Kemper Corporation (NYSE:KMPR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

You’ll see a 1,000 plus RBC ratio for the life company. And so we’ll take that ordinary and extraordinary dividend this quarter, increasing the cash overall. So we’ll be a billion plus in liquidity. As I think about our sources and uses over the next 12 months, typically we spend about $150 million a year in cash. About $80 million in dividends, about $55 million in interest expense, and other hold co-expense items $10 or $15 million. So when you think about that $1 billion plus of liquidity, $150 million in usage were covered multiple times. We can extend out for several years.

Greg Peters: Fair enough. And do you have, are you, because of the several quarters of losses, I assume you are unable to dividend up any capital from any of the subs at this point? Is that correct, or is there still a way to pull capital out of the subs, if needed?

Brad Camden : We cancel pull out capital out of the subs, particularly the life company.

Greg Peters: Okay. Thank you very much for the answers.

Joe Lacher: Yes, Greg, just, this is Joe, just, I wouldn’t focus on the $1.3 billion. That was really an anomaly. And the $1.4 billion was a surge of earnings in the 2020 time period when people weren’t driving. And as Brad pointed out, you look at the RBC of a 1015 in the life company. In an ideal world, we would have actually moved that 250 plus before the end of the quarter. And it’s a timing anomaly that it was, it’s going to be done in the fourth quarter rather than inside the third. So I would definitely encourage you to look at those in combination in terms of where the cash is moving back and forth between them.

Operator: Your next question comes from Brian Meredith from UBS.

Brian Meredith: Yes, thanks. A couple of them here. First on the adverse reserve development. Brad, I know you said that you’re confident you’re in a good position now. It’s a short tail business. But if I look, you’ve had adverse development in your personal auto business for four quarters in a row. What give you confidence that your personal auto is reserved adequately? Are you seeing trend kind of going down now? Are there certain things that give you more comfort? And then also on the reserve topic, if you could address commercial auto a little bit and what’s going on there, I mean you grew very rapidly for the last three years. And I know other companies are having challenges with their commercial auto. So maybe your book is different or something and that’s why. Maybe you can address that as well.

Joe Lacher: Yes, let me, well let’s do these in reverse and I’ll do a quick one on commercial vehicle and then Brad and I will tag team and maybe Matt as well on the PYD. The commercial vehicle, remember that was a 93.6% underlying combined ratio. The $7 million is some BIDCC related items. It’s just the defense and cost containment that’s running underneath there. And it’s still a very strong combined ratio there. If you look at it over any rolling 12-month period, you’d feel good about the underlying profitability there. So that one doesn’t cause us a lot of angst, it really just a little bit DCC and cleaning up there.

Matt Hunton : Hi, Brian. On the reserve, think about, our comfort there, lot of the activity we saw they’re accretive prior development this year was related to the second half of 2022. And so we have a short tailed business. As we get further away from that, we’re confident in what we have reserved. Additionally, related to PIP, we’ve seen increased frequency of claims. We see higher severity. When we think about what we’re reserving today, we’re reserving for not necessarily an acceleration of claims coming through, but a higher total claim, higher total amount of severity due to the increase in litigated claims. And we think we’ve captured at this point in time everything that we can, taking every practical approach to what we think has occurred not only over the previous years, but what we expect to occur going forward. Additionally on PIP, we’re not reflecting any of the benefits that may be there related to legislative changes in the first quarter of 2023.