RLI Corp. (NYSE:RLI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Andrew Andersen: Great. Thank you.

Todd Bryant: You bet.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Meyer Shields from KBW. Meyer, your line is now open. Please go ahead whenever you’re ready.

Meyer Shields: Great. Thank you. Good morning. One quick question for Jen. You talked about underwriting adjustments in marine. I was hoping you could expand on that a little bit?

Jennifer Klobnak: Sorry, you were talking so fast. I didn’t understand the question.

Meyer Shields: Sorry. That’s an occupational hazard. Yes. In your opening comments, you talked about underwriting adjustments in marine, and I’m not sure what that actually means.

A – Jennifer Klobnak: I don’t want to — we’re not like underwriting the book, but we’re just adjusting on the edges a bit which has caused us to reduce a little bit the growth that we’ve seen historically in marine as of late. That’s a very healthy book, though. We continue to get positive rate in marine. So for the quarter, we had a 5% rate increase in Marine, 6% year-to-date. So we are just taking minor underwriting adjustments, but we do throughout, but in this particular case, it was a little bit more noticeable on the top line. So that’s a [indiscernible] Marine book.

Meyer Shields: Okay. So it wasn’t like a numerical adjustment. There’s just in underwriting standards?

A – Jennifer Klobnak:

Meyer Shields: Okay. All right. Sorry, I wasn’t sure. Related question, I know we talked a lot about how turmoil in the personal lines market is creating opportunity for standalone personal umbrella. I’m wondering, is there any downside — are there any business that’s lost sort of — that you wouldn’t want to leave because of all the challenges in personal lines?

Jennifer Klobnak: That’s an interesting question. I — we are not really losing business right now. We are — our retention is pretty much steady. So I would say there’s nothing notable there. In fact, it’d be nice if our retention was higher because it does take effort to gain new business. So it’d be nice that would be higher. But we are not seeing any business that we are losing that we would not want to move to say at this point.

Q – Meyer Shields:

Todd Bryant: Yes, Meyer, it’s Todd. For the quarter, it really was contained. All of the Maui losses were contained within the Property segment as well as the reinstatement premium. The other storm losses in the quarter, but the other $5 million that I mentioned, there was around $1 million of that is about the [indiscernible] level in the Casualty segment. So the bulk of that was in the Property segment as well.

Meyer Shields: Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much.

Todd Bryant: You bet.

Operator:

Q – Scott Heleniak:

Todd Bryant: Scott, it’s Todd. I mean, I’m not sure the relevance from that standpoint. I mean, to the extent that you’re trying to do a comparative to prior periods when you think in terms of changes in the reinsurance. But it’s — you’re going to be in that 150-plus range. I mean, you can kind of see it. And the initial reserves that we estimate that we have made. We are going to do a 130 to 150 range, and we are constantly attempting any way to be more on the conservative side in our initial book.

Scott Heleniak: Okay. That’s helpful. And then just touching on the reserve releases again, was there any particular accident year that stood out where most of those releases came from? Or was it spread out? Anything notable there?

Todd Bryant: It was spread out. I mean, we have a little bit in the ’15 to ’17, some in the ’19 to ’21. I mean, it really wasn’t any particular accident year that a bulk of that was coming through, pretty spread.