The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE:HIG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

But I don’t think there’s any trend to call out other than just sort of maybe normal volatility. We watch all our components of price, whether it be hospital stays, whether it be physicians, whether it pharmaceuticals. And generally, things are behaving as we expect. So I don’t know what to tell you other than it’s steady as she goes from our perspective as we sit here today. I think the impact on the longer term is still to play out. But as we’ve talked about before, Brian, I mean, our claims team is world-class. We have fee schedules in place, networks in place that sort of provide a buffer. And if long-term, things continue to be elevated, the reaction function within our system, I think, will allow us to raise prices and deal with it appropriately.

So I don’t think we’re going to get surprised in any way, shape or form on medical severity running away from us.

Brian Meredith : And I would expect your loss control probably helps you relative to the industry as well, right?

Chris Swift: Yeah. Clearly, we’ve got a lot of capabilities embedded in claims, embedded in our Engineering Group, so yes. And again, being the second largest rider, you would expect us to have those capabilities.

Brian Meredith : Yeah, thank you. Very helpful.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Elyse Greenspan : Hi, thanks. Good morning. I wanted first to start with the response to Brian’s first question. You guys said that you just saw some competitive forces in July. And it sounds like that corrected over the rest of the quarter. I want to confirm that. But then can you give us a sense of what lines, I guess, specifically within the middle market you were seeing folks become more competitive in July?

Chris Swift: Elyse, I might have Mo comment on that.

Mo Tooker : Yeah, Elyse, I would just say that July was the month we felt it the most. And then it was on the larger end. I won’t get into specific areas. I’ll just the larger account segment is really where we felt the most competition during the month.

Elyse Greenspan : Okay. And then with the reserve development in the quarter, we saw total favorable development was driven by comp. There was a little bit of adverse development in GL. Anything you want to highlight there? Any specific years or anything you guys are seeing? I know it’s a small number, but just looking for some color there.

Beth Costello: Yeah, Elyse, it’s Beth. Nothing in particular I’d call out. A couple of large losses that we saw on umbrella and one large national account that’s spread over several years. So again, as you pointed out, relatively small impact in the quarter and nothing that’s indicative of a new trend or anything like that.

Operator: And we will take our next question from Mike Ward with Citi. Your line is open.

Mike Ward : Thanks, guys. Good morning. I was wondering just with the growth in property, how should we think about your non-CAT property volatility going forward? And like has the range of outcomes on your underlying loss ratio, why didn’t it change materially?

Chris Swift: Mike, thanks for the question. As I said in my prepared remarks, I mean, we’re trending towards $2.5 billion of commercial property premium across our businesses, which would be about a 25% increase from prior year. And we feel very good about how we’re executing both from a growth and pricing side. I’ll give you just a couple of numbers for the third quarter here. In our Spectrum property component. Our growth was 13%, and pricing 11.5%, up. In our general property in Middle Market, growth was 13% and pricing was up 12.9%. Large property grew 16% with pricing up 16% also. So I think, in total, we’re executing very well. We grew property 12% this quarter with pricing up 14%. And as I said before, I mean, this isn’t a CAT strategy.