Hey, Phil. Hey. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Great to have you. So listen, Trisura's got some pretty exciting growth targets. Maybe we'll kind of start off the conversation with a talk about the roadmap and some of the key levers to get there. Yeah, I think it's a, it's a good question. It's relevant for Trisura because unlike a lot of the companies out there, we are a pretty small player in the market that we're in. So from a growth initiatives perspective, we're just coming from a different posture than most, right? We've got a lot of ground in front of us, a lot of areas in front of us that we can grow into, which is exciting. I think, I think we've made a lot of investments recently that show our commitment to that. We talk about US Surety as a huge initiative for us. We've de-risked that build-out a little bit with the acquisition of this new entity in the US. We've now launched US Corporate Insurance. We're starting to write premiums in that part of the business, and then the organic growth of our existing platforms continues to be very strong. So we're feeling really excited about where we are at this stage. Excellent. Maybe we talk about how the company's evolving, right? You recently renamed some of the operating segments that to reflect those shifts. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, and I appreciate the question 'cause not a lot of people caught this nuance in our recent reporting. But the idea of Trisura always when we spun out from Brookfield, probably seven years ago now, was that we were going to build a scaled North American specialty platform. And our reporting originally sort of reflected what the business was when we spun out, which was really a Canadian business, a separate US business, and the attempt to build both of those. We've come a long way, I think, from those original structures, in that now we're a much more integrated North American platform. We've got practices that span borders. We've got expertise now in both the US and Canada in those core lines of business, right? We talk about Surety and corporate insurance. We've now got programs business in the US, as well as fronting business in Canada. All those structures now benefit from the presence of another practice in the entity, and this is all in pursuit of that goal of "Listen, let's become something that's a little bit more scaled, a little bit more relevant, and a little larger." So our reporting now, we're trying to evolve that. And listen, I'll be the first to say, to the extent we can describe that better or talk about that in a way that's more relevant to investors, we're always keen to hear ways to improve. Okay. And we thought about over the next five years, then, I mean, what do you see as the earnings contribution mix between those two platforms? I think more and more, our earnings platform will, drive towards fifty-fifty contribution from Canada and the US, right? Today, the vast majority of our underwriting income, the vast majority of our, our overall income comes from Canada, with growing contributions from the US. Proportionally, our growth rate will be a lot higher in the US, right? These, these platforms, as they build up, US Surety, US Corporate Insurance, they're going to be growing faster than our established platforms. That means that in time, you'll have a, a greater contribution, at least proportionally, from those entities. So I'm kind of excited to see in the next three to five years what the platform looks like, because I think there will be a lot more, both diversification and scale from these practices in the US. Excellent. We'll shift gears a little bit, and let's just kind of focus in on that, on the US Programs. And I think for that US platform, I mean, the investor narrative around growth feels like it's shifting, I think from basically shifting to an increased focus, I think, on profitability over top line. So maybe just spend a few minutes and just kind of unpack that dynamic and what you see as the biggest opportunities over the next 12 to 24 months. Yeah, this is an interesting question 'cause one thing we've always been relatively definitive on is the pursuit of profitable growth. So this question of always, is growth for growth's sake? Is growth for profitability? The entity launched in 2005 and grew very profitably from 2005 until now, so US Programs is not an exception to that. I think what you're seeing in that entity is a maturity of that platform. So on a dollar basis, the entity is a lot larger than it used to be, so those percentage growth rates are normalizing. And I think we've refined our appetite a little bit. Candidly, in the last six or seven years in operating in that practice, we've had experiences in lines of business we don't want to be exposed to anymore, and that changes the profile of the business, it changes the volatility of the business. But there's always been, and will continue to be a focus on this core level of profitable growth. I think US Programs is a really interesting part of the market. There has just been a secular trend of investment into the MGA space in the U.S. There has been a huge step up in the amount of premiums written through these models. I think it's about $100 billion now being written through these businesses. Our models, the types of models that we execute in that space, maybe account for 15% of that market. So there's a lot of room for us to take up share there, and I think a lot of room to do that very profitably. Excellent. And what's a reasonable expectation for midterm ROE for that U.S. platform? Yeah, we're running today at about a mid-teens Operating ROE. I think as that continues to scale, my hope and expectation where that starts to creep into the mid- to high-teens. You've seen precedents in that space achieving that, and I think we've seen the potential of that to get there. So I think as that entity continues to grow and scale, that mid- to high-teens ROE is what we'll be targeting. Okay. I think there's also been a shift, I think, in the proportion of risk that you're retaining across your U.S. fronting business. What's behind that change? And is that a short-term trend or maybe a new level set over the mid to longer term? Yeah, on the latter part of the question, I think this is a new level set. Our business is now more mature than it was five, six years ago. We're larger, we've got more familiarity with our partners. And candidly, it's been a very strong pricing environment for the past few years. And when we see that, there are lines of business and partners of ours that we want to gain more exposure to. And so there's always this efficient frontier you're trying to find between fee income and retained premium in those lines of business. And originally, we'd started, we talked a lot about kind of at 5-10%. I think that's likely migrating to 10-15%, in that range. It's part of the reason we've started referring to this business as US Programs business, rather than just a pure fronting platform, and I think that's likely where we settle. Excellent. So you also had a target to bring that Fronting Operational Ratio down to 80% or a bit below. Is that something you're still confident in, and when would you expect to get there? Yeah, the only thing I'd say that the profitability of this platform, I think I still have a lot of confidence in. I think the way we measure it is evolving a little bit. Fronting operational ratio, as you say, I used to bang the drum. We wanted to get that down to 80%, maybe high 70s%. What we've noticed, and I'll take, I'll wear the blame for this, is as you change retention, so as you retain more business, it can be as profitable or more profitable on an income basis than retaining less business, but your fronting operational ratio may move up. And so what I care about, what we care about at the end of the day, is capital allocation, is return on equity. What's the return on this business platform? There are trade-offs between marginal increases in retention or fee income. So if we retain 15% of our business, let's say, you might see that fronting operational ratio move up into the low 80s. If we retain 5% of that business, fronting operational ratio might be down in the 70s. But the absolute dollars of profitability are gonna be very similar between those two. So this is something that we're working a little bit with our investor community to educate them on. What we care about a lot is, listen, what's the profitability coming out of this platform? Is it segmented between 90% fee income, 10% underwritten income? Is it 85% fee income? Is it sort of 15% underwritten income? That's gonna inform that fronting operational ratio, along with all the other things we talk about, loss ratio and growth and things like that. But it, it's a, it's an important nuance of our business, 'cause I think a lot of people originally used that as a heuristic. 80% is gonna translate to X percentage of ROE. There's a bit more nuance to it now. Okay. And again, I think within US Programs, I think Q2 saw a bit of an unexpected surge in premiums written. How should investors think about top-line growth for 2024 and into 2025? Yeah, you're right. Q2 surprised us. I mean, I think I've been talking very openly about this year being probably low- to mid-single-digits growth on a full year basis. Q2 was well above that, obviously. I think my view for 2024 is still in that low- to mid-single-digit range, so I'm not changing that forecast at all. But I think it shows very well the potential of this platform going into 2025. Our pipeline is strong. The platform continues to grow. Our differentiation is material now versus some of the other competitors in the marketplace. So that sets us up very well for 2025, as we think about what that growth rate settles at. Okay. And are you comfortable with capital levels to sustain that growth? Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think from a capital perspective, we have. We've been very fortunate to have very strong support of the markets historically. We're now in a position where you've got a very strong returning platform from an ROE perspective, now pursuing growth rates that are a bit more normalized. They're still attractive. You've got, depending on line, 15%-30% growth in our business. And when you're writing at the ROEs that we're writing at with the surplus capital we have, gives us a lot of confidence that we're able to fund that internally. Okay. So Trisura Specialty, I guess formerly referred to as the Canadian segments, really generated impressive ROEs over the past few years. What would be the near-term ROE outlook, and what do you see as a sustainable mid-term target for that platform? Yeah, it's so just to level set anyone who's not familiar with these figures, the Canadian platform historically has been running close to a 30% ROE, and some of the things we are very open with people about is that's likely not the long-term level of return for that business. I think it probably settles in kind of low- to mid-20s. And in the near term, in Q1 and Q2, we did see that high-20s ROE level, and so certainly that's an expectation that I think is fair for the next quarter or so. As we think about that in the long term, as we think about a larger business, as we think about an entity maybe that's not writing at 81% combined ratio, maybe something 85%, which is still very strong, you're probably closer to that low- to mid-twenties ROE, which we still think is spectacular. Okay. Okay. So you talked about the US Surety business potentially growing equal in size to that Canadian operation. Can you give us an update in terms of how that expansion is progressing, and really what investors should expect over the next twelve to twenty-four months? Yeah. In the near term, I'm not expecting a huge material change in that US Surety premium. I think we've seen some good momentum this year. We talked about that in Q1 and Q2. But the inflection point for that business is gonna be a widely licensed platform. So we closed in spring of this year, our acquisition of a US Surety platform. Our next job is to expand that platform across the US, and we're going through that right now. It's a very regulatory and legal-heavy process. That means in the next twelve months, the growth that we expect to achieve is really based on that old platform that we have in Surety. Candidly, it's performing well. We are seeing accelerating growth in that, but that inflection point where we start to say, "Okay, when can I expect to have a platform in the U.S. that starts to mirror the size of the platform in dollar amounts in Canada?" That's probably three to five years away, and we're talking about a platform, hopefully at that time, that's CAD 100 million in top line. But what that means, if we take a step back, is we've got an entity today that is fully funded, fully set up for that type of premium base, and a combined ratio reporting statistics that includes the drag of that build-out. So what's interesting about our platform today is we're investing in the entity, we're building out new platforms that will be very significant for the entity in a few years. We're absorbing the cost of those through our platform today, and if at any stage we start to get through that break-even point into the profitability, which we sort of expect in the next two years or so, that starts to get really attractive from a return perspective. Okay. I think there's been several headlines related to rising real estate developer insolvencies, really resulting from increased construction costs, higher financing expense. How are the domestic operating conditions for Surety? Yeah, I would really segment surety. I think from a news perspective, there's been a lot of focus on the condo market. This would be something we would call developer surety. There's really three components of the surety market in Canada that we participate in. There's contract surety, which is the largest part of our book. Let's say three-quarters of our book is contract surety. Commercial surety would be 10%-15%. There's a little bit of residential warranty, and then there's developer, which is mid- to high-single digits of our surety book as a percentage. So to level set, before I talk about kind of developer surety, it's a relatively small part of our business, but I don't think we would shy away from saying the developer surety space today is stressed. I think most of us can look around, both urban environments and suburban environments and see some of the stress we're having in getting units built: condo units, regular units. Those developers are struggling. Development costs are high, construction costs are high. That's hurting some of these developers, so from a developer perspective, I don't want to sugarcoat it, that's an environment that is challenged right now, and I don't think that will be news to anyone. From a Trisura perspective, again, not a huge component of our business, but if we take a step back and we say, "Okay, how's Surety doing in general?" That infrastructure-focused part of the business is continuing to perform as we expect, right, and that's gonna be the biggest driver of our Canadian Surety practice. That's things like roads, bridges, sewers, hospitals, schools. Those types of things, as you have a growing population, as you have increased infrastructure spending at every level of government, all those require surety bonds. And this is, by the way, one of the reasons we're so excited about the U.S. The U.S., if you look at a lot of the infrastructure acts, the Inflation Reduction Act, there's huge components of those policy postures that include investment in infrastructure. That infrastructure in the U.S. also needs surety bonding. And so these environments, despite what I'd say has been a pretty volatile interest rate environment and an interesting construction environment, there is secular demand for these types of products. And given where Trisura plays in Surety then, I mean, what economic indicators should investors be really focused on to help gauge the directional outlook of that business? At the highest level, Surety is a procyclical product, and so think about economic activity really at that really high level. If you want to double click one or two levels down, it's gonna be infrastructure spend. So what are governments committing to in terms of the build-outs that they have in the market? And then, if you want to talk about claims, which is as important to be monitoring, right? That's what we care about very deeply is claims experience. It's solvency of institutional construction. And I really focus on that commercial and institutional space because a lot of times people conflate residential construction with the space that we're in. Single-family homes is not... They're not getting bonded, right? The requirement for bonding is really a government one, and so I'm always really definitive when I say, "Listen, the stuff you should look at, at that high level: economic activity, GDP, infrastructure spending, and then it's solvency of contractors in the institutional and commercial space. Okay, so you've also expanded into the US Corporate Insurance space. What's your take on operating conditions in these lines? Yeah, this is a-- I'd say, this is a more balanced market than it has been. I know Rowan referenced in the specialty commercial space, there is more competition and more balance. We've seen three, probably almost four, really good years of rate environment in that space. I would say the operating environment from a pricing standpoint is pretty balanced right now, which for us isn't really gonna impact whether we enter or exit a business line. Take a step back at Trisura, we are in specialty commercial lines, which means through the cycle, regardless of the pricing environment, we expect better than industry average profitability. This business was candidly built in a soft market, and we've enjoyed a hard market for the past few years. It's very difficult to time, okay, is there a soft or hard market coming in the next couple of years? But what we care about is building a platform that performs in both. And so when I talk about launching the US Corporate Insurance, that's not a comment on, we think it's a really hard market right now, a really attractive pricing environment. We think the components of that market that we are good at underwriting are always going to be attractive, and that's really what our posture is in launching. Okay. What do you see as Trisura's competitive advantage then in that segment, and again, the growth outlook for the platform overall? Yeah. So with corporate insurance, there's really two things I would talk about as competitive advantages. First and foremost, you need to understand the risks that you're putting on, right? And that comes with time and experience. And this is why you see there's a really strong bench at Trisura of people who have been in the business for a long time. So those who are authoring our policy documents, those who are adjudicating sort of risk appetites, they're people who have known and lived the business for sometimes in excess of thirty years. That's now being supplemented by very senior hires in the US who have relationships, and that relationship component piece is as important as an understanding of the underwriting. Because you can have a perfect policy that might never have a claim, but if you can't originate any premium, it doesn't matter. And so it's the marrying of those two factors, the ability to originate premium and the commercial sense to pick the right risks, that is Trisura's competitive advantage. And again, if you look at our history in Canada, there's been a very strong track record of growing faster than the market and doing that at strong combined ratios, which is what we're trying to do now on a North American basis. Okay. Shift gears a little bit. The Canadian fronting business, it's really been a solid growth engine in recent years. What's the growth outlook for that segment, and what do you see as the critical factors to get there? This is always a tough one to estimate, and I get this question a lot. We tend to estimate our market, our sort of opportunity, I'll say, on a bottoms-up basis, so who are our partners? What do we think they're doing? What do they think they're doing year over year, and that sort of informs our estimates. As you know, I've been a bit low on what that platform could do in the last couple of years. It's getting bigger now. We sort of think that 15%-20% growth range this year is where we'll settle. Just as a lot of large numbers go, that probably comes down to mid-teens next year, but the biggest determinant of that market is going to be the appetite of foreign reinsurers to access Canadian premiums, right? And that's where we come in, can we originate these style of programs that are interesting to those foreign reinsurers? And it's worth noting, this business is different than our US programs business, right? This is not specifically MGA-driven necessarily. This is a broader platform that services not only MGA premium, but analogous groups of premium from broker communities, partnerships with reinsurers who want to deploy capacity into Canada. It's a much more... It's a much lower retention business, I'll say, than our US business, but one that is, as you've seen, has been a very fast grower and a very strong contributor to profitability. So it's one we're keen to keep expanding. Okay. Now, how do you see the earnings mix across the Trisura Specialty platform evolving over time? I think proportionally, this goes back to a little bit of that comment on Canada versus US. Proportionally in the near term, that primary business, the surety and corporate insurance, that's going to grow faster than the other pieces. The other pieces being US programs and Canadian fronting. I think the component we don't often talk about is investment income, and if you take a step back, our business is sort of split a third, a third, a third on a pre-tax basis between fee income, investment income, and underwriting income, and that's a really nice place for us to be in. I think in the near term, you're probably going to get a bit more growth in that underwriting income side as you ramp up your primary business. Those are business lines we think are very strong and profitable, and that's sort of the evolution we want to see. Okay. And again, I think Trisura has enjoyed a fairly strong tailwind, I think, from investment income. Yeah. And with the shifting yields, I mean, what's your outlook over the next twelve, twenty-four months for that line? Yeah, we, It's worth noting, we were very fortunate at Trisura to have grown in a rising rate environment. So we turned over our portfolio very quickly, right? We raised capital, we grew, we were able to deploy that capital in the market. We generally stayed pretty short duration, and until very recently this year, we started extending duration. And the goal there is to lock in these yields for a longer period of time. So regardless of where interest rates go, what we're focused on doing is defending this new level of investment income that we've created, and you're seeing us do that through a bit of an extension in duration. I think our portfolio will continue to grow because we've got confidence in the growth trajectory of our premium base. Whether or not yields are 25 basis points higher or lower from here on out, I don't think is going to change that trajectory of growth in the investment portfolio. What you're not going to see is we're not going to double investment income every year, which is sort of the trajectory that we've been on recently. But I think that growth of our investment portfolio, and therefore our investment income, is fed by that fronting growth trajectory narrative that we've demonstrated. Excellent. Well, time's ticking down, so maybe one time for just a final closing question here. The stock's seen a bit of a reversal, I think, post the Q2 earnings. What do you think investors are missing, and why do you think they should be excited about the outlook for the stock from here? Yeah, from my perspective, Q2 results were strong. We had great growth, great profitability. I think as we sit today at Trisura, we have a bigger capital base than we've ever had. We've got more financial flexibility than we've ever had. We've got more scale than we've ever had. And so the ability to execute on these initiatives starts to be de-risked. It's not riskless. This is an execution story like it always has been. But if I'm looking out at where Trisura is today, book value is the highest it's ever been, premium is the highest it's ever been, investment income is the highest it's ever been. That's a great launchpad for the next couple of years on where we want to go, and I feel very confident that that's a platform we can continue executing on. Excellent. Well, David, great conversation. And again, I'd like to thank you personally for taking the time today to sit with us and participate in the conference. And again, on behalf of Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets, we'd like to thank the Trisura organization for your continued support. Yeah, I appreciate it, Phil, and thank you to Scotia. Thank you. Thank you.