Cincinnati Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:CINF) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So that’s putting a weight on the Commercial Lines growth as well. So your comment of returning to historical levels or walking away from other business, like I was saying before, I think we’ve got a winning strategy. We’ve got a winning model, doing business locally with the best agents in the business, face-to-face that has served us well for many, many years. And our risk selection, our claims handling, our loss control, those things have all improved on linear basis since I’ve been here, I think, 32 years ago. Our pricing precision, segmentation has improved exponentially over the last 10 years. So where we just didn’t have those tools, say, when I was a field rep 15 years ago and the look into each individual account that we do and price them on their own merits.

So yes, our field underwriters and our renewal underwriters have those pricing precision tools that they use to where — if we don’t feel like we can get an adequate rate on a risk-adjusted basis, we’re — we’ll walk away from an account, and we’ll wait it out. First and foremost is we need an underwriting profit. We’ve got 11.5 years in a row now of — 11 years and 9 months of underwriting profit and we want to keep that rolling. I don’t worry about growth over the long haul at Cincinnati Insurance Company. We are talking about agency appointments. We have plenty of runway to continue to do that. We’re growing our E&S company. You see what’s going on in Personal Lines. Well, I’m not — I don’t worry about growth prospects for the future.

Michael Zaremski: Okay. That’s thorough and helpful answer. And my follow-up is you’ve been deliberate in your actions to kind of increase IBNR. And you’ve talked about uncertainty in terms of — more uncertainty in terms of the loss cost trend environment. Growth is obviously — you just talked about maybe a little bit slower, too. So would it be fair to characterize that Cincinnati is taking a view that loss cost trend is a bit higher on a go-forward basis than it has been a year or 2 ago. Is that a fair characterization?

Steven Johnston: Greg, this is Steve Johnston. And I think what we’ve seen was kind of a rapid acceleration of inflation starting at the beginning of 2021. It is now in the last several months moderated, still going up, but moderated. I think just with the way that we time our rate increases in rolling on to the book, it takes a little while for them to actually reach all the policyholders. But the key point, I think, is that we are very prospective in terms of the way we look at inflation. The most important thing we can do is to look out into the prospective policy periods that we’re pricing for right now, do our best to estimate the loss costs and the inflation impact on that prospective period and set the pricing right and do it on a individual policy-by-policy basis the best we can. And I think we’re in a good position to continue doing that.

Michael Zaremski: Okay. So you clearly feel it sounds like pricing is in excess of loss trend, knock on wood, if everything plays out. If you don’t agree with that…

Steven Johnston: I would agree with that.

Operator: The next question is from Grace Carter with Bank of America.

Grace Carter: Looking at kind of results line by line in the Commercial segment, it seemed like quite a few saw year-over-year improvement but the workers’ compensation line sticks out a little bit kind of the second quarter in a row where we’ve seen a decent bit of pressure on the underlying loss ratio. I was just curious if we could get more color on what’s going on there. I mean, obviously, you’ll have referenced the pricing pressure for that book. But we’ve also heard some other peers talk about concerns regarding medical inflation. And if you all could just give us some more color on what’s happening there?