The Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gregory Peters: Well, that makes sense. I guess for my follow-up, I’m going to pivot to the pricing slides. I’m thinking Slides 9 and 10. And was wondering if you could — I know you provided detail in your comments but if you could give us an update on the problematic states. I think in Slide 9, you said 41% of the — of your business in auto is running above 100. If we look forward to 2024, how do you think this chart might look?

Tom Wilson: Which chart are you referring to, Greg?

Gregory Peters: [Indiscernible].

Tom Wilson: Yes. I mean, of course, it all depends. Mario can give you some color as well. But it all depends what happens in California, New York and New Jersey. But let me be very clear, we are not going to continue to lose — 4 digits in millions in those 3 states. So far, Mario has talked about us getting smaller by not growing we’ve executed that. The next step is to not be able to serve customers who we want to serve because we can’t afford to those $0.20 on the dollar. Mario, do you want to comment on? Like we’ve been talking — it’s not like this as we just figured this out or they’re not aware of.

Mario Rizzo: Just to give you a little additional color across the 3 states. And Tom is right, we’ve been talking about this all year and we’ve taken pretty significant actions to restrict new business volumes and it’s down like we talked about earlier, about 75%. We’ve got 3 significant rates pending rate pending across all 3 states. We have an auto rate in California that we filed back in May, I believe, 35% we’ve got a 29% filing pending in New Jersey. We implemented rates in New York ranging from high single digits to low double digits or low teens across our opening closed books middle of the year. We just filed for another 18.3% in New York auto. So we’ve got significant rates pending with the department. As Tom mentioned, where we’re at now is we need action those filings in the fourth quarter.

And if we can’t, then we believe the right thing to do for the customers in the other 47 states as well as for our shareholders is to take additional action to get smaller across all 3 of those states and that’s what we would do beginning next year if we can’t get resolution on the rate filings that are currently pending.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from the line of Alex Scott from Goldman Sachs.

Unidentified Analyst: It’s Marley [ph] on for Alex. So you mentioned in the prepared remarks that you were increasing in-person inspections to reduce overall claim costs. Could you touch on this a little bit more? How impactful is this? And then maybe how many of the current accidents are assessed now in person versus remote? And then how should we think about this for near-term changes to loss LAE?

Mario Rizzo: Marley, this is Mario. I’ll answer your question. So I would — where I would start is going back to the different components of our auto profit improvement plan, taking rate increases, reducing costs, restricting new business in states where we aren’t achieving target levels of profitability and improving operational processes and claims what you’re describing around more in-person inspections is a component of that fourth piece of improving operational processes. We believe that by doing more physical inspections doing more oversight broadly of both in-network and out-of-network shops as well as doing the same thing on the property side as well that we’ll be able to identify opportunities pay what we owe but also not pay for, say, things like pre-existing damage or in total loss cases, cars that could be repaired versus replace.