Good morning, everybody, and good afternoon for those in Europe. My name's Mike Zarembski, and it's my pleasure to introduce Chris Swift, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Hartford, and Beth Costello, Chief Financial Officer. The format of today's presentation will be a virtual fireside chat. I'll start off by quickly saying that it's been a whirlwind past year for most everybody, to say the least. I've been making the case to investors that despite COVID-19 headwinds in parts of the business, the P&C industry fundamentals are sound, and there's actually underlying positive momentum in many areas. I was looking at The Hartford's 2022, for example, consensus earnings forecast, for example, and they've indeed increased 13% off the kind of June, July 2020 lows, when COVID's uncertainty was at its peak. With that, why don't I pass it off to Chris to make some opening remarks as well, and then we'll get into Q&A. Thank you, Michael. It's great to be with you. Beth and I, great to be with you at your virtual conference here, and we look forward to our conversations. I just thought I'd summarize a couple key facts about The Hartford that maybe your investors would find helpful. First, in spite of all the challenges in 2020, I thought the organization performed exceedingly well, and persevered through a lot of challenge. In the end, we delivered over $2 billion of core earnings, a 12.7 core earnings ROE, and we are executing well on our key initiatives, including our expense savings program, The Hartford Way. The guidance we provided for 2020 from our core drivers perspective, I think points to Commercial Lines' ability to expand margins and grow in the top line. For Personal Lines, I would say I think margins will remain healthy there, while driving patterns begin to revert to normal means going forward. As we discussed, Group Benefits, first half of the year is going to be significantly impacted by what we think is going to be continued excess mortality due to COVID. The underlying fundamentals of Group Benefits remain very solid. The last point is, we have begun to execute our capital management program, which as we described, is $1.5 billion of buybacks through the end of 2020. We feel good about returning and buying back shares to investors, and from investors. Overall, my overall feeling that I would want investors to have is, I feel very optimistic as we head into 2021 in our ability to perform, create value for shareholders, and ultimately remain a top competitor in an environment where there's a lot of good competitors out there. We're looking forward to competing every day for hearts and minds of agents, brokers, and customers. Okay. That's a great intro to kind of maybe set us up for some of the questions that I also, probably surveyed some investors over the last couple of weeks too, so some of these questions are from them. Chris and Beth, I think most investors at a high level do understand that The Hartford's growth trajectory, if we're thinking about kind of premium and top-line growth, has been steadily improving along with GDP levels lately. Maybe you can kind of talk about some of the pluses and minuses you're seeing or thinking about in both maybe P&C and Group Benefits. I know there's nuances there, so we don't have to touch on every business line, but maybe the main points you'd like to get across. Sure. I think what we tried to say, particularly in our last investor call with fourth quarter earnings, Michael, was, I think you got to put everything in context of where we are today. First, I just think about what is the macro backdrop. One, we're still in a pandemic. We're approaching, hopefully, 15% of our population being inoculated with the vaccine. There's still going to be some pressures in various sectors of our economy as we still deal with the pandemic broadly defined. Second, what I would say particularly is, for us, Beth and I have always talked about our firm being an employment-centric firm, given our large presence in workers' comp and long-term disability. Those lines are still performing very well from an overall profitability perspective. When unemployment really spiked as it did in the second quarter, and we're now just beginning to sort of build out, there was a little top-line pressure as people reduced payrolls, as exposures shrank. I was listening to the Fed yesterday, I'm sure like you. If the economy really can grow 6% next year, that is going to put a little bit of a lift, I would say a lot of lift, particularly on jobs and wages, which again, exposure should come back into our premium base, building over the year. I think, again, most of this is probably second half of the year, and that's why I think the first half of the year and the second half of the year in 2020 is going to be dramatically different. Third, The Hartford specific, I think you know more than most. We've been hard at work improving the franchise, making investments, doing M&A to add capabilities, building our own organic growth capabilities with new products and services. I really feel like it's all coming together very beautifully next year, where our agents and our brokers really know our expanded capabilities and are looking to use more of our products in solutions with our shared customers. You think about the industry verticals, you think about Global Specialty, you think of some of the improvements that we've focused on in middle market. I think all that is coming together to have a margin improvement story and a top-line growth story. One business I would call out, just because I know it gets a lot of attention, is Small Commercial. As you know, Small Commercial is a gem of a business for us. We've been at it for over 30 years, making investments, and it's a marketplace we know very well. We know distribution very well in there. We know all the FinTech startups very well and watch things closely. I would say that business is starting to normalize and will pivot again to top-line growth as exposures and as payrolls come back on, particularly in the second half of the year. We're still seeing some minor exposure shrinkage through year-end. I think premiums were down about 1% in Small Commercial overall. Just, again, not a bad outcome, just given the environment. I do feel that's going to pivot back to sort of modest growth going forward. Yeah, workers' comp is still important there, but our growing our Spectrum product, our business owner's product that we've totally revamped and we think is really innovative, has grown almost 12%, 11% in the fourth quarter. I expect that double-digit growth rate to continue because it's such a revolutionary product. That's just one example in one of our businesses, Michael. Great. I guess on the recent earnings call, an investor asked me, I think your colleague used language that said, "Transformed middle and large commercial over the last year or two." Maybe you can kind of touch on what that means. Yeah. I think the way I would describe it is, I think we finished year one of a three-year process, project plan to really transform middle market from, I'll call it a couple dimensions. First, just how we underwrite product there. Two, efficiency. Three, again, a little bit of growth and profitability. On the underwriting, the way to simply think of it is right now, it's a slow process for us, and I think most of the Middle Market players out there. A lot of manual activities and spreadsheets going back and forward. We're really ultimately looking to simplify the underwriting process with advanced data analytics, pre-fill, using digital tools to ingest data, have more commonality in our processes from agent to agent. Ultimately, trying to reduce our speed and turnaround times. Because sometimes on very complicated lines, if you're quoting workers' comp and GL and property all together, it could take 20, 25 days, to get back to an agent. We're really trying to get that down, and we've gotten most of our comp turnaround time down into that four to five to six-day time period. Speed counts in this business and ultimately efficiency. That's the second thing, is how can we be more efficient? How can we have a better customer experience for our internal employees and our agents? Third, the profitability actions that Doug and Mo overtook over the last 18 years to really tune some aspects of our middle market book. It's painful to do, right? Shedding business or raising rates, but you have to if you're going to maintain or try to grow your margins. I would say we're largely done with that. There might be a couple little spots that we still need to tune a little bit in 2021, but that's what we mean holistically, that we're trying to transform middle market and the way business gets done, and ultimately our profitability and growth profile. Just to be clear, Chris, you said 18 years. I think you meant 18 months. Yeah, 18 months. Yeah. Chris, just to follow up, the first part of kind of this transformation, to me, it sounded kind of like the digitization of some of the business processes. Just curious, because it's tougher for investors to get kind of under the hood and really understand how the brokers are transacting with the likes of Hartford. Would you say Hartford is kind of trying to be a first mover in this digitization process? Are you playing a little catch-up? I'm just trying to get a sense of where you feel you're positioned in that kind of middle and large commercial space. It's really hard for me to sort of have a good picture on just how others compete, but I would say we're probably in the first-mover cohort. There's others that I'm sure are working on things. Middle market and large commercial is a very important segment to us. As I said, over the last 18 months, not 18 years, we've been focused very keenly on improving the overall results and the business processes in our area, and we're going to continue to do that. We still got two more years to go, but committed to fundamentally changing the way we interact with our agents and brokers. Okay, great. I guess I ask because I sense from speaking to some brokers that on the micro commercial, I call it, or very Small Commercial, you guys are ahead of the pack, and it's an easy process for them. Maybe switching gears to The Hartford Expense initiatives that are well underway. Maybe you can kind of offer some insights into what are the It's a lot of savings that's going to benefit investors, that is benefiting investors. Is there any cyclicality element to this where some of it, if we get into a soft market, could maybe go away or maybe even you want to give back some of these savings to the consumer to elevate the natural rate of growth? I'm going to let Beth comment also, but I would just give you the context, Michael, of we've been at this, I would say, really hard for the last five quarters now and feel really good about where we're at. I think we said early on, we're trying to reduce expense ratios into the ranges that we've talked about. If top line expands, that's great. That's additional lift that will probably drop. If also top line gets a little soft, we still want to then extract the dollars that produces that expense ratio outcome. We've geared it two ways to ultimately achieve dollars and expense ratio outcomes, because that's important. We still feel, again, that the investments that we've made over the years in our overall operation, whether it be technology, whether it be digital, whether it be advanced data and analytics, those will continue, but we wanted to drop the majority of the benefits in this program to the bottom line over 2021, 2022. Then we can recalibrate really where we're at from an overall run rate and overall investment need perspective in 2023 and beyond. I know that's looking out just probably quite a bit for some, but just to tell you our mindset. Beth, what would you add to your perspective of the program? Yeah, the only thing that I just would reemphasize is we were very intentional in not just talking about this as a dollar amount of savings, but also what we expect to see from the expense ratio. I think sometimes for investors, it can be really hard to find the dollars of savings because there's other things that can be pluses and minuses. We're really anchored on that overall expense ratio improvement in P&C, and then also in Group Benefits, and a little bit on the loss side as well. A part of this initiative and the savings that we're generating is going to come from how we adjudicate claims, and the expense associated with that. It really is across all areas of the company, but the true proof as to whether or not we're making progress is going to be in that expense ratio, because that is what we are focused on. Understood. A quick follow-up, were there any kind of tough elements to this in terms of attrition in people, or is this a plan that was more on the digital kind of technology side that where tougher decisions didn't have to be made in terms of flattening the structure of the organization or something? Okay. Yeah. It's a combination. Obviously, to achieve the savings that we're talking about, there are people impacts. We are a service business, a lot of our costs are people. Some aspects are just looking at the organization and how it's structured and so forth, but this is all about being sustained. To sustain things, you have to change processes, you have to improve them, a component of this is doing that as well. That's why we were very clear in showing there's some invest dollars that are going into achieving this program, because there are things that we need to invest in to, as you commented on, digitization and things of that sort, that will get us to our ultimate goal. It's always difficult when you go through these types of initiatives, but as we look at what we think it will do for us in the long run, and improving our overall efficiency, improving customer experience, because again, we don't want to take any steps backwards in that area, and really looking at this as a way to continue to improve that experience across all our businesses is top of mind as we look at executing across roughly over 600 individual initiatives that make up this program. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe we can touch on, Chris, you mentioned, I think more than half of the people listening today follow you rather closely and understand that the drivers of the improved Commercial P&C margin outlook. Maybe you can kind of talk to what's driving the improved outlook. I think some of it's what we just talked about, but I think there's other elements as well. Yeah. I'd share, Michael, as you know, the guidance that we provided, particularly in commercial, I'll focus on commercial and we can talk about any other of the businesses. Almost 3 points of margin improvement as we measured it on an underlying basis, ex-COVID, between years, which is pretty meaningful. If you really then peel that, the first layer, I would say approximately 2 points of that is loss ratio improvement and 1 point is expense ratio. If you peel it even more, I think the biggest contributors in sort of rank order are Global Specialty, middle market, and small. We've talked quite a bit that we have a large workers' comp book that is performing exceedingly well. We expect more of the same in 2021, maybe a little less negative on rate pressure in totality, but not a huge turnaround in small from a margin perspective. Middle market could be flattish to maybe slightly up, just we have a little bit more freedom of rate in middle market. I think the margin expansion will be driven by obviously ex workers' comp, but mostly coming from Global Specialty, our specialized industry verticals, some of our excess liability, our umbrella product lines, and then the rest of middle market. Again, I think the rate environment we see is still going to be healthy. A lot of different reasons for that, which we've talked about. I still think there is a lot of pressure on social inflation. The 10-year, people think it spiked, but you got to put it in context. It's still below 1.5%, so we're still going to be in a low environment. I think that still points to a very friendly rate environment for carriers. I still continue to believe for the next 18 months, for sure. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe let's switch gears then, Chris, to the Group Benefits. I think investors understand the mortality impacts you spoke to, is it fair for us to unfortunately look at kind of mortality rates on the screen to get a sense of when that impact can fall off a lot? Yeah. When does it stop, right? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. We're over 500,000 deaths today estimated by CDC, caused directly by COVID. Again, I think what all industry participants have talked about is the concept of excess mortality due to COVID and just people not taking care of themselves during the pandemic here and not doing the regular maintenance on a human body that is required so that you remain healthy and don't get sick, and you discover things more quickly. We know where we're at. I think your question ultimately is, as you said, when does it stop? I think we were transparent and clear in our earnings call at year-end that I see this as more of a first quarter impact, first half of the year, 75% of the impact in the first quarter, continuing into the second quarter. The dollar amount that we gave on a point estimate of our excess mortality, which you know there's a range around, but sometimes it's easier for investors just to anchor around a point estimate, is $160 million of excess mortality, again, occurring mostly in the first half of 2021. I think that's where we're at. All the data that I follow, and I'm sure you do too, is the vaccines are beginning to bend the curve of infections. Death rates will follow, you could see them, particularly after the holiday season, I consider holiday season basically November and December. There was a spike, now that spike's starting to come down. There's encouraging signs, again, we still have to keep our guard up as a nation, as individuals, and contribute to that overall healthy environment and recovery from COVID. The only watch item is the multivariants that are coming out of the different parts of the world, is there a second spike due to the variations of and the mutations on the virus? I don't know. I still think this is a first half of the year or first half of 2021 issue, we should be in a much better position as we revert back to normal in the second half of 2021, Michael. Understood, and just one- Chris can- Yep, sorry, Beth, go ahead. I just wanted to add to that because I know the question was specific to Group Benefits and the comments that we made about our expectations for 2021. As a reminder, we do still expect to see some impacts in the P&C lines as well, and we provided an estimate of that. Just like Group Benefits, we'd expect that to be more heavily weighted to the first half of the year and to the first quarter, just given what we're seeing. Just one nuance, is there any IBNR concepts in Group Benefits similar to P&C where you're kind of maybe trying to front load maybe some of the impact that might even take place in the second half of the year? I'll let Beth. Again, we've talked about our accounting quite a bit as a reformed accountant. You have a concept of IBNR in life insurance, but it's when you cut off on a quarter or month-end, you try to estimate what you think the deaths were that occurred during that quarter or during that month. We don't reserve for deaths that are going to occur in April or May at this point in time, Michael. Okay. Understood. Maybe if we talk about Group Benefits guidance excluding kind of COVID impacts. I think the margins still look fairly excellent, but maybe a little bit below last year's guidance. Am I remembering correctly? Maybe you can kind of talk through some of the nuances, what drove that. You're playing Columbo on me. Do I remember correctly? Of course you do. I mean, you know our numbers. What we've said is ex-COVID, the midpoint has come down half a basis point or a half a point, half a full point over the year. That's primarily due to what we think is going to be less favorable development, both on the LTD book, and the life waiver book. Again, you have to put that in the context of we still are sitting on, and it can generate healthy margins, but the margins that were generated over the last three, four years were exceptionally strong, just particularly due to incidence rates and recoveries happening at a much faster rate from a recovery side or lower incidences than we had priced for, reserved for initially. That's what's contributing to all the positive prior development, which I just don't think it's going to occur at the same rate that we have in the past. The last point would be just a lower rate environment. Yeah, that's the long-duration liabilities, LTD. Rates coming down, and it does have a little bit of a compression. You put it into context, I mean, this is still a strong double-digit, low to mid or double-digit range ROE business that, again, we're one of, I think, the top two players, the top two largest players in the business. We're growing our voluntary capabilities. We have strong distribution relationships and a brand that people recognize and trust in the benefits place, which I think all bodes well for us. Particularly as payrolls come back, I think, again, we can begin to recover growing our top line in 2021. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe moving to Beth to investment income. I think it was a positive surprise on the Q4 call when you kind of talked about the overall yield pressure being around 10 basis points in 2021 versus 2020. Are there any shifts you're making in the portfolio, this is the core fixed income portfolio, to kind of offset the low rate environment? Yeah. One thing, just to be clear, when I referenced the 10 basis points, I was talking about what we generated in the fourth quarter. Obviously fourth quarter was a little bit lower than what the full year is. Yeah, I think as we look at just our overall asset mix, nothing significant that we're changing a little bit on the margin. I guess if you look at full year 2020 to what we'd expect in full year 2021, I'd also remind you that for a portion of the year, we were carrying elevated liquidity, just as we were managing through the pandemic, and that had a little bit of impact on our reported yield for the overall year for 2020. I would not call out any significant changes in the construct of our portfolio. Our HIMCO folks continue to look for opportunities to make sure that we're getting the right yields that we need, obviously with a mindset of not taking undue risk. We don't want to put outsized risk on the portfolio because we've been really pleased to see how it's performed from a credit perspective through this period. Again, nothing particular I would call out. Okay. Next question, I'd say a lot of investors feel The Hartford stock is very attractive from a valuation standpoint. Thus, sometimes ask, why doesn't Hartford kind of exclusively gear capital management towards buybacks, does the door need to be left open for M&A? I think, Chris, that's probably a question for you. Yeah. No, Beth and I, we'll cover it. I understand the question. I think we've been pretty clear, over a longer period of time, we've always had a balanced capital management philosophy. More of recent periods, the context of your real question is, what else do we think we need to do from a competitive side to continue to grow our franchise? I think we have all the capabilities inside the four walls of the organization today. We need to mature it. We need to make sure all our agents and distribution partners know our full capabilities. That's internal activities and blocking and tackling, and it's hard work. The team is working hard to do that. I really don't feel like there's any gaps in our profile that we should fill in vis-a-vis M&A. We've said we want to be able to grow, incrementally, that's going to take some level of capital. It's not a lot if we're going to try to grow over the next couple of years in this environment. We've just raised a dividend, which we've been a consistent razor, if I could say it that way, of our dividend. We announced a $1.5 billion program over two years. As we know, in the property and casualty business, there's a lot of variables and a lot of unknowns, right? Who would've forecast what just happened in Texas? We still have a lot of natural perils we're exposed to. I would not want investors thinking that we're not committed to doing our buyback program because there's some alternative motive. That said, look, we're always going to be aware of what's happening in the marketplace, and if there's ways that through M&A that can add value and create value from a financial side, we'll consider that. As I said, that's a lower priority right now, just given what we're focused on and what we've been able to achieve over the last couple of years in building out organically or through acquisitions, our product sets and capabilities. That's what I would say. Maybe since you brought up, Chris, Texas, I know it's very early days, very wide band of what the industry loss could be. Anything you'd like to comment on what The Hartford's seeing so far? I think some people were surprised that some forecasters are saying it could be just as much Commercial Lines as Personal Lines. I would, Beth can add her perspective, I would say, first, it's just a major event that again, started basically, if you think about it, in the Northwest, that seeing snow. I used to live in Houston, seeing snow in Houston and down in Galveston and the beach, it's just sort of amazing. Then obviously now things continued into the Mid-Atlantic area. A huge multi-day event that is both Personal Lines affected and Commercial Lines. I think that the accounts that we would have in right now, particularly in Texas, I would say, Beth, it's somewhat 50/50, Personal Lines and Commercial Lines right now. We'll have to watch how that develops across different parts of the country. Truly a horrific event from another human toll perspective, but also, from some significant property damage, primarily due to freezing. Would this be an event that potentially you could utilize some of your reinsurance partners' protection, or too soon to say? I wouldn't want to speculate, Beth. Okay. I would say, yeah, depending on levels of loss, it's why we buy reinsurance, and we've structured, call it deductibles in various retention levels to take into account these types of events. Beth, I don't know if you want to describe our reinsurance program again. Again, I think that there is a very high likelihood that we would see some recoveries under our reinsurance programs. We provide pretty good, I think, disclosure in our 10-K that lays it all out. I'm primarily focused on that layer, that's the 250 excess of $100 million. It's kind of hard at this point to see us getting all the way up to where that $350 million layer starts to work in. As Chris says, early days, and the way that our reinsurance program works, this event would be covered by that layer that we have. We'll just have to wait and see. Thank you. I should remind, too, on that layer that we have, that's 250 excess of 100, we do have a $50 million deductible on that. For a first event, you really kind of think about losses up to $150 million, then it would cede into the quota share. Okay. Yeah, you had very good disclosure on that. Okay. Maybe we have a few minutes left. We'll touch on Personal Lines. I'll throw a couple questions in so you can choose. You did mention new AARP products being launched, if it's too early, feel free to just, we'll be able to wait a couple months. Also just kind of curious about, has the pandemic thrown, kind of caused you guys to create a new playbook for how to price the business to try to maybe, I don't know if some of your clients are asking for discounts or you feel deserve discounts, just a more broad question. Yeah. Let's tackle the AARP one first because it's actually quite exciting. I understand the second part of the question. It's no less important, I think the context here for this, Michael, is we struck a new 10-year arrangement with AARP, I think through the end of 2032 now. Really with the idea of recommitting to one another and fundamentally rethinking principal tenants in the program that has been very successful over the past 30 years. It ultimately, both parties agreed that we probably needed to modernize the program. Modernize it from the importance of lifetime continuity agreements, modernize it for 6-month auto policies, that we could have a broader filter of people that we could filter into the organization and ultimately see how they perform and take more rapid actions in managing your book than we did with 12-month policies. Likewise, the homeowners product is a good product. We have a decent size book of business, modernizing that LCAs, lifetime continuity agreements, aren't on there. Again, all with the idea of how can our both organizations commit to grow faster and capture more natural market share of their membership base. Our first two states will roll out here by the end of March, auto. We'll fast follow with homeowners in those two states by June. I think there's another seven or eight states that would happen in the second quarter. Ultimately, we've got states and territories to roll products out to, and I think that is scheduled to happen through the end of 2022. I think we could get it done by the end of 2022, you never know with various regulatory approval and timelines there. That's our objective. I think then we could start to more effectively grow, given that we have more flexibility in how we think about attracting customers, because our ability to generate quotes and responses with our direct marketing to the AARP channel is very good. Just our hit ratios, given some of the constraints on the program, just weren't high enough. As we loosen some of those constraints up, because then we have more ways to manage once they're a customer, I think will contribute greatly to a higher growth rate going forward. Lastly, both organizations, AARP and The Hartford, are focused on the 50- to 65-year-old demographic, so we'll have to wait a little bit for you, Michael. That is a growth area, and if you're going to try to grow in that area, you're going to have to deal with youthfulness at home, you're going to have to deal with teenage drivers, and again, we're prepared to do that when we think about our underwriting, we think about data, we think about pricing. All of it is just modernizing the program focused on a broader segment of the AARP membership base. Okay. I think we'll leave it at that. I really appreciate your insights, Chris and Beth, and thank you everyone for tuning in and wishing you a good rest of the quarter, and we'll speak soon. Great. Thank you. Thank you for having us, Michael. Thank you.