned, have elevated ourselves with the best agents in the country, based on our capabilities as well as our talent and our unique and sophisticated agency partnership approach, which I'm sure we'll get into. Our value proposition for those agents is that we bring a broad set of relevant and distinctive products and capabilities, all delivered through the independent agency channel. We focus on the preferred sectors of the business, we deliver specialized offerings in whatever sector we choose to play. We are not a generic insurance company. We do not play where commoditization lives. We believe we've created a strong franchise for a select group of agents, we bring a very unique partnership approach that includes an open book test, if you will, an ability to share analytics and to present consultative tools to agents that are unmatched in the industry.
We believe we create a great alternative to some of the larger companies who are quite good at what they do, but frankly, are a little less focused on the distributor success, maybe a little distribution agnostic as we go forward. So we try to play to that and say that we can be that great alternative. We are focused on a select group of agents, like I said, and really trying to create these authentic partnerships that are mutually beneficial. Last but not least, we think our value proposition to investors is quite strong also. We have a proven track record of delivering top quartile ROEs, and we're very focused on earnings growth. We have an outstanding group of talented professionals that we've assembled from some of the better companies in our industry, and we're all excited about building this company and creating additional value.
As I said, we have a diversified franchise. We have a broad-based profitability within the firm. We're not making outsized margins in one particular part of the business and subsidizing another. Last but not least, we have significant headroom to grow. We believe that the position we've created with those distributors is what's going to allow us to take this company to the next level based on these strategic relationships, and we're excited to share more of that with you today.
Excellent. Thank you. Let me start with a short-term question, because we're going through a period, and everyone said this, but it's true, that it is unprecedented. Getting more information in terms of what the economy looks like and what near-term expectations for your insurance and therefore for Hanover are. Can you talk us through what you've been seeing month to month, week to week, if that's relevant, and the application of a short-term strategy to that economic reality?
Yeah, Meyer, I agree with you that this is a time to not be too insular, to really be very externally focused, to understand what's going on, not only in the economy, but in the dynamics of this property casualty industry. I personally have spent a preponderance of my time getting external, talking to agency principals, talking to, frankly, a lot of the consultants and insurtech firms that surround us, talking to our board members on a more regular basis, trying to get their insights on what's happening in other industries. Together, as we rallied with the Partner Group, which is our executive team, we've really come together and decided that the collaboration that we've established within our firm needs to get further intensified.
At the end of the day, this is going to be a complicated navigation through a very dynamic time, and no one person is going to have all the answers. We have come together and focused on really three major areas. Our risk and portfolio management, where we are looking at every aspect of our portfolio, both from a defensive perspective, but also from an offensive perspective. I hope we'll be able to get into that. We're also incredibly focused on helping agents optimize their operations, their financial wherewithal through this. This is a time for us to show the authenticity of our partnership strategy, and we believe we're living those values today. Last but not least, we committed to further driving our technology and digitization and looking for transformational opportunities that really are more in the mid-range as opposed to the long range.
This is a time to get a little bit more short-sighted, a little bit more intense on how we manage through this time. Not just in terms of producing top quartile returns, which we're committed to doing, but also making sure we don't miss the opportunity to show some agility and really embrace some of the change that we think is coming upon us today. The team that I alluded to earlier is such an important part of that. We have brought professionals from every good company in this industry, getting those folks to really come together and think through this dynamic time and push themselves on their thinking, I think is super critical and we're working really hard at it.
Excellent. That's very. Thank you. Is it fair to say, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but we're seeing an uptick. I don't know whether you say V-shape or even that class of definitions is appropriate. Broadly speaking, does it feel like your insureds, your agents are in a period of economic recovery?
I think that we are definitely. There's a sense of relief that the intense economic conditions that came upon all of us have stabilized somewhat. I don't think anybody's naive to believe that we're out of the woods or that things are crystal clear. I have been very impressed with, at least within this industry, how people, agents, brokers, other companies, have been able to move to a remote environment, focus on what needs to be done, what are the things that really matter in the short term, and to leverage the technology and the tools that are available to run pretty sophisticated companies. Economically, we are seeing some level of stability, but obviously it varies. It varies by geography, it varies by sector, and I think we'll get an opportunity to talk later about this.
I believe that's critical because this is not going to hit the economy in an even way. We're all going to have to be able to realize that there are industries that are not going to go back to the way they used to be, and that can both have an economic effect, but it also can have an operational or an insurance exposure effect. We're maniacally focused on that.
One of the elements of the response that Hanover is undertaking is a business mix shift. You've talked about this on previous conference calls. One of the outcomes is a reduced exposure to some classes that are maybe particularly pandemic sensitive, and then growth in other areas. I was hoping you could talk us through the status. Where is this initiative right now? Should we think about it in terms of lines of business? Should we think about it in terms of industry exposure? What does the Hanover book look like when we get back to whatever the next phase of normal is?
Yeah, Meyer, I'm glad you asked that question because what I want to do is make sure I put it in perspective is that we've been on this journey to try to rebuild a company and to make it more relevant and to make it more distinctive. We've always had to look at our geographic footprint, the sectors, the line of business, because in our business, as you know, what you look like in each geography is different because of the exposures that get presented, because of catastrophe weather issues, legal climates. I think of what we've been doing over the last few months as that next intense level of portfolio management that is part of what we've been doing as a firm over the last decade.
I think we were fortunate in that some of the things that we anticipated three and four years ago around social inflation and higher litigation rates motivated us to become less penetrated in some of the service sectors, the restaurants, the hospitality, the retail, particularly in major metropolitans. I think you can remember us talking actively on earnings calls about that really felt like a difficult place to make a living until some of these liability trends became more understood. That's obviously serving us well. We're pushing further on that and asking ourselves what % of restaurants or hotels or other hospitality businesses are going to be healthy when this is over. How quickly can we get back to something that would allow them to be economical and to have decent margins?
We're also looking at these geographies and asking ourselves, can we see a strategy that will allow us to generate good margins. I think we feel well-positioned in moving not only to defensive measures that we've talked openly about, but some of the offensive measures here. There are emerging opportunities that are getting intensified by this environment we're in, and we're just as focused on the growth opportunities as we are on the kind of defensive measures.
Let's move on, because I think it's an important point. There's certainly an aspect of your strategy that's been critical, and it's been working, I think, in a demonstrated sense with regard to increasing your share among agents. I was hoping, can you talk about how that's playing out, both in the long term and its relevance in this short-term period of, hopefully short-term, period of economic disruption? What are the strengths? Are there any challenges that it brings forward?
Sure. Well, you know that when you decide as a company to focus your efforts with a subset of the agents, and in particular on the higher quality agents, large and small, you have a different set of requirements. You have to have real specialized capabilities. You have to have really good talent, and you have to be able to underwrite well enough, to deal with some of the negotiation power that comes from some of those more sophisticated distributors. In doing so, if you do that well, you really put yourself in kind of a brand category that gives you some real advantages. I think those advantages are going to be particularly important as this pandemic and the economic fallout are going to further accelerate the concentration, if you will, of how those agents place their business. I think there will be a flight to quality.
I think there will be a desire, particularly in the flow businesses and personal lines of small commercial, to put more with less because of their capabilities and their ability to flex their operating models to be able to be a more wholesome provider to those sectors of the business. I think you know that's what we've worked really hard on, is both in personal lines, becoming that great account writer for the Middle America and upper middle market client for small commercial in the lower end of middle market, being an account writer with some real industry orientation and some expertise. All of these things that we've been working so hard on now, I think, put us in an enviable position as these agents decide to really lean on these strategic partnerships.
I can tell you, in the last three or four months, we are having even more dialogue about market consolidations, which are driven by not only agents realizing that they have to service those clients more economically, but that all markets aren't created equal. The coverages we've built, the service center that we've built, frankly, the operating models that we have when somebody decides to consolidate markets, are really top rate. When somebody goes through that process of figuring out how they're going to skinny down their markets and do so in a way where their clients get benefited by that really does skinny down the playing field. The other part of this, I think that we've talked openly about, that affects even our specialty businesses, is that over the last decade and a half, the business has become quite fragmented.
If you look at the playing field, many of the carriers have had very specific strategies. I want these specialty lines. I'm a workers' comp-oriented market. I'm a cherry picker of the better business in the distribution system. I think we're now getting to the point where everything's going to get more client-centric. It's going to be less about what the carrier wants, and it's going to be more about what the customer wants. When you're a high-quality agent, you start to assemble accounts back together, and you start thinking about who can add value. I believe we're starting to see additional pieces of evidence that we've put ourselves in a good position to capitalize on that trend.
We have a very timely example of that coverage portfolio, I think, with today's announcement of the home business product that Hanover is introducing. Can I get you to talk for a couple of minutes about what that actually entails? It seems superficially to be very COVID related as more people work from home, what it looks like in the real world.
Certainly in the personal lines space. I always talk about this, that people think personal lines, as you know, is half the property casualty business, and it's not one big thing, right? I think Chubb showed people a long time ago that if you focus on the high net worth, you could create a nice business, and you could do something quite different than somebody that's going after low limits auto policies for very price-driven consumers. Again, those are all viable businesses, but they require different capabilities. Six, seven years ago, when we recommitted ourselves to being an account player and first and foremost, putting and trying to synchronize our home and auto pricing algorithms so that we could be a more stable and more thoughtful market for personal lines customers, that was the chassis of which we could build from.
It's much harder than people know. After a decade and a half of multivariate pricing and predictive modeling, I think the independent agency system and many carriers lost their way on what personal lines is really all about. It's serving the customer. We're building on that proposition, like you said, with the Platinum experience, which is our broad-based approach, bringing accounts together, rounding out umbrellas and toys where appropriate, then putting Prestige in place where you say, for that consumer that wants some additional coverages, that has some smart home capabilities, that has maybe some additional exposures and is willing to pay a little bit more for that we built that Prestige approach on top of the Platinum experience. We greatly upgraded our platform to the agents through our point of sale, as well as some of our self-help tools to the consumer themselves.
All of that is playing, I think, to our advantage. If you look at the results in the personal lines business, we have some of the best pricing that's out there. Yes, there's some competition, but I think we're proving today that when you do that well, you don't have to have outsized rate increases. You can have more consistent, appropriate rate increases that help you have a stable book of business, create that tenure in the book of business, and it really helps your relationship with agents, because they need that stability on the personal lines and small commercial books of business. They can't spend too much time churning the book of business.
Excellent. We're trying to get examples of technology capabilities, investment strategies from all of the companies because we're beyond the point where technology is this abstract concept, and we're at the point now where it is a real differentiator between companies and their appeal. Can you talk about, I know spend has been hovering at around $200 million. What are we seeing, what are we going to see as the output of these, what I'll call technological differentiators for Hanover?
Sure, our technology and frankly, capabilities beyond technology, have been a big part of our focus in terms of how do we modernize the company, but how do we actually become more efficient and more effective at meeting these new and improved customer preferences and desires. I would tell you, first and foremost, that $200 million is over several years. It started with some of the additional legacy transformation issues that all companies had to deal with. But we're well past that, and we're through most of what I would call the platform modernization phase. We replaced our personal line system. We're substantially through our small commercial system replacement. We replaced our billing system, our commission system, our claims system. When you look at this company, we're not catching up to the past.
We have substantially gotten ourselves to a position where a disproportion of our investment dollars now are focused on digital capabilities, data analytics capabilities that can enhance our business across the value chain, and other areas that frankly can help us either be more appealing to the consumer, more operationally efficient, or can lower indemnity because of being better at getting insights and predicting losses into the future. Our team has been really huddled around that, and we have brought in some talent to really help that. We have a new digital officer from outside of our industry. We have a new data analytics leader from outside of our industry. We upgraded our security team. We have brought in people inside of claims, both from an analytics perspective as well as an innovation perspective.
It's not just spending money on the systems, it's spending money on the people and the capability that allow you to embrace some of the new opportunities, whether they're coming to us organically or whether they're coming to us through Insurtech firms. You should think of us as having the chassis now that allows us to play in a much more modern and frankly, agile way. This summer, we've been going through a series of what we call summer sessions, where we take the mic from the business unit leaders, and we give it to the enterprise leaders that are running each of these capabilities of the firm. They're telling us what's the status, how do we stack up against the competition? Where should we go next?
It's a really exciting time in the firm where we're taking the matrix that we built and really, I think, using it to our advantage to define how we can further improve the company.
Should we look at that manifests itself most prominently in revenue growth? Should we look at it in terms of continued expense ratio improvement or some other facet? I'm not in any way disputing the merits of what you're doing. I'm just hoping you can help us understand where we should actually look to see the benefits for Hanover and its shareholders.
I would say it is across the spectrum of those kind of benefit realizations. We are committed to being a company that can grow above industry average, and we know through this managed transition, we've kind of stunted some of that growth temporarily. Yes, a good portion of our investment, for example, in the personal lines and small commercial platforms, are to be able to really drive ourselves to that next level of agency penetration, embrace some of the new technologies that allow us to frankly price our product more effectively and grow. I would tell you, if I were to go through all the investments that we're looking at, the area that I think is going to be most accretive to the firm is becoming more operationally effective.
The question is how that hits the expense line, which Jeff can talk to, is really a matter of how much of those savings we redeploy for the right types of investments that keep us on the right path versus taking to the bottom line. I believe we have proven over the last three years, in particular, that we can improve our expense ratio, and we have meaningfully, but also look towards investing in the future and not just trying to optimize any one year. Jeff, I don't know if you wanted to speak to some of that. I think maybe it's a good time for you to jump in.
Sure. Happy to. It's a very broad topic, and I'll try to be quite specific about it. When you think about $200 million or so on this capability and innovation and analytics spend that's happened over a few year period, Jack mentioned that we're very late in that process in the sense that we've been at it for a while, so the capability building was early, and now we're reaping the benefits of it. In many ways, we've got analytical capability, digitization with agents and customers. You're really starting and going to start seeing the revenue and the premium growth there as we're easier to do business with.
We're also seeing efficiency plays along the way, whether that be in the claims department, end-to-end process on how to do a claim, things like taking pictures and people don't have to go out and look at a car accident or look at a small home issue, so adjusters can handle claims much more quickly. Then also on the loss indemnity side, being able to use analytics to specifically target when things are likely to go to court, when things are going to require stronger attorneys versus more efficient attorneys, when we should settle things more quickly. We think ultimately it enables us to grow at above average industry growth, and it will improve over time, over a longer period of time, the combined ratio, both in terms of the loss ratio as well as the expense ratio. We've been at this for a while.
We've funded those initiatives through expense cuts, now you're going to see the fruits of all that labor coming forth over the next couple of few years.
Excellent. Thank you both. I intentionally did not lead off with this question because I think it's important, but it's not I want to highlight other things. Let me talk about pricing. I'm being encouraged on the dashboard to ask some questions, I want to break it up into four categories where, at least from my perspective, there's a bit of differentiation. General commercial pricing, which seems to be rising at an accelerating pace, workers' compensation, where we've gone through decreases, there's a bit of a difference of opinion in terms of the next phase. Personal lines, where there seems to be some intensifying competition. Finally, reinsurance as a cost, where we're also seeing maybe some differentiation in pricing and how that impacts the reinsurance buying strategies. I know that's a lot, I will stop here.
Meyer, between Jack and I, we promise to answer that question quite holistically. Before we do that, I'd love to just jump in and give a little bit of context on July and August, particularly with respect to CAT and frequency, so people have some contextual. As you know my background, I've been at Hanover for four years, I have a long background in finance and risk management, about 10 years in P&C, almost 35 in financial services. As we think about the financial discipline and the risk management we have here, I think it's important to think about CATs. I wanted to share July and August. Clearly, August has been a very active period for natural catastrophes. We've had Isaias, it's taken me a while to figure out how to pronounce that. I'm sure I'm not alone.
We've had tornado events, we've had other wind and rain events, including Derecho that exhibited itself, California wildfires, to a much, much lesser extent, Laura, which for us ended up looks like it's not going to be a terribly large event. We don't believe that this is really a major earnings event for us in the quarter. It's going to be very manageable. It's likely to be about $15 million-$20 million above our July and August plan. As you extrapolate to the full quarter, unless we get really lucky with September, we're likely to be a little bit over our quarterly CAT load that we expected. But so far, we're going to be well below what the industry is really talking about in terms of events. Really very manageable.
On the positive side, our ex CAT loss frequency is still somewhat below historical levels, particularly in auto, but we're seeing it in other areas as well. We feel fine. We move to the question that you ask about pricing, there's really a lot there. Overall, we are achieving very strong rate increases in almost all areas of our business, which makes us feel very good when we think about long-term loss trends. We are at, or in many cases above long-term loss trends. We're very optimistic about the current rate improvement trajectory as economic activity increases and the opportunity to pursue additional rate seem to really be consistent. We feel good about holding our loss picks and perhaps even improving them while we improve the expense ratio over time. With that, I'll pass it to Jack to cover individual line context.
We can do this quickly. As Jeff said, that we have a well-balanced and high-performing portfolio, we intend to behave like a company that way. We're not going to miss pricing opportunities, but we will balance pricing with market share penetration because we worked so hard to put ourselves in this financial position. We also know that the loss trend environment is anything but predictable. There's some short-term benefits that we have to acknowledge, but there's some intermediate and longer-term trends that we have to assess and anticipate. We think we're doing a really good job, as good as anybody, at trying to balance how do we behave from a pricing standpoint based on some short-term opportunities versus positioning our success for a longer period of time. In commercial lines, as Jeff said, we believe we're pricing above loss trend.
Our specialty business continues to get increased rates, somewhat driven by some of the more difficult categories spilling over in management liability and professional liability. Definitely seeing some improvement there. Even in the core lines, we're seeing some continued progression. Workers' comp, obviously, is an area where we do believe there's some bottoming out, but it's less about what the state rates are going to do and more about the subjective credits that the larger carriers will apply going forward. I don't think the industry can wait around for the rates themselves to come back and to turn into positive. I think many of our better competitors, as I said earlier, have outsized profits coming from the workers' comp line.
No one would have predicted over the last two or three years that workers' comp would kind of carry the ball for the deficiencies coming out of commercial auto and from some of these liability trends, and frankly, some of the weather that continues to bounce around. It becomes really important, and I don't know exactly which day or which quarter, but it is our belief that the loss trends will move back to normalization and that the pricing will come up. We believe that's an opportunity for us. Workers' comp is only 7% of our portfolio. We're a high-performing workers' comp market. We have plenty of headroom, particularly in the middle market space, and we know where that business is.
With our Agency Insights tool, we know the business that we want when the pricing improves, and every RVP across the country has that sitting at the corner of their desk, and they're ready to attack. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We want to grab the business when the pricing is right. personal auto, I think, we acknowledge that there has been a little bit more competition, particularly on the new business side, but we're holding serve quite nicely on our renewal book, and I think that's because we didn't get greedy. In the past, we've been presenting our agents and our customers with steady rate increases based on the profitability of the book, getting it where we need it, making adjustments between our new business levers and our renewal levers one geography at a time.
When you know how to do that well, I think you can walk and chew gum at the same time. New business momentum will pick up as some of the folks that are creating a little bit of hyper competition and living off of short-term loss frequency issues, that will come back. They'll have to hit some of those young renewals, as they always do, with outsized pricing, and we'll just keep emerging. You saw a couple of years ago, we had six, seven, 8% increases in personal lines, which were less about us becoming more competitive and more about the market coming to us when we weren't experiencing some of those frequency challenges that others were talking about. I think the other area you talked about was reinsurance.
I'll say a couple of things about that, and then I think Jeff has that responsibility as part of his set of responsibilities. He can comment further. Overall, we treat our reinsurance relationship similar to the way we treat our agency relationship. We expect partnership. What that means for us is that we know the business is cyclical, but we give each reinsurer an opportunity to play on the mosaic of our reinsurance purchases and to place themselves in places to kind of diversify themselves and not corner themselves into any one place. For that, most of our reinsurers are in the black, and we are leaning on them hard that as their markets firms, we believe that the way we place reinsurance and the way we perform for our reinsurers deserves extra consideration. Jeff, maybe you could just add a couple of comments to that.
Just briefly, we've obviously gone through our renewals. We've seen some firming in the pricing of reinsurance, of course. We've been able to navigate through it. It'll be very manageable. We've taken the opportunity to add some reinsurance, particularly in CAT, which will serve us well in tail events. We've added to the tower. Overall, I don't think it's a cause for major concern. I think we can navigate through it quite successfully.
Thanks. I know we talked a lot about loss trends and social inflation. Is weather a trend? Is the assumption that clearly this year has been a disaster, even though it could've been worse. Hurricane season's not over yet. Broadly speaking, we've had tough weather, whether it's hurricanes or more localized events, for a few years. How do you interpret that apparent trajectory in reinsurance buying? I don't really see that that has been a major driver of the pricing of reinsurance. I think the social inflation, casualty trends, the specifics of non-CAT type weather seems to be driving some firming and pricing. Low interest rates, I'm sure is driving it. We only buy a third of our CAT each year going out three years, so we didn't have that much that's repricing, and we haven't nicked our CAT treaty in a long, long time.
I just think it's a confluence of events which is emboldening the reinsurers, maybe even virus concerns and issues, terms and conditions are moving that market. I am a believer that there is something to global warming. I am a believer that we have seen an elevation of weather-related issues, and we'll have to factor that into pricing and have been factoring it in. Meyer Shields, for us, I think the lever, reinsurance is not unimportant to us. We certainly buy a fair amount of reinsurance. Further improving on our property aggregation management, diversifying the firm, growing more specialty capabilities, mostly casualty specialties, expanding our footprint thoughtfully, all of those things that we've been working hard on are in a stronger lever to the weather that clearly continues to be problematic.
I would say as we look back through our results, the reason why our results have become more consistent, and frankly better, is because we diversified the firm. Great. Thank you. This is probably going to be our final question because of timing. I'm going to connect two questions that have come in because they're both in the context of capital deployment. One would be your attitude approach to share repurchases in current environment. The second would be whether M&A may be for adding additional products to broaden your portfolio further, whether that's a consideration of what you're seeing in that marketplace. I'll cover that one. From a financial perspective, we're very focused on growth in earnings and top quartile ROE. As we manage our ROE, we're very thoughtful about our capital. We allocate capital carefully and effectively among our businesses.
We look to use the excess capital that we generate for organic growth. We have been generating a lot more capital than we can redeploy organically, and we haven't had opportunities for accretive inorganic growth. Not that they won't be there, not that we can't selectively, thoughtfully find those things, and we're hopeful that we can add product and capability that way. Accordingly, capital management through stock buyback will likely be part of the equation. We're quite comfortable with the payback period on stock buybacks currently. We would remind you that we've generally been conservative with such activity out of an abundance of caution during CAT season. Okay. I'm going to ask for final comments, ahead of that, I just want to thank Jack and Jeff for, as expected, a very informative session. Thank you for participating in our conference, I will turn over the mic.
All right. Meyer, thank you so much for the opportunity to participate and for your questions and the questions that came in. I hope for those of you out there that are less familiar with our story, that we've given you an opportunity to maybe take another look and to understand that this company is on the move and that we are determined to be the best franchise for the independent agents in the sectors that we choose to play. I think we've made a ton of progress. We've got the attention of the best agents in the country, and if you care to learn more, reach out, and Oksana Lukasheva would be happy to work with you and get you additional insight. Thank you very much. Thank you