And ultimately, that may take longer to settle. And then there’s no doubt that the court closures with the pandemic length in the tail. Those factors get exacerbated by the unfavorable legal environment that we face and a rising cost of inflation. And that is not going to be unique to us, but I can’t speak to what others are sort of doing in that space. We were very cautious. We put up additional IBNR across those maturing accident years. We’ll see how things play out over time. In Professional, we’re speaking to our large risk-managed E&O and D&O accounts in the U.S. where we offer larger limits. We tend to play in an excess position in the years in question. We would often be in high access positions. What we’ve begun to have some concern around is an emergence of a pattern where it may be more likely that our layers get implicated than we previously anticipated.
And we’re seeing some of that already. We’ve seen that in recent quarters. The good news is, right, in that quote, there’s not much of a claim reporting tale. We’re talking a claims-made book of business. It’s a finite claims universe. And so, we got our underwriting claims and actuarial teams together in the fourth quarter, took a deep dive, ultimately concluded that we would take a more pessimistic view with regards to how many claims we could be exposed to. There’s no doubt in my mind the rising costs to defend, increasing settlement amounts are linked with a more inflationary environment we’re experiencing, and that’s the impetus for our development. Again, that isn’t going to be unique to us, but I can’t speak to how others are handling that.
The years in question as well on the professional side, they correspond at the peak years for security class action filings, lower court dismissals and now that’s kind of playing out. Importantly, I think across our books of business, those were experiencing on the tail end of the last soft insurance market cycle. Since then, we’ve had the better part of four years of rate increases, and we’ve done a lot on the underwriting side, terms, conditions, limits profiles, attachments. We’ve seen retentions increase from clients. So, we’ve taken a lot of underwriting action and now we’ll just take a very sort of cautious view on the most recent years, and we’ll see how that plays out. As you know us, we react to bad news very quickly, and we’re pretty cautious with regards to the economic backdrop at the moment.
Mark Hughes: Yes, sure. But on the reinsurance side, what’s your appetite to grow as you see pricing here in your target line?
Jeremy Noble: Well, I think that’s the part. It’s a little bit down to the appetite. So, we certainly have the ability to grow and the capital to deploy supporting growth if we’re happy with the pricing and the terms and condition and the environment. I mean it is the case that while property got a lot of the headlines around 1/1, casualty, professional specialty lines where we play, definitely were firmer acting as a more disciplined market and we will see improvements with regards to coverage attachment and pricing in our portfolio as we move this year. We will opportunistically take advantage where it makes sense in that space.
Operator: We’ll move next to Scott Heleniak at RBC Capital Markets.
