The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE:HIG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Swift: Yes, thank you for joining us today, Jimmy. Again, as I said in my opening remarks, I mean, the trends there are some modest level of deterioration in our combined ratios, principally due to the pricing environment set by various regulators in the experience that the industry has had, I think you’re really asking is, when do you see a turn and that’s a hard question to ask. But I think the components of a turn in pricing are starting to emerge, particularly as we get through the pandemic period where frequencies were just down due to less economic activity, less work in general, and those usually, the look back period is three years on rate filing. So, if you think of experience in 2019, 2021 that starts to leave your rate filings in 2024. So, I’m optimistic that there can be some at least reversal of negative price trends coming out of NCCI or other rating bureaus to allow maybe modest price increases sometime in 2024 heading into 2025.

Jimmy Bhullar: Okay. And then on personal lines, obviously, the loss ratio picked up at the expense ratio declined considerably this quarter, should we assume a similar expense ratio given lower marketing until the loss ratio begins to improve or what are your thoughts on that over the next ?

Chris Swift: Well, let me just start and then I’ll ask Stephanie to add her planning. Again, this year, we really cut back on marketing, particularly in the fourth quarter to make sure that we had opportunities to add new customers that were really €“ could be profitable with us as we earn that in and we just really, sort of slowed down marketing at this point in time. And as we head into 2023 though, as I said, I think we’ve become rate adequate by the middle of the year and gives us an opportunity to think about marketing slightly differently, but Stephanie, what would you say from a strategy side and then really an expense perspective?

Stephanie Bush: I think you captured it well, Chris. A couple other points I’d either underscore add is that, yes, our marketing and media change was intentional in the late third quarter into the fourth quarter. We moved really more to more targeted and very marketing sources. So, I want to confirm that we were still marketing. It’s a very dynamic process, marketing source by marketing source, but as Chris mentioned, we believe that we will be new business rate adequate by mid-year in majority of the states and you should expect to see our media spend continue to build throughout the year. And then finally, with that new business rate adequacy, I would expect that we’d begin to start to see new business PIF count growth in the back half of the year. So, think about how all of those components work together.

Chris Swift: But Jimmy, just to tie it all together, I would expect on a year to year over basis expenses to be relatively flat.

Jimmy Bhullar: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Kligerman of Credit Suisse. Andrew, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Kligerman: Great. Good morning. Looking at Slide 16 of your presentation, I see that the annualized investment yield ex LPs has really picked up nicely just Q-over-Q from 3.3% to 3.7%, and we’re seeing a little bit of pressure now on rates, but can you talk about where you see that annualized investment yield ex LPs going over the next few quarters? And any insight you could provide there?