The Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom Wilson: So first, the 14% to 17% confirmation was just really our way saying we don’t see anything that diminishes the ultimate earning power of the company. What the equity base is and what the earnings are, of course, but we — so we’re really just trying to say we don’t see anything that diminishes the earning power of the building company. We never said it was a cap. And as I just mentioned, our strategy is really get returns up to where they’ve been historically, which will increase shareholder value. And then the big differential we have versus progressive and others is we need higher growth to drive the multiple of and we’re going to get that two ways to increase market share, personal profit liability to transformative growth. And then secondly, by expanding our protection offerings, which will drive the multiple up. So it’s like step 1, step 2. We think they can both hit at the same time, to be honest, but that’s what we’re driving to.

Michael Zaremski: Okay. That’s okay. That’s very helpful. My last question is just thinking through all the actions you’re taking in terms of expense ratio, pulling back in certain states. I guess it seems clear that in the near term, we should be thinking about PIF [ph] growth remaining under pressure. I’m just curious, too, is that one the right way to think about it? And two, is there — for your capital model, does PIF growth being negative with total revenue growth still being very positive because of pricing power? Is it — does it help that you’re shrinking PIF, but growing top line because of pricing, or is every dollar of growth still seems the revenue still seem the same way within your capital model?

Tom Wilscon: Capital models are really driven on risk, which are tied to premium. So PIF doesn’t really impact it. So — which is the right economically, we believe the right way to do it. In terms of growth, we think we can — Mario talked about growth in National General. We talked about growth in 50% of the markets were working there. When those 3 states that we need higher prices on get to the right level, we can grow there as we continue to roll out transformative growth and we’ll be in — we expect to be in 10 states with our new product this year, which will just be in the states and that we drive a lot of growth. but we’re using machine-based learning some really cool direct stuff. So we think there’s plenty of opportunity to grow.

And so we’re not concerned about it. The reason we’re reducing the growth in those states like if you’re not making any money, it doesn’t make sense to sell it. Like I don’t really understand the logic of we’re losing money. Let’s go out and spend a bunch of money to get business, and we’ll continue to lose money until we can raise the prices later. That just raises your — if you include those losses in your acquisition cost, it’s hard to make the lifetime value work. So we chose not to write the business it’s not quite really, as Mario said, it’s not really a combined ratio impact. It’s just like why do something that’s uneconomic.

Michael Zaremski: Understood

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Alex Scott from Goldman Sachs. Your questions please.

Alex Scott: Hi. First one I had is on the prior year development. One of the things we noticed from last quarter was just that I think 2022 accident year actually looked like it developed favorably and 2021 was still a bit unfavorable. And I guess I’m just interested what was the mix of that this quarter? And how do we think about sort of the speed up of kind of reaching settlements to reduce volatility on some of the older claims and the impact that’s having? And where are you in the process of doing that? Like is there still a good amount of wood to chop there? Have you sort of, gone through the 2021 claims to the extent you’re going to do it already. Just any color around all that to help us think through what development could look like through the rest of the year?

Jesse Merten: And I’ll take that quickly. I think the first thing I would highlight is that the development this quarter was related to National General, so a little bit different than what we went through last year. And we don’t separately disclose which prior years, it’s attributable to. But it’s safe to say — given the nature of that business, some of the near and years, we continually, Alex, move reserves between years and coverages and prior year reserves and coming up with these estimates. And so it’s safe to say that we’re really focused on settling — getting some of those older claims settled, getting the reserves right. And, sort of, again, I’m a broken record on this, but getting the aggregate reserve recorded properly. So this was really — again, this was — this quarter is certainly a story of the National General reserve levels. And the movement between prior years and coverage is just normal course this quarter.