Kinsale Capital Group, Inc. (NYSE:KNSL) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Pablo Singzon: And then, just to follow-up, Mike, on your comment about actual losses running light here. Right? So I think one area where you see that is in your paid incurred, which has been running low for several of years already. And I think that’s part of the reason why you’ve been releasing reserves from more recent accident years. I guess, just sort of like a pushback question here, you know, realizing that the losses have been good, but what gives you the confidence that you’re not releasing too prematurely? Right? Because I think if you ask most other insurers, they’re not touching the more recent accident years yet, right, even if everyone had a good run-in pricing. So just your thoughts on what you’re trying to do there?

Michael Kehoe: Yes, I would just say we’re releasing reserves more slowly than we have in the past. We’ve called out the 2016 through ’19 accident years repeatedly as an area where not overall but on our long tail occurrence business, a lot of it’s construction related, we’ve seen those accident years develop later than we would have anticipated and of course we react to that. There’s a whole range of actuarial assumptions you make as we post our financials every quarter. And we’re always looking at actual loss activity and going back and reviewing and testing those actuarial assumptions. And if there’s an area where we haven’t been cautious enough, we correct for that. But in general on a call like this where we can’t get into too much granularity because it gets to be such a complex topic, I think it’s really important for investors to know that it’s an enormous priority for the management team to post loss reserves today, to pay claims in the future, to do that in a conservative fashion so that it’s very likely we have more than enough money set aside.

That’s our goal. We don’t we haven’t batted a 1,000 on that, but we’ve been very good at it over the, if you will this is our 15th-year in business. So we’re trying to extend that good track record even in the face of kind of heightened uncertainty with inflation and the like.

Pablo Singzon: And last one, Mike, I’m going to ask you to composite a bit here. But just given all the reserving issues that are sort of bubbling under the surface now and slowly emerging? Do you think that creates another pricing led for casualty, right? Because clearly last year was property, but do you think this creates more opportunities than casualty?

Bryan Petrucelli: Yes. I think we’re seeing that right now in the deals we’re looking at in casualty.

Michael Kehoe: Yes. And I think there’s also this enormous expansion in the delegated underwriting authority market over the last number of years is kind of an interesting anomaly, if you will, in that normally hard markets are associated with a contraction in delegated underwriting. In this market, we’ve had this hard market the last several years at a time when we’ve had an expansion in delegated underwriting authorities. And clearly some of those are very well managed and we’re not indicting that model of business even though we’re not engaged in it. But there’s a lot of those delegated underwriting authorities that can be wildly aggressive in their underwriting pricing and we see that as nearly and for likely feature contraction which I think is bullish for the market and I think is bullish for Kinsale.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Andersen from Jefferies.

Andrew Andersen: Hey, thanks for the follow-up. Just wanted to go back to the rate increase number of 7%. Just to be clear, that’s what we can think of as a pure rate number and then we could perhaps add on a few points of exposure that acts as rate?

Bryan Petrucelli: Yes, that’s correct.

Andrew Andersen: And the loss trend against a 7% plus a few points would be approximately 8%?

Bryan Petrucelli: I’m sorry, ask that question again.

Andrew Andersen: The loss trend that we could apply against the 7% rate plus perhaps a few points of exposure?

Bryan Petrucelli: I think it would have somewhere 4% to 5%.

Operator: And there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Michael Kehoe for some final closing remarks.

Michael Kehoe: Okay. Well, thanks everybody for joining us and we look forward to speaking with you again here soon. Have a great day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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