All right. We're good? Excellent. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us for our next fireside chat. I'm Brian Meredith. I am the insurance analyst here at UBS. With us for our next fireside chat, we've got Chris Swift, who's the Chairman and CEO of The Hartford, and Beth Costello, who's the Chief Financial Officer. I'm going to ask a couple of questions, and then encourage you, the audience, also, I'll reach out to y'all to see if you have any questions as well. I think there's a way you can also do questions online as well if you'd rather do that. But let's start big picture, Chris. Maybe talk a little bit about what your key kind of strategic priorities are for 2025. First, Brian, thank you for inviting Beth and I to your conference. We always enjoy it. I would say our priorities aren't just for 2025. We think in terms of three, four years down the road and plan accordingly. But I would say there's probably four things that come immediately to mind, and probably not surprising to you. It's just we need to continue to focus on our underwriting discipline. And that means tools, means data, see how maybe AI affects that down the road. But we need to be the underwriter's underwriter, as I've said. I think from there, we have to think in terms of being more growth and innovative, more growth-orientated in competing in the spaces that we want to compete in, primarily SME and Middle Market. So we think we have the distribution, the product sets to capture more market share. And then the innovative side of it is also what we want to do. And we're putting really the customer, including their advisors, the agents, but we define sort of the customer as the ultimate user of our risk product. We'd like to improve that overall experience, and we're making it sort of a centerpiece of the next three years. I would say from there, then, the last two would be just technology and generally. I think you know you've been following us for a long time. We're builders, investors, and we've taken the long-term view of what we need to have in our four walls from a competitive side to differentiate ourselves. And that'll continue. I'm not going to go into too many details because some of that stuff, we actually have patents pending on some processes and technologies. But just know that we want to continue to innovate, again, to do more with our customer, do more from an efficiency side, have our employees feel like they have data and information at their fingertips. We call that augmenting human talent. So there's a whole category of investing in technology. And then lastly, I would just say that we've made a lot of progress, but I think we can make additional progress in sort of our industry vertical specialization. I think there is some products that we need to think about. And one that we're thinking about and rolling out right now is cyber, which is new for us. If you think about other aspects of the property and casualty business, or even the Group Benefits business, when we think about dental and vision in our partnership with Beam, we're thinking in terms of industry specializations, vertical, sub-product expertise that we think our economy will need in the future. So we're not just looking sort of what is the next excess liability vertical we need to create. I mean, we're really thinking down the road of where is our economy going, what are future emerging risks, and we want to be in a position to take advantage of that. So those are, I'd say, the four big things. Gotcha. Just following up on the technology, is there any specific area that you think you really need? You may have some technical debt that you really need to invest in, be it Group Benefits, commercial, Small Commercial areas. You're like, "Hey, this is an area we need to focus on." Yeah. I would give you the context of everything on the P&C side. I think we have foundational elements that are first class. Agreed. Because that's what we've been working on for really a long time, last 10, 12 years. So think of claim systems, think of recently with Prevail, which is a product set, but it's also our technology at Duck Creek. Think of Guidewire and everything we have our core products on one system. And that'll ultimately allow, I think, for faster innovation and experimentation going forward. And we're trying to get Group Benefits in that same basic foundational element. We probably have another 18 months of heavy investing to do. But really pleased with all our digital interfaces. We have one website for any customer of any of our businesses or product lines where you could interact with us. And then, as I alluded to, I think the next leg of this journey from a real differentiation side will be AI and how and where we deploy that, so. Makes sense. I think what I would add to that, Chris, is that when you think about our technology and being able to innovate, obviously, it's really important that we can attract the right resources. And from how we're seen from that world of technology, it's top-notch. And we are able to attract people because it is exciting, the things that we're doing, the things that they want to work on. To use your word, it's not talking about technical debt. It's really about the innovation piece of what we can do with this and using those new technologies. The other platform, again, it's a little longer-term project, but I would say it's a six-year project. We're probably at the halfway point, but we're going to take all our data and applications to the cloud. Again, there's security benefits, there's efficient expense benefits, but there's speed and innovation benefits that we think we'll really monetize, and I know there's a lot of other fine companies that are working on that too, but we're poised to lead the way. Great. Let's talk about reserves. That's been a hot topic across the industry, general liability, commercial auto. The Hartford was not immune to what we're seeing in general liability. We saw that with the fourth quarter, some strengthening in GL. You were really confident on the conference call that it's been addressed, right? You're done. Maybe you can talk a little bit why you're that confident, give us some color on kind of what happened and how you went about the process of figuring out the 130. You want to tag team? Mm-hmm. How about if I just lay the foundation on? Yeah, we weren't immune. I think our impacts, though, are less than others. One, given our clientele, given, I think, the reserving philosophy that we thought we had, the rate execution on pricing. As I like to say, over the last five years, our average cost of goods sold in any liability product, primary, excess, umbrella, is probably in the 10%, 10.5%, 11% range. And our pricing over the last five years is close to 12.5%. So I think that's a pretty good indication that we weren't being Pollyannish or rosy with the trends we face. Even our assumptions got overwhelmed by some of the recent social inflation trends, the slip and falls, just the plaintiff bar just being very, very aggressive. So I think we've dealt with that in the past. We trued up the accident year 2024. We carried those trends forward into 2025. They're already in pricing. So as we think about sort of January 1, the big selling season, we had our new liability trends that we were pricing for. The team does an excellent job in executing based on what we set as objectives. I've got utmost confidence in all our segment underwriters, and we're moving forward, and we're moving forward with confidence that we've addressed it. And the only thing I'd add to that and what we were trying to convey as we talked about our results is that going into the fourth quarter, we had seen GL activity in the second and third quarter. Each of those quarters, we had taken about $30 million of adverse development and trued up our current year. As we went into the fourth quarter, we saw those trends continuing. But it's not as if we saw trends four times what we saw in the previous quarters. We said, "Okay, we have another quarter of this. We need to build into our estimates that some of this activity is just going to continue." So more IBNR that we put up in the fourth quarter than in previous quarters. As Chris said, we also then looked at the current year, trued that up, and even with that, felt great about where we ended the full year in Commercial Lines, relatively consistent with the prior year. So really strong position. And then, as Chris says, really positions us into 2025. And that feedback loop that we have between our underwriters, our claims folks, our actuaries allows us to get that into pricing. Even before we have all the models all tuned, they know that if the model tells you you need this, you better get this because we're updating trends. That's good. That's helpful. Maybe just adding on to that then, Chris, maybe we can talk a little bit about your perspective on this whole social inflation environment, right? And maybe what's driving it, what needs to be done to address these issues we're seeing right now. And do you think this new administration we have could be helpful, right, for the tort environment? I promised myself I wasn't going to get agitated today, but that's your third question. Now, in all seriousness, it is a difficult societal matter. Some might not think it's a problem. I think it's a problem. I think it's a tax on society that is really undiscussed, unknown, of how it affects an average business or family. So if I really go trace back to it and try to answer your question intellectually, I think once the lawyers were able to advertise, probably going back 20- 30 years ago, maybe even longer, the game sort of changed. And the game there was how do you get the most money for someone, not necessarily the fastest, the best recovery, but it was always about dollars. And they started building strategies to appeal to juries, to judges. There's a lot of strategies then to elect certain types of officials that might be partial to that. So again, this problem just didn't start five years ago. I mean, it's been building, I think, for a long time. But I think the good news on this is there are some state legislatures that are really starting to address this because it's both at the state court level and a federal court level. The Committee on Civil Discourse is looking at it from a federal side. But it's the ground game, one off, one legislature at a time, one governor at a time from a leadership side. But I'm encouraged. There are four or five major states that have issues that are trying to get their arms around it. But as I always say, the other side of the plaintiff's bar, I mean, is equally powerful and motivating too. But I think everyone can agree some simple disclosure on who's funding, particularly mass torts when you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars. And then just the inflationary trends of slip and falls, right? We just talked about what we book. I think there needs to be that grassroots effort to really say what's enough. What's enough from an injury side? You could see some legislators are capping awards and injuries. I plan to spend more time in Washington this coming year with our trade group and then individually working with senators and congresspeople that might be sympathetic to listening and really thinking about solutions. It's early in the new administration. I think there might be some higher priorities if we're intellectually honest. But that doesn't mean we can't get people's attention that are really looking fresh at how government works and how our judicial system really works. Let's talk about regulation and stuff going on. California is one of those states that are obviously challenging always from a regulatory perspective. I guess maybe firstly, California fire losses, right? How should we think about California fire losses for The Hartford? And then, I guess as an add-on to that question, Chris, what's the solution in California? I mean, it's going to become an affordability issue, I think, probably for people. You want to go? And then I'll. Yeah, I'll start. So for the wildfires, obviously our claims folks have been working really hard with our insureds in those areas, both on the personal insurance side and the business insurance side. And sitting here today when we look at the claims that we've received and look at our insured values in the areas, kind of looking at a range of around $300 million-$350 million pre-tax, and that's net of reinsurance. And then obviously you'd have to add on to that depending on what layers of reinsurance we would be in, maybe $10 million-$30 million of reinstatement premium. So kind of sizing it that way. And it really will be split between both commercial and personal insurance. And we've made our best estimate of looking at what might happen with the FAIR Plan as well. So that would be in those losses and losses associated with the FAIR Plan that ultimately aren't able to be recouped through surcharges or things like that also go into our reinsurance programs. Gotcha. So I think your question was, are there solutions? Yeah. It's particularly to California. Is that? Yeah, California is more important. Again, just the context, the state-based system I think actually has worked fairly well for a long time. I mean, if you look at the state-based model, the regulator, the one regulator, whether he or she is elected or appointed by the chief executive of the state, has a dual mandate to take care of customers with properly approved and vetted products, which gets a little bit at availability. And then they also have sort of the solvency component of the industry. So that if you're domiciled in one of the 50 states, that is your primary regulator from a solvency side. So those pieces of the equations generally have worked well, but sometimes they get out of balance and require correction. This state, where we are today, Florida, has gone through that, particularly with some of its assignment of benefits, its lawyers and challenging things. And they're honestly on the road to recovery. Now, it's not quite sort of cat-exposed solutions yet because Citizens are still the insurer of last resort. That's probably over-indexed. But we're having more capital come back into the Florida homeowners market and taking policies and business out of Citizens. All that is healthy and part of, I think, a capital markets-based system that is private, that is working in conjunction with the legislature here in Florida. California, if you remember, going back to 1988, Proposition 103 was voted on by the electorate, not the legislature, not the governor, but it was really a consumer-driven proposition that really put onerous constraints on the industry from how much rate they could get in any one point in time, what was in a rate filing like reinsurance, or can you use CAT models, or even expenses. You would think that expenses could be benchmarked from an industry side and you can have a fair representation of what it costs to do business in California, but no, they're suppressed. So all these things have sort of compounded over the years. And obviously, we've lived through a tremendously disruptive inflationary period and a period of time when climate patterns have changed, which has been nothing short of explosive in California, as we're seeing with the fires. So look, I think it has the governor's attention. I think it has the legislature's attention. It has the insurance commissioner's attention. But basically, you've got to allow risk and price to be matched up a little bit better. And we need to have access to all the other tools that we use as an industry from predicting catastrophes, using reinsurance, because most people still reinsure at some level. So I think if you look at it objectively, everyone should know what needs to be done, but it just requires leadership. Leadership to say, "This is what we need to do for the citizens of California." And as one industry participant, and I'll speak for others through our trade group, we want to be part of the solution. We want to be part of the long-term fix so that more capital can come back in and where Californians have greater availability of insurance protection. It might be at a higher price, but that's reflective of that environment, Brian. Makes sense. Flipping over to Commercial Lines. So, renewal written price increases, fourth quarter ex comp up 9.7%, acceleration from third quarter 2024. Looking back, I think it may be the highest that your renewal rates been since the hard markets, the early 2000s. So, I guess the rest of the industry is starting to talk about Commercial Lines pricing moderating, but you're still seeing improvement. Maybe talk a little bit and tell people kind of how your business will kind of differentiate from the general industry and why you're still seeing more price. We alluded to it before. I think when you operate sort of at that Small to Middle Market segment, we call it the SME space, there's a little more stability. There's a little more elasticity on price and retention. And while property sort of in the large property area is starting to soften, we're still getting good double-digit rates. I think we talked on our fourth quarter earnings call and the SME segment, which includes a little bit in Middle Market, we're probably getting mid-teen rates on liability and property. And one, it's needed, just given the trends that we just talked about, whether it be in property or liability. But the market seems to be accepting that. And again, particularly with our technology, our speed and accuracy and ease of doing business, I think we're capturing more market share naturally while still getting the rates that we want to keep up with loss cost trends. Gotcha. And that kind of goes into the next question. You kind of alluded to that, and maybe we'll continue on here with it. If I look at the Commercial Lines written premium growth that Hartford's experienced over the last three to five years, you outpaced the industry by about 100 basis points when I look at your peers, right? Maybe you can provide some context around that. And you're overweight comp too, by the way, which is another thing that really makes you even more impressive. Maybe you can talk about some of the things that you've kind of done over the last five to ten years to kind of solidify and improve that growth profile of the company and what it looks like you're going forward. It's probably not one thing. There's a multitude of things. And between Beth and I, we'll try to reprise it in a way that's digestible. But we talked about it technology-wise. All the investments in technology, I think, have helped from a speed and a turnaround time. I think our underwriters have more to sell. I think we're account rounding more with our comp product, which is our largest product line. But you, of all people, ought to know we diversified that down from 40%-45% down to about 25% today. But that's selling other products. That's building other product capabilities. That's building the risk management tools to be a bigger property writer like some of our good competitors. So yeah, I think it's a series of things, foundational elements that we did, and then a series of, and we always had good distribution relationships, but then how did we want to talk? How did we want to market? How do we tell our story to our 15,000 appointed agents across the country? So I think we've done a good job effectively just building a growth mindset and then adding that innovation mindset, I think will only allow us to capture more market share going forward. Yeah. And just to add a little more color there, I think when you look at our small business area, I mean, the fact that they had over $1 billion in new premium this year, new written premium, just speaks to the power of what's been built there. And over 75% of the quotes that we give are on the glass, no human touch. So I still bristled when you said technical debt in our Small Commercial business. There is nothing about our technology that is debt. It is a huge asset. And the team just continues to leverage that and be able to look for ways to bring in other product sets from other parts of our business, whether it's from the professional lines, E&S, all of those things. So as Chris said, there's just a lot that we're building on. We built a lot and really, I think, positions us well as we head into 2025. Yeah, one item, and Beth mentioned it, but we did an acquisition in 2019 that maybe curled some people's hair like yours or turned it more gray. But I'm so glad we did that deal. And if you really think about where the E&S markets exploded to over 20%- 22% of all Commercial Lines, to have additional distribution with the wholesalers, to have a dedicated channel there, to have the profits and improvements and the returns that we have in our Global Specialty business today, I'd do that deal in a heartbeat. Makes sense. One more, and then we'll turn it over to the audience. I'm going to dig into the weeds a little bit on this one. So Commercial Lines insurance, underlying core loss ratios and core margins. We chatted a little bit about on the conference call. You said despite some favorable non-CAT weather, I think you could be kind of consistent with 2024, 2025, maybe unpack that a little bit for us, kind of how do we think about it, get to the moving pieces. Is that exclusive of non-CAT weather, including non-CAT weather, you think it's going to be flat? What did I say on the call? You said. Was not going to unpack and go line by line into details. Why would you think I would change my mind two weeks after I just said that? No. But just because we like you and respect you, I would still say the components of margin expansion are still alive and well for us across many different business segments, right? Whether it be small, middle, Global Specialty. And I think the only thing I would say is I don't see the comp world all that differently. But remember, meaning compared to last year, I think medical trend and loss costs will be fairly stable and pricing will be slightly negative again. But when you put it all together, as you mix in some of our new products, as you mix in more property, as you think about some of the improvements that we're going to drive for in liability lines, broad-based, and you think about our expense efficiency programs, our continuous improvement mindset, just giving you a little nuggets to put into your calculator to sort of say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. The only thing I'd add to that is if you broke down all the components and we look at sort of all the puts and takes, there's not any one big thing that's being offset by one other thing going the other way. I mean, there's a lot sort of on the margin, which is why when we look at it and say that we can be relatively consistent, we see how all the pieces fit together. And it's all the things that Chris spoke to that are already underway. Makes sense. Our property underwriting is really good. We got good tools, good models. So whether it be CAT, whether it be non-CAT, I feel good about sort of our attritional losses and then the CAT loads ex, the California fires that we'll have to just deal with separately. Gotcha. Anything from the audience? If not, I've got plenty more. So let's go to the next one. So you had a goal, I believe it was $300 million of E&S premium in 2024. You met that. Anything you could share for 2025 as far as moving into the E&S markets? No. There's still. Is it still an attractive area? There's still attractive markets. It's a growth area for us, but I'm not going to quantify what we think we could do from a growth rate side. Remember, we've gone basically from zero to $300 million over the last three, four years, so the relationships that we have with sort of the big three wholesalers and the ability to turn on what we call more cities and more locations in their network. There's still untapped market potential that we're going to get after. So maybe the question is, do you expect it to continue to be a larger percentage of your overall commercial insurance business over the next five years? Yeah. I think the E&S growth rates will continue to be some of the highest in the platform, commercial platform. And I guess we've talked about this before, but it was an interesting point. Why, as a typical standard Commercial Lines insurance company historically, right? Now, granted, you got Navigators and you've got some good E&S capabilities now. Why the push more towards E&S? Is there a structural reason that it's just a better market to be in now? I think basically the freedom of rate and form is a powerful motivator for risk these days, whether it be property risk in certain areas, whether it be liability risk that we just talked about. The ability to just really customize what perils you want to cover with an appropriate price and what perils you don't, it's a pretty good chassis. Yeah. Is it easy to turn on that E&S engine in a standard Commercial Lines kind of underwriter's philosophy, or is it completely a kind of separate unit? We keep it separate, right? So we don't mix retail and wholesale. Gotcha. Products are separate. Businesses and underwriters are separate. And yeah, that's one of the, I think, key priorities. There might be a handful of us that approach it that way, but yeah, it's sort of like Coke and Pepsi. You can't mix them. Can't mix them. Makes sense. Maybe we can talk a little bit about Personal Lines insurance business, changes that you've been seeing in your Personal Lines business. How is it positioned right now for better growth and profitability as we look going forward? Well, besides sort of the inflationary period that we lived through that required fairly meaningful remediation of the industry book of business, but particularly ours, I feel good about what we've built, again, as a new chassis, a new platform. Where we started building that, and you know this, Brian, is that our AARP relationship of almost 40 years is really a preferred market segment that we recommitted to one another in essence for a 10-year contract extension. So I think our contract goes through 2033, January 1, 2033. And we built new products and we built a new technology platform that is more modern. We've introduced telematics. We've had better digital tools for our customers. We're in 45 states right now. So I'm declaring that basically the rollout of Prevail, the product and chassis into our direct response model, which is AARP, is virtually complete. And we'll get back to targeted profitability on our overall book of business in mid-year. I think then what's really next is, and we alluded to it in our, I think, other discussions that we've had, Brian, is that we're really studying the agency channel and seeing if our preferred market orientation can work in an independent agent channel with the Prevail product and the Prevail technology. And that's what we're working on. And when we're ready to roll it out, we'll let you know. But I think that's the evolution of how we think about that business. And then we get back to sort of targeted margins in the 20%+ ROE range. I feel pretty good about the earnings contribution lift that we'll get to the overall franchise once we get to those targeted margins. Where are we in the transition to six-month policies? Say it again. Aren't you going to six-month policies? Yeah. The Prevail chassis has six months. For auto. For auto. Home is 12. But I would envision using that same chassis in the agency channel too. It's faster cycling, right? We've improved our cycle times with a six-month policy, but we also improved our cycle times with data and analytics that really drive all the adjustments that you need to do. I think as we've talked about this before, Brian, we're not converting the legacy book from the 12-month to the six-month. It's new business, so as far as percentage of policy, still a higher percentage of auto is still 12 months, but that will roll in over time. Makes sense. Let's pivot over to Group Benefits. Been an incredibly attractive business for the last several years, right? Great margins on the business. Maybe talk a little bit about where the margins are headed. I know you told us to think about margins heading back to kind of historical norms. What's been driving the kind of really good margins and why should they head back to historical norms? Yeah. We've probably been telling you to look at historical norms for the last five years, and we've always been able to outperform. So I'm not saying history is a predictor of the future, but we're going to try to outperform the historical norms. And really what we've always said, Brian, is that that six to seven is how we're pricing products in this next three-year cycle. Remember, we're making three-year rate guarantees. The assumption is that basically incidences that are all-time lows, particularly over the last two or three years, and our planning assumption has a little bit of a reversion to the mean there. And if we generate six to seven points of margin on a GAAP-stated ROE basis, that's probably in the 11% ROE range. If you convert that then to tangible ROE with a goodwill and other intangibles we have in our book, it's probably +15% in the 15%-16%. So I know you get a little concerned when margins come down, but it's still healthy. We're still going to try to outperform. And I think the only matter that really requires some attention is we have a couple states where we offer leave, particularly paid family and paid medical leaves. And that book of business is about $250 million in total that we need to do some profit improvement. It's a nice problem to have because the products are being utilized. People understand the benefits, but we probably picked an incident rate for some of those paid family medical and leave products that were just a little too low. Generally, we're able to reprice those products every one year, two years at the max, and we'll get after improving that. So you put it all together, six to sevens, we still like that. We're investing in this business, particularly in the down market. Us and maybe two other folks are the absolute leaders in the national account space, 5,000 and lives up. But we do want to have a bigger presence, a better impact on 5,000 and below. And to do that, we do need to make some technology improvements to have a quote to underwriting to onboarding process that's just a little smoother and less friction for customers. And that's what we're working on. Great. Maybe pivot over to capital management for a couple of minutes here. Maybe talk about priorities for 2025 from a capital management perspective, balancing kind of growth with growth in business, both organic and inorganic, with returning capital to shareholders. You want to start? You want to flip a coin? Yeah. You can start. No, no, go ahead. No, I think as we look at it, our priorities are consistent with how we've talked about them in the past. I mean, we always start with looking at using our excess capital for where we can deploy it in our businesses and to support the growth that we have. And I think we've shown that over the last several years and feel really good about our trajectory there. And then from there, we continue to focus on maintaining a healthy dividend. And so you've seen us increase the dividend as our earnings have increased. And then as far as after that, we continue to see share repurchases as an effective use of our capital. We've talked about the fact with our new authorization, we're on about a $400 million run rate each quarter of repurchases of what we've been doing. And when we put all those pieces together, the investments we're making in our business, maintaining our dividend, what we do with the excess, feel very good about that. And as we've talked about before, from the capabilities that we have in-house, we're not missing something. And so for us, as we think about inorganic, it would really have to be opportunistic and something that fits very well strategically and financially because right now I think the path we're on is very good. I don't know if you had anything else to add. Nope. It's perfect. Very good. One, I've been asking some people, tariffs have been a big hot topic, obviously. How does tariffs impact The Hartford's business? It's one of those things, obviously, all market participants need to watch. And if you had to sort of pick maybe one or two areas, and I didn't realize this until you sort of study trends, but 60% of our lumber gets imported from Canada. So if you think about just building materials, because lumber is still used in many parts of the world, so rebuilding homes, new homes, values could be a little higher. And I think the other area is in either personal or commercial auto when you're dealing with sort of physical damage. And if the tariffs really put additional cost on importing replacement parts or even new parts for existing or for new cars, that'll probably have an inflationary impact. I I think my gut tells me this is probably more of a second half of 2025 issue, depending on how it gets resolved. And then obviously a potential fuller year impacts in 2026 and 2027. But as we've planned, I feel good we have a range of outcomes that contemplate some of these things in our cost of goods sold pick. It's not a high case. It's not a low case. I think for 2025 we'll be okay, but we'll have to really think hard about 2026 and 2027, depending on what really gets negotiated. Negotiated. Makes sense. I think rational minds, both on the Canadian government, the Mexican government, and our government, no one wants to tip an economy into recession and have unintended consequences. So I really do believe that there'll be a negotiated outcome where everyone can declare victory. The other thing I add as to what Chris said is that the teams are obviously watching it very closely. And I think with tariffs, if they come into play, they'll come into play quickly. And I think our teams are ready to react to that if they need to. There can always be some lag. But to Chris's point, as we sort of think about 2025 and what we're planning, believe that we have some runway for that, but the teams are on it and watching it and ready to react if we need to. Great. Awesome. We're over time. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It was great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.