W. R. Berkley Corporation (NYSE:WRB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Rob Berkley: Okay. So it’s what I would describe as somewhat of a recent phenomenon that is a reflection of the shift in the political environment. As far as data points go, Richie, I know that in your comments, you alluded to what we saw in the — I guess it would have been the fourth quarter of last year, which was really the, I think one of the first meaningful contributions or impacts that we saw and we saw an even greater impact in the fourth quarter and we’ll see how it unfolds from here. Rich, do you want to just spend a moment, maybe sharing with Josh and others that may be interested in just what has transpired with these linked securities in Argentina?

Rich Baio: Sure. Happy to do that, Rob.

Rob Berkley: Thank you.

Rich Baio: So Rob had alluded to earlier, the impact, excluding Latin America, in terms of our book yield being 4.2%. If we were to look to the prior period, a year earlier, if you will, just to show an appreciation for the increase in the domestic portfolio, that would have been around 3.6%. So certainly saw some pick-up there in regards to our overall yield. We did have a majority of our Argentine positions mature in the first quarter. And so for that reason, that’s why we’re saying that we would not anticipate the same level of investment income that we saw in the first quarter of this year, but would anticipate that we would get back down to a more leveled basis, as it relates to the Latin American portfolio in the second quarter and it will continue to decrease as the remainder of those inflation linkers mature throughout the remainder of this year.

Josh Shanker: So given that sort of situation, if we think about the amount of portfolio that matured this year or was preempted by a sale of investments, it was no different than in prior quarters. We can look at the sort of the trajectory on where investment income has gone, excluding 1Q and think about that might be a way to think about, as we head to a 5.5% yield on the overall portfolio, that it will continue along a trajectory towards that path?

Rich Baio: I think that’s a fairly reasonable approach, Josh, yes.

Josh Shanker: Okay. And just on the reserve releases, you know, historically, you tend to be pretty conservative in your portfolio, not releasing a lot of reserves, sometimes there’s one-off course where it happened. What happened in this quarter that made you feel that there was a reason to throw off some reserves here?

Rob Berkley: Josh, we — as I think we’ve discussed in the past, we look at our reserves a variety of different ways by each one of the operations that makes up the group by product line at a very granular level. We also look at it at the aggregate as well, the group level and we assess where we are and what we need and what tweaking needs to happen. I think there tend to be some folks that tend to maybe not try and tweak as regularly as we do, but we are constantly looking at it and trying to make sure that we’re not getting the porridge too hot or too cold. So at any moment in time, there’s 60 different moving pieces, but we feel as though that things are in a good place.

Josh Shanker: All right, I’ll come up with some harder questions, come offline, but I appreciate the disclosure. Thank you.

Rob Berkley: Okay. Thanks for the question, Josh.

Operator: We’ll go next to David Motemaden at Evercore.

David Motemaden: Hi. Thanks. Good morning.

Rob Berkley: Good morning, David.

David Motemaden: Good morning. Just had a question, if you could just let us know, understand it’s about $1 million of favorable PYD. How much of that was coming from the insurance segment versus the reinsurance segment? And maybe just a little color in terms of the movement between lines and accident years?

Rob Berkley: Sure, David, to make a long story short, the amount of movement from each one of the two segments was what I would define relative to the overall reserve position of each segment, let alone the aggregate, one could say is immaterial. And as far as the development goes, if you wouldn’t mind just catching up with Karen on those details. But there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary and from based on what I have the sheet that I have in front of me, but why don’t you catch up with Karen and she can try and give you a little bit more detail on that. But if your question is, are we taking lots of reserves out of the current year or the more recent year? No, the answer is, we’re not.

David Motemaden: Understood, that…

Rob Berkley: And a reminder, our life of our reserves is just inside of four years and the incurred tail is inside of three years.

David Motemaden: Got it. That’s helpful. And then just following-up on that, just looking at the accident year loss ratio ex cat in the insurance business, assuming negligible PYD to sort of back into that, it looks like it deteriorated around 100 basis points year-on-year. I’m wondering, was there any change that you guys made to loss trend or anything on the mix side that you would just call out as sort of pushing that up?

Rob Berkley: Richie, is there anything that you recall?

Rich Baio: I think certainly with social inflation, some of our loss picks maybe are slightly higher than where they had been the year earlier, but it really is just a mix of the business that’s just rising that.

Rob Berkley: Yes and probably the areas, well, not probably the areas that we are looking hardest at the picks would be around commercial auto and it’s less that we have concerns about prior year, it’s more that we just have concerns about the environment and where it seems to be today and where we expect it’s going tomorrow, we’ve got to keep up with that.

David Motemaden: Understood. Thank you.