Kemper Corporation (NYSE:KMPR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Joe Lacher: We started, Paul, giving you guys some rate and non-rate direction a year or so ago, partly to try to help get to a number. And we acknowledge at the time that as the rate came in, we might unwind some of those non-rate actions. And I think I’m going to go back to what I said a moment ago, all of those crossing items are in our guidance and we’re trying to give you the answer rather than ask you to sort of work the components underneath because it’s on – be almost impossible to for you to work the individual components. We’re just trying to give you the answer at this point. And it’s probably a little less important to try to break those two apart going forward and we’re going to have more trouble helping you break them apart because they’re going to move in multiple directions.

Paul Newsome: But still nonetheless helpful to understand what could be happening, so we will see it. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the Life operation and the capital optimization. So a couple of $100 million potentially removed from the Life U.S. concerning to the parent. Maybe you can talk about sort of what adds up being the actual capital behind the Life operation? Because I was looking at the statutory statements, it looks like there’s not that much more than a couple $100 million of statutory capital in the Life subsidiaries at least according to [indiscernible]. And – but I also presume that there is an amount of Life capital that’s sitting in the Bermuda subsidiary as well. So can you talk about sort of where that total Life capital ends up and maybe both in size as well as where it ends up being distributed?

Jim McKinney: Yes, happy to kind of walk through it, Paul. Good question. Big picture wise, yes, there is capital in the Bermuda entity. When you think about it across both, you’re talking about $280 million that would be sitting there today. In total, one of the things I think you need to look at it is we’re resetting or there is a component that is resetting some of our reserves that will release reserves and equity that is currently held inside those entity, so it will increase up. So you won’t see a meaningful change in the actual capital level that’s inside the Life companies. Some of the things that we’ve done is essentially we had initial filings and placements with the department of Illinois and others that go back many years as it relates to our mortality trends.

And we said that we would come back and update those appropriately once we had really strong mortality tables and experience. We’ve done that coupled with our Bermuda initiative and that is essentially freeing up equity basically from a statutory perspective that will then be able to come up. And so you won’t see a meaningful change in the overall capital dollars in it. You’ll just see a difference in the reserve level in total if those reserves are reset – represent more of a true mortality curve and the benefits that we’ve had from an experience perspective.

Paul Newsome: That’s very clear. Thank you very much.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Greg Peters from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Greg Peters: Good afternoon. Hopefully, you can hear me now?

Joe Lacher: Welcome back.

Greg Peters: That’s good. So I wanted to start my question – the first question off with – Joe, in your comments you talked about this being an unprecedented time for the personal lines business. And you mentioned buying triggers, embedded in that as retention. I’m just curious with all the rate that’s being thrown at the consumer and it’s just not your company, it’s other companies, but particularly when I think about your company being in the Specialty business, which is lower limits, I’m curious how the consumer is responding to this because it feels like you’re probably pushing the envelope of what the consumers can afford. So just your perspective on that.