The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE:HIG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Swift: Yes. I would say, it was a net headwind. That’s what I said about that 50 basis points or half a point of higher than expected property, non-CAT property losses and then if you put the aviation war losses that we booked in there and that’s in the international vision, not small or middle. That’s the 50 basis points of pressure I would normalize out.

Mike Ward: Got it. Got it. Thank you. Maybe on personal auto, just curious – do you feel like the pricing that you’ve gotten in the quarter, was it what you expected? Is there – is it more difficult with the regulatory environments or is it just severity is just higher than expected?

Chris Swift: Well, where do we begin? Again, if I look at how we thought about how the year was going to play out is totally different honestly. I think the level of inflation pressure, the stickiness of it particularly in physical damage is just overwhelmed many industry participants. So then the BI component, the severity ticked up a little bit for us. We had a little bit more uninsured motorist claims this quarter. So it is just really been a challenge. What I would say on the positive side though is we’re getting rate, teams pushing really hard for rate that we could just file and use or use and file in those states that we need to get pre-approval. We’re working the system as hard as we can. Both Beth and I talked about the rate increases that we got in this quarter, and we expect to have a written rate increase of 20% by the end of the year.

And I suspect once we plan for 2024 will probably be in that range of written rate need in 2024 to get the book – back to target profitability. But when we put it all together, it’s overwhelmed our judgments and estimates, our judgments turned out to be too light. As we’re halfway through the year and if you look at really what we printed on a six month basis, we’re probably eight points above our guidance for the full year. And that’s probably a minimum of where the full year’s going to come out at this point in time. But again, the positive news I want to leave you with and the optimist side is we’re executing well on our rate plans. We’re really proactive with making the needed adjustments in a timely fashion. And that will continue into 2024 aggressively to get our book to target profitability probably in early 2025 now.

Mike Ward: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Elyse Greenspan from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Elyse Greenspan: Thanks. Good morning. Chris, maybe building off of that last comment, because that was going to be one of my questions on personal auto recognizing, right, that’s obviously been a hard business line for everyone in the industry. So when you say you’re going to get back, potentially back to target profitability in early 2025. Do you envision needing double-digit rates between now and then? Or how are you seeing price and severity trend playing out over the next year plus?