Horace Mann Educators Corporation (NYSE:HMN) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript May 5, 2023

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the Horace Mann First Quarter 2023 Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Heather Wietzel, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Heather Wietzel: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Horace Mann’s discussion of our first quarter results. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, investor supplement and investor presentation. Copies are available on the Investor page of our website. Marita Zuraitis, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bret Conklin, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will give the formal remarks on today’s call. With us for Q&A, we have Matt Sharpe, Mark Desrochers, Mike Weckenbrock and Ryan Greenier. Before turning it over to Marita, I want to note that our presentation today includes forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance.

These forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations, and we assume no obligation to update them. Actual results may differ materially due to a variety of factors, which are described in our SEC filings. In our prepared remarks, we use some non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in our investor supplement. I’ll now turn the call over to Marita.

Marita Zuraitis: Thanks, Heather, and hello, everyone. Last night, we reported first quarter core earnings of $0.23 per share in line with our preannouncement. As we noted then, outsized catastrophe losses affected our quarter’s bottom line, consistent with the experience of others in the industry. The first quarter results also confirm that we remain on pace toward our business objectives for the year. In particular, we are very pleased with our top line sales momentum across all segments as well as what that growth momentum means for our progress towards increasing educator household acquisition and gaining a larger share of the education market. Bret will talk about the details later in the call, but at a high-level, we continue to expect core EPS in the range of $2 to $2.30 for the full year with lower first quarter P&C net investment income being offset by higher-than-expected supplemental and Group Benefits first quarter earnings.

Today, I want to talk about the progress we are seeing as a result of the transformational actions we’ve taken over the past few years. Our diversified business model provides more stable earnings and revenues in a quarter like this one, but more importantly, it broadens the solutions and value we can provide to educators and school districts. In the year since we integrated the worksite division, our team has made substantial progress building a solid foundation for growth by serving educators through their school district employers. This provides value not only to the educators who receive more coverage, but also to school districts that can provide more robust benefit packages to attract and retain staff. While the sales pipeline in this business is longer than in the retail division, we are seeing positive outcomes.

This year, we expect the Supplemental and Group Benefits segment to contribute 25% of our total earned premiums and contract deposits. The segment’s worksite direct line of business saw the highest quarterly sales since 2019. In the employer-sponsored line, we are seeing success building relationships and winning business with new districts and associations. This business continues to grow and participation rates within those areas are on the high-end of our expectations. We continue to receive good feedback from our school district customers about our enrollment services, including an option for one-on-one enrollment support. In the Retail division, we are seeing momentum within the priorities that underlie our strategy to serve a larger share of the education market.

Across the country, school access is improving, our agency force continues to grow. One of the key programs to which we attribute this growth is an agency mentor model, where a new agent works in an established office before opening their own. What sets Horace Mann apart is that our exclusive agents have distinct territories. So there’s cooperation among our agency force that’s beneficial for everyone. Our established agents share best practices and resources with our newer agents. In fact, we recently returned from one of our first retail agent leadership trips since the pandemic began. It was a great opportunity to discuss the business in person, and we are seeing a lot of optimism in the agency force looking towards the future. With that said, back to the retail results.

Sales of life products increased 22% over prior year, in part benefiting from sales by worksite representatives during enrollment activities. We also have been focusing additional retail agent training and support around our indexed universal life and cash value term products as educators may be more interested in these options in a higher interest rate environment. In addition, retirement results remain solid. Property & Casualty net written premiums were up 7%, primarily due to the impact of rate and non-rate underwriting actions taking effect. We are on track to meet our profitability goals in this business, including our target of 18% to 20% cumulative points of rate in auto nationwide by the end of 2023. Of note, over the weekend, we received notice that California has approved a 6.9% auto rate increase for the smaller of our underwriting companies in the state.

We are confident that we have demonstrated our rate need and expect to see approval in the coming weeks for the other, which represents about 80% of our premiums in the state. We expect our actions will lead to an auto combined ratio between 97% and 98% in 2024. In Property, we expect rate increases and non-rate actions to contribute to nationwide premium increases of 17% to 20% over the course of the year. If loss trends exceed our current expectations for property or auto, we will adjust our pricing or underwriting plans as needed. For the quarter, auto average premiums increased 8% over last year and average property premiums increased almost 10%. So far, our retention is holding. We believe there are three reasons for this. First, Property & Casualty carriers are implementing similar rate increases to address the impact of high inflation, all aspects of settling claims, including labor, materials, litigation and medical care cost more than they did a year ago.

Second, we provide more value to educators than just an insurance policy. Many of our P&C customers have retirement plans with us or a student loan solutions account or they know their local agent as a trusted school partner. Our diversified business creates stronger customer retention. Our auto retention is more than 10 points stronger with customers who have four lines of business with us than with monoline customers. Finally, we are working to help our agents understand the rate environment so they can answer policyholder questions proactively. We respect our customers, and we care about our customers. We want to be transparent about what’s happening in our business because we want to maintain those relationships. When it makes sense, we retain the business, but we can place customers with trusted third-party carriers when that is more appropriate.

To sum up, we are confident in our 2023 outlook and are excited about the growth we are seeing across the business. After addressing the profitability of the Property & Casualty business over the course of the year, we expect to be near our long-term targets in 2024. We believe this, along with growth across our businesses will contribute to a 2024 core EPS nearing $4 and a double-digit return on equity. Before I turn the call over to Bret, I want to talk about our commitment to corporate social responsibility. We recently released our 2022 reporting that details how we address the issues that are important to our stakeholders, while ensuring we run our business ethically, minimize our environmental impact and support our educators, employees and communities.

To touch on a few of the highlights. In 2022, we successfully reached our objective of cutting our Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions in half and plan to further reduce our carbon footprint going forward. We increased our corporate transparency by providing new disclosures on business ethics, data security and privacy and responsible product offerings. We identified $160 million in public service loan for this opportunities for educators, bringing the total for Horace Mann’s student loan solutions program to more than $600 million in forgiveness opportunities identified. And we completed hundreds of financial wellness workshops in schools across the country, providing free sessions for educators on topics like state teacher retirement systems, classroom crowd funding and financial literacy.

The need for these financial resources for educators is clear, more than a third of educators say finding a trustworthy financial adviser is an obstacle to their financial security. Many don’t think they can afford one by providing complementary financial education and convenient formats, we are helping more educators become financially secure, which leads to more educators staying in the profession they love. These commitments to educators and other stakeholders are not separate from our business as a mission-centric organization is part of who we are. A good example of this is the activities we’ve undertaken this week, which is Teacher Appreciation Week. Our agents are hosting events for teachers. Employees are calling our customers to thank them for all that they do.

And this week, we will be honoring top educators both locally and nationally. While we are more than happy to share in appreciation events this week, we make it a point to thank educators all year long for their important role in helping prepare our children for the future. Before I wrap up, as you may have seen, we announced the hiring of Steve McAnena as our Chief Operating Officer. Steve most recently served as President of Personal Lines; and earlier, President of Distribution Life and Financial Services for Farmers Insurance. Before that, he was at Liberty Mutual Group for more than 25 years. His initial focus will be supporting market share expansion in the retail division. He is starting next week, and we will introduce him on our second quarter call.

Thank you. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Bret.

Bret Conklin: Thanks, everyone, for joining our call today. As Marita described, 2023 has started very well for Horace Mann despite the early arrival of some spring storms. I want to turn to the details of the segment performance and how we adjusted segment guidance to reflect first quarter results even as we continue to expect full year core EPS in the $2 to $2.30 range. So let’s start with P&C. Catastrophe losses were $22.4 million for the quarter, in line with our preannouncement and the primary reason for the segment’s quarterly loss. In addition, segment net investment income was below the prior year, largely due to the negative return on the limited partnership portfolio in the first quarter. Cat losses for the quarter contributed 14.7 points to the combined ratio versus 4.8 points from last year’s first quarter.

The 23 cat events in the period included two severe storms very late in March that combined to contribute more than a quarter of the cat losses in Q1. Over the past 10 years, second quarter events have typically resulted in almost half of full year cat losses and first half events have resulted in almost 60% of the total. With April cats coming in below our historic average, we think timing is definitely a factor in the above average first quarter cat losses. We are continuing to use a cat loss assumption that equals about 10 points on the full year combined ratio in our 2023 guidance. As we said at year-end, 10 points is our 10-year average and also aligns with the calculation based on historical frequency and a modeled increase in severities due to inflation, partially offset by a model decrease in exposures.

Turning to the underwriting results. Total written premiums rose 6.8% this quarter compared to the fourth quarter’s 4.7% increase as we begin to see the benefits of the rate actions that have been implemented today. Retention remained very strong, rising for both auto and property with strong auto sales coming largely from states where we’re most confident in the outlook for pricing. I’ll address the auto and property books in a moment, but we will certainly see the growth rate in total written premiums accelerate further over 2023 and 2024 with earned premium growth following. Turning to Auto. The year-over-year increase in average written premiums was 8.1% in the first quarter, up from 4.8% in the fourth quarter. Rate actions averaged almost 10% countrywide over the past five quarters.

As anticipated, first quarter underlying loss costs continued to be impacted by higher severity due to the inflation of the past year. We expect frequency to stabilize near 2022 levels for the full year, but it rose in the quarter over a year ago, impacted by the severe weather. However, we did see frequency return to expected levels in April. And as Marita noted, if loss trends exceed our current expectations in auto or property, we will adjust our pricing or underwriting plans as needed. The auto rate plan for 2023 is targeting rate increases of 18% to 20%. Achieving that rate plan only requires a single round of approvals in California, one of which we received over the weekend, as Marita noted. Bolstered by non-rate actions, this should lead to an auto combined ratio between 106 and 107 in 2023 and near our target level of 97 to 98 in 2024.

Turning to Property. The year-over-year increase in average written premiums was 9.8% in the first quarter. Rate increases countrywide since the beginning of 2022 have been bolstered by inflation adjustments to coverage values. The first quarter property underlying loss ratio improved to 50.2% with fire losses lower than a year ago. Our 2023 rate plan for property adds another 12% to 15% over the course of the year on top of another year of inflation guard increases that keep coverage values updated. These will combine for an impact of 17% to 20% in 2023, which should result in an underwriting profit in 2023 and getting us back to our targeted 92 to 93 combined ratio in 2024. Taking into account the various factors, but recognizing the lower net investment income in the first quarter, P&C 2023 segment core earnings are expected to be between breakeven and $5 million, reflecting a combined ratio in the range of 104% to $105, including 10 points from cat losses.

In 2024, we should be near our longer term combined ratio target for the segment of 95 to 96. Results for both our Life & Retirement and Supplemental & Group Benefit segments reflect our adoption of LDTI as of the first of the year with an implementation date of 1/1/21. As we’ve said, the standard did not change long-term earnings, underlying economics or cash flow. Furthermore, it has no impact on statutory accounting. However, it did require cash flow assumptions, underlying policy reserves to be reviewed and those reserves to be revalued using current discount rates. We will see the LVT impact in three areas in reported results and in the recast results for the past 2 years. First, it made the liability for future policyholder benefits more variable, largely due to changes in discount rate assumptions.

Second, it added a new benefit liability called Market Risk Benefits, or MRBs, which adds volatility to the benefit expense in retirement business. And third, it eliminated the shadow DAC equity adjustment. So let’s look at these segments. Turning to Life & Retirement. The segment performed largely as expected with adjusted core earnings of $14 million with net investment income up 4.4%, reflecting a higher contribution from floating rate investments, including commercial mortgage loan funds. The net interest spread on our fixed annuity business was 206 bps in the first quarter. Interest on FHLB funding agreements, which is included in interest credited, rose more rapidly than investment income due to the timing of rate resets. For the full year, we continue to expect the spread on our fixed annuity business to be in the range of 220 to 230 bps.

For the segment, total benefit expenses declined. Life mortality experience improved over a year ago that offset a modestly higher unfavorable MRB adjustment for the retirement business. For the Retirement business, net annuity contract deposits were $109 million for the first quarter. Cash value persistency was 93.1%. Outside of our core 403(b) accounts, we may be seeing a bit of an impact from the external headwinds facing the retirement savings sector, including inflationary pressures on consumers. We had another good quarter for Retirement Advantage, the fee-based mutual fund platform that we believe creates long-term opportunity for this business segment. Life annualized sales rose 22.2% year-over-year with persistency remaining strong.

We continue to look for Life sales as a way to initiate and solidify educator relationships, and we are very pleased with the progress. We continue to expect Life & Retirement core earnings will be between $67 million and $70 million for the year. Now let me turn to the Supplemental & Group Benefits segment, where we are beginning to reap the rewards of the investments we have made and will continue to make in diversifying into this higher growth, less capital intensive business. For the segment, first quarter core earnings were $14 million as the benefit ratio remains very favorable. First quarter premiums and contract charges earned were $66 million, about evenly split between the Worksite Direct and employer-sponsored businesses. We expect this segment will represent about 25% of total premiums and contract charges earned for the year.

Segment sales of $8.2 million for the year reflected sales levels in our Worksite Direct business, the supplemental products acquired in the NTA transaction in 2019, approaching pre-pandemic levels. They also include strong sales of employer-sponsored products as we gain traction with our distribution partners together gaining more access to districts and schools. We generally expect the first quarter to be a good sales quarter for employer-sponsored products, but also expected to be the highest quarter for the employer-sponsored products benefit ratio is benefit utilization for these products typically as highest early in the calendar year in our market. With benefit utilization and therefore, the benefit ratio lower-than-anticipated in the quarter, we expect seasonality will be less pronounced this year.

We now expect the benefit ratio in the third and fourth quarters will be higher than originally anticipated, but expect the full year benefit ratio to be below our long-term target for this business of 50%. The benefit ratio for the Worksite direct business remains low as utilization remains below pre-pandemic levels, although the ratio is slowly moving closer to our long-term target. As expected, the expense ratio rose from a year ago as we invest in the infrastructure for this business. Looking into 2023, we now expect core earnings to be between $45 million and $49 million, taking into account the strong first quarter results. Total net investment income was $74.7 million, 2.3% above last year’s first quarter as a higher contribution from floating rate investments, including commercial mortgage loan funds more than offset lower LP returns.

Pre-tax investment yield on the portfolio, excluding limited partnership interests, rose to 4.72%, with new money yields continuing to exceed portfolio yields in the core fixed maturity securities portfolio. The A+ rated core portfolio is primarily invested in investment-grade corporates, municipal and highly liquid agency and agency MBS securities, positioning us well for a recessionary environment later in 2023. The net unrealized investment loss position of the fixed maturity securities portfolio decreased to $453.3 million pre-tax at quarter end compared to $571.9 million at year-end 2022, primarily due to moderate stabilization of the interest rate environment experienced during first quarter 2023. Realized investment losses were well below last year and continue to reflect portfolio repositioning activities to improve book yield as well as the declines in the fair value of equity securities.

Full year net investment income from the managed portfolio is now expected to be between $325 million and $335 million. We are clearly benefiting from the higher interest rate environment in our core portfolio, and we are monitoring our commercial mortgage loan exposure closely. In the portfolio, we are underweight office and remain committed to a high-quality portfolio, so we would take action quickly, if appropriate. Due to first quarter results, we now assume full year limited partnership returns will be below their 10-year average. Our guidance for total 2023 net investment income reflects approximately $26 million quarterly from the deposit asset on reinsurance. In closing, despite the cat losses, the first quarter clearly demonstrated the progress we are making to leverage the stronger and more diverse organization that Horace Mann has become.

We remain confident that the growth we anticipate over the next several years will lead to an increasing share of the educator market, putting us back on the trajectory to sustainable double-digit ROEs. As we return to our longer term profitability targets in the P&C segment, we continue to expect 2023 core EPS will be in the range of $2 to $2.30. In 2024, we believe ROE will be at 10% with core EPS approaching $4. Our Life & Retirement and Supplemental & Group Benefits segments are a stable source of earnings and capital, which clearly mitigates the volatility of P&C. When we have returned to our targeted profitability across the segments, we know that Horace Mann is capable of generating approximately $50 million in excess capital above what we pay in shareholder dividends.

Our priority for excess capital will remain on growth. However, we are committed to using available excess capital for steady shareholder dividend increases, the Board raised the dividend by 3.1% in March and opportunistic share repurchases. We purchased approximately 157,000 shares at a total cost of $5.3 million since the beginning of the year. At the same time, we are committed to maintaining our financial leverage and capital ratios at levels appropriate for our current financial strength ratings. We expect our progress toward our objectives will accelerate over the coming quarters as we remain focused on providing strong returns to shareholders. Thank you. And with that, I’ll turn it back to Heather.

Heather Wietzel: Thank you. Operator, we are ready for questions.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Matt Carletti with JMP. Please go ahead.

Operator: Our next question comes from John Barnidge with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Operator: Our next question comes from Derek Han with KBW. Please go ahead.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Heather for any closing remarks.

Heather Wietzel: Thank you, and we appreciate everyone making time on a busy earnings day, available through the remainder of the week, if there’s any additional follow-up questions. We do have plans to be meeting with investors over the next couple of months. Feel free to reach out. But we do hope to connect with everyone and talk again. Thank you.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.