Good day, and welcome to the Horace Mann Educators First Quarter 2022 Investor Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Heather Wietzel, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Horace Mann's Discussion of our First Quarter Results. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, investor supplement, and investor presentation. Copies are available on the investor page of our website. Marita Zuraitis, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Bret Conklin, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will give the formal remarks on today's call. With us for Q&A, we have Matt Sharpe on supplemental and group benefits, Mark Desrochers on property and casualty, Mike Weckenbrock on life and retirement, and Ryan Greenier on investments. Before turning it over to Marita, I want to note that our presentation today includes forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations, and we assume no obligation to update them. Actual results may differ materially due to a variety of factors, which are described in our news release and SEC filings. In our prepared remarks, we use some non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in our news release. I'll now turn the call over to Marita. Thanks, Heather, and good morning, everyone. Last night, we reported first quarter core earnings of $0.64, a decrease from prior year. While external events affected our bottom line, we are pleased with the sales momentum we continue to see. In fact, April was the strongest sales month we've had for P&C products since the beginning of the pandemic, and supplemental product sales were double last April. We're also pleased to have Madison National fully on board and working with us to fulfill our long-term objectives of a sustained double-digit return on equity and a larger education market share. Today, I'll first briefly touch on the quarterly results, which Bret will discuss in more detail later in the call. Then I'll talk about how our commitment to educators and our stakeholders continues to inform our strategic vision. I'll summarize the work we are doing to realize our long-term objectives. For the quarter, life and retirement and supplemental and group benefit segments had steady performance, and annuity contract deposits were up 6%. Our total net investment income was up 3%, and the current higher interest rate environment bodes well for our portfolio going forward. Our auto combined ratio improved 6.6 points in the first quarter of 2022 over the fourth quarter of 2021. However, in line with the broader industry, our property and casualty earnings continue to be affected by inflation, particularly for auto parts and labor costs. The impact of inflation was most pronounced in March, but our early read of April appears more consistent with January and February. Despite the impact on our near-term P&C earnings, we remain confident in the profitability and opportunity for the auto line over the long term. This confidence stems from our auto position pre-pandemic, our strategic pricing choices during the pandemic, and our long-standing approach for customer cross-sell and retention. Simply put, we are focused on offering a fair price for our loyal customers through varied market conditions. We wanna keep and cross-sell our auto customers. If you recall, between 2017 and 2019, we undertook an auto pricing and underwriting initiative to improve profitability, which resulted in a 7-point improvement in our underlying auto loss ratio. Throughout the pandemic, we chose not to lower rates under the assumption that auto frequency would return to "normal" sooner rather than later. As auto loss trends returned to more historic levels over the course of 2021, we began the process of adding rate where needed to address rising severity. With inflation accelerating, we have updated our rate plan and filing schedule to move ahead with higher single-digit to low double-digit rate increases in most states. We will continue to evaluate loss cost trends throughout the year, taking rate and underwriting actions as needed. Minimizing the impact to our educator customers remains a priority. We have equipped our agency force with tools and resources to have conversations with their customers on the current industry environment and to provide more opportunities to quote auto to our educator client base. We do expect the ongoing inflationary pressure on auto loss costs to have an impact on our full year results. With that said, we now expect our 2022 core EPS to be at the lower end of our $3.45-$3.65 range. We continue to expect 10% average annual EPS growth and sustained double-digit ROEs in 2023 and beyond. Turning to the long-term outlook, under our new divisional structure, we are working in tandem to serve educators however they receive their insurance and financial solutions. Whether educators are receiving benefits through work, buying solutions from a trusted local advisor, or using our convenient direct channels, Horace Mann can help them achieve lifelong financial success. It's a mission that is especially relevant this week, which is Teacher Appreciation Week. Our employees and agents are offering their heartfelt thanks to the educators who made a difference in their lives. In communities across the country, we're recognizing the educators who are dedicated to making sure each and every student is supported and given the opportunity to reach their full potential. A natural extension of this commitment to our educator customers is a desire to have a positive impact on all our stakeholder groups. We do this through integration of ESG factors into both our day-to-day operations as well as long-term planning. We recently updated our corporate social responsibility reporting, which includes a commitment to cut our absolute Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions in half by 2030 and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We've already reduced our emissions by about a third since 2019 through initiatives like installation of a more efficient HVAC system and more than 500 solar panels at our Springfield, Illinois, headquarters. We also undertook an updated materiality assessment to ensure our direction remains aligned with the priorities of our stakeholder groups. In late 2021 and early 2022, we solicited feedback on the ESG topics of most importance to investors, employees, agents, customers, community leaders, and company leadership. What we found was that while issues like business ethics and data security remain top priorities across stakeholder groups, human capital topics, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion and employee development, grew in importance since our last stakeholder engagement survey. We will take this stakeholder input into account as we continuously update our long-term ESG plan. It is against this backdrop that we enter the leadership phase of Horace Mann's growth journey. In our foundational phase, we implemented a multi-year strategy that included enhancing our product offerings, strengthening our distribution, and modernizing our infrastructure. In our transformational phase, we added capabilities and scale with our acquisitions and improved our overall profitability through the improvement in our underlying auto loss ratio and by reinsuring a legacy annuity block. During the pandemic, we virtualized our sales processes and invested in agency support to enable agents to reach educators wherever they were. Our two goals remain unchanged. First, capturing an expanded education market share. There is substantial opportunity within the K through twelve educator space of 7.5 million individuals. Slide 17 in our investor presentation breaks down how we are thinking about our short and long-term opportunities here. We consider our retail and voluntary supplemental customers as a natural cross-sell space for us. We have proven effective cross-sell processes in place for this group. With our newest customers in the worksite space, we have the opportunity over the next several years to test and learn how to cross-sell individual insurance and financial services products to educators reached through employer-sponsored products. Looking through a wider lens, beyond Horace Mann customers, we have relationships with roughly 1 million educator households. This includes participants in our Student Loan Solutions program, which helps educators take advantage of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Broader still, we have engaged with far more educators through financial wellness workshops, social media, previous quotes, and more. With nearly 80 years of history in the educator space, we know a lot about our nation's educators, but we have yet to fully understand the buying propensities and preferences of those 7.5 million individual educators, as well as the districts that employ them. We're currently undertaking even more in-depth research into the education market to better understand educator demographics around financial service needs, further refine sales processes, and maximize cross-sell opportunities. Second, we remain committed to accelerating shareholder value through a sustained double-digit return on equity. This year and beyond, we expect to generate $50 million in excess capital annually. While our first priority for excess capital remains supporting profitable growth, which further drives shareholder value, we continue to return capital to shareholders through dividend increases and share repurchases. In March, our board of directors approved a 3% increase in the annual dividend. This is the fourteenth consecutive year we've increased the dividend. In closing, we're excited about the future as one company supporting educators in achieving lifelong financial success through both individual insurance and financial solutions and employer-sponsored group coverages. Thank you. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bret. Thanks, Marita, and good morning, everyone. As Marita noted, Horace Mann reported core EPS of $0.64, below last year because of inflation and other factors affecting P&C results. The value of the revenue and earnings diversification we've accomplished in recent years was demonstrated with steady results in both our life and retirement and supplemental and group benefit segments. The results of newly acquired Madison National are included in the worksite supplemental and group benefits segment. As Marita said, this business is performing within management's expectation. One technical note, starting this quarter, we've added adjusted core earnings and tangible book value to our materials, along with related ROE calculations. We are defining adjusted as core earnings excluding DAC unlocking and amortization of intangible assets, both non-cash items. We believe these metrics are useful when evaluating our capacity for capital generation. Also, I'll touch on our full year EPS guidance later in my remarks, but first, let me run briefly through the results and outlook considerations for each segment. As expected, P&C net written premiums were slightly below last year's first quarter. The benefit of stronger retention is being somewhat offset by new business volumes that remain below historical levels due to the lingering effect of the pandemic on sales. Segment earnings reflected a year-over-year decline in underwriting income, as well as lower first quarter net investment income due to the performance of the limited partnership funds allocated to this segment's portfolio. Looking at auto and property results separately, the change in the auto loss ratio primarily reflected the anticipated increase in frequency toward pre-pandemic levels. Over the past year, miles driven has steadily moved closer to pre-pandemic levels, and the impact of that change comes as no surprise. Similar to others in the industry, we are also seeing higher auto loss severity due to inflation, which was the other factor in the increase in the auto loss ratio. As we've said, Horace Mann is well prepared to leverage the disruptions underway in the auto market, and we believe the 3-point improvement in auto retention since last year's first quarter is one sign that we're on the right track. As Marita noted, we had achieved our targeted auto profitability prior to the pandemic and did not respond to its early stages with rate decreases to gain market share, a strategy used by direct marketers. Instead, we remain committed to our long-term strategic approach of providing our policyholders with a fair price over the life of their policy. Further, auto average premiums are level with last year, and pandemic-related mileage changes have stabilized. With inflationary pressures raising costs associated with claims, our auto rate plan now includes rate increases in the high single- to low double-digit range in states representing almost 80% of our premiums. For property, the first quarter underlying loss ratio was strong at 52.3%, although higher than last year's first quarter due to elevated fire losses. There is no pattern or trend to report, and as noted in the past, this line can be lumpy on a quarterly basis. The increase in the underlying loss ratio was partially offset by cat losses below last year's level, with the property combined ratio at 92.3%. Household retention has risen 2.1 points for property, even as average premiums have risen 5% due to inflation adjustments to covered values made in recent months. We expect renewal pricing increases should move closer to high single digits over the course of the year. Briefly on the P&C segment outlook, as we look to the remainder of 2022, we will be continuing to file and implement our rate plan for auto and to monitor coverage values and rate needs in property. We expect to see those actions influence underwriting profitability over the course of the year. In the combined life and retirement segment, core earnings were up 3.5%, with total benefits and expenses unchanged. Adjusted core earnings, which excludes DAC unlocking, were up 26.1%. Both the retirement and life businesses continued to perform in line with the trends we saw during 2021. Retirement net annuity contract deposits rose 5.9% over last year's first quarter, with total cash value persistency strong at 94.3%. We continue to see how our solutions for augmenting retirement savings remain a core need for educators and how retirement products are an important entree into districts in this environment. The net interest spread was 286 basis points, up from a year ago, reflecting strong investment returns. The spread on our fixed annuity business is comfortably above our threshold to achieve a double-digit ROE in this business. We had another quarter of progress with Retirement Advantage, where contracts in force increased to about 16,000. Retirement Advantage is the fee-based mutual fund platform that we believe creates long-term potential for this business segment. Life sales continue at a steady pace, albeit slightly below a year ago, and persistency remained consistent. Mortality costs were below last year's first quarter. Our outlook for the L&R segment continues to anticipate higher net investment income, with the spread remaining near the 2021 level and mortality consistent with actuarial expectations. Now let me turn to the new supplemental and group benefit segment. This segment combines the results from the supplemental segment we created when we acquired NTA in 2019, with the results for Madison National. Madison National's results were added effective January 1 of this year, which makes some of the comparisons to 2021 performance less meaningful. For the full segment, first quarter premiums and contract charges earned were $69.9 million, of which the new employer-sponsored products represented $39.8 million. Total sales for the segment were $3.7 million. Sales of voluntary products were $1.4 million in the first quarter, a 40% increase over prior year, with persistency remaining very strong at 92.1%. Sales of employer-sponsored products added another $2.3 million, in line with our expectation for Madison National's first quarter as part of Horace Mann. Amortization of intangible assets under purchase accounting reduced core earnings by $3.9 million pre-tax versus $2.9 million pre-tax in the first quarter of 2021. Therefore, core earnings were down slightly, with adjusted core earnings up 4.4%. Net investment income for this segment reflected the addition of the Madison National portfolio effective January 1. We expect to see investment yield improve for this segment over the remainder of this year and into 2023 as we optimize that portfolio. The pre-tax profit margin declined because of the addition of the newly acquired employer-sponsored products, which are expected to generate a lower margin than voluntary products. In the first quarter, total benefits also reflected normal seasonality for the employer-sponsored products. The benefit ratio for the voluntary products continues to reflect some benefit of changes in policyholder behavior due to the pandemic. Our full year outlook for the supplemental and group benefit segment assumes claims utilization will move closer to pre-pandemic levels, leading to full year benefit ratios of about 35% for voluntary products and about 50% for employer-paid products. Amortization of intangible assets is expected to be approximately $13 million or $0.30 per share after tax for the year. Turning to investments, total net investment income on the managed portfolio was up almost 3% to $73 million, with total net investment income up 2.5%. The increase in net investment income on the managed portfolio was partially due to a higher contribution from our commercial mortgage loan fund portfolio. The return on our limited partnership portfolio of 7.69% was below the record-setting returns we saw last year, but still a strong return given market volatility. The traditional fixed income portfolio had a yield of 4.26% in the first quarter, compared with 4.16% a year ago. With the increase in interest rates, we continue to find good opportunities to add high-quality corporate exposure into the portfolio at rates north of 4%. The core new money rate was 4.04% in the first quarter, and based on current market conditions, we continue to anticipate it will remain above 4% for the year in light of the current outlook for interest rate increases. Our allocation to commercial mortgage loans and limited partnership funds are expected to generate a higher income contribution than could be generated through traditional fixed income investment in today's markets without any meaningful shift in the risk profile of the overall portfolio. Overall, we expect these strategies will combine to generate high single-digit annual returns on average over time. As we look to the full year, we continue to expect net investment income from the managed portfolio will be in line with 2021, with the underlying assumption that limited partnership portfolio returns are closer to our historical average for the full year after last year's outperformance. That's a good segue to our expectation that 2022 core EPS is more likely to be at the lower end of the guidance range of $3.45-$3.65 we provided when we announced year-end 2021 results. This view is largely due to the impact of inflation on our near-term auto results, although it's also influenced by the potential impact of market volatility on DAC unlocking. Our long-term view of our potential remains fundamentally unchanged. We continue to target 10% average annual EPS growth and sustained double-digit ROEs driven by our profitable growth beginning in 2023. Every day, we see the values of the strategies we have been implementing for a number of years to make Horace Mann an even stronger and more diverse organization, better able to serve educators while also providing solid returns to shareholders. Further, we continue to see Horace Mann generating at least $50 million in excess capital each year, and that's in addition to the more than $50 million we already pay in cash dividends. Beyond supporting growth opportunities, we have several ways we can use capital to enhance shareholder value, in particular, opportunistic share repurchases. Thank you. With that, I'll turn it back to Heather. Thank you. Operator, we're ready for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily. Our first question will come from Gary Ransom with Dowling & Partners. Please go ahead. Good morning. I wanted to ask about loss trends a little bit more. I wonder if you could just give us a sense of the typical type of car the Educators own. Are they more new cars with lots of technology where chip shortages are involved? Are they older cars? I don't know. I just wondered if you can give us a sense of how your mix might be different in any way from others. Probably makes sense, Gary, to turn it over to our resident expert. Mark, do you wanna take that? Yeah, sure. Gary, I mean, our book is, you know, probably typically a little bit older than the average, you know, for the fleet across the country in general. You know, not you know, anything you know, significant in terms of the impact of, you know, high-priced cars or anything like that or lots of newer cars. You know, but I still think that, you know, we're certainly not immune from some of the trends in terms of, you know, overall used car pricing, the labor shortage issues, any issues around, you know, parts being available. That has a broad impact, you know, even if our fleet is slightly older than the countrywide fleet. Can you clarify what you were talking about when you said March was a little bit higher, and then January, February, and April? Yeah. Were more similar? Yeah. What was the difference there? Yeah. When we looked at March, what we're seeing was an unusual uptick in what I would say is more severe accidents. That, you know, you have the impact of inflation driving up the severity, but we also saw higher impact losses that we would associate with longer trips being taken during March that, you know, we speculated is associated with people traveling during spring break. Our early view when we look at April kinda confirms that this appears to be an anomaly, and April looks more like we would expect. Right. Okay. Over on the liability side, is there anything going on in the social inflation that's evident to you or attorney rep or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, I do think we are seeing more increased social inflation. You know, as courts open up, you know, there's definitely been an uptick in both attorney representation and I think the aggressiveness of some of those attorneys in terms of, you know, going after settlements. I think that we, you know, like the rest of the industry, we're starting to see some of that, you know, return to what we might have saw at the latter end of time just before the pandemic kicked in. Just one other question on this topic. What has basically happened when you look at used cars, you had a couple of step functions up in summer of last year and kind of the fall of last year, and things have kind of leveled out. Are you actually seeing a leveling in the sense of sequential, even though it's up year over year by a substantial amount? Are things flattening out at this point? Yeah. I mean, we are starting to see a little bit of that flattening out, I think, like others are seeing. You know, I think there was another period of time, maybe in the fall, where we saw that for a short period, and then it you know spiked again. I am cautiously optimistic that we'll continue to see it kinda level out and start to normalize a little bit. Yeah, we're certainly seeing those same kinda trends. All right. Thank you. I'd kinda like to ask a different subject for Marita. You mentioned in your prepared remarks about studying what the educator market is doing, how they're thinking, and you know, how to cross-sell. You know, have you learned anything or is there any way you can describe how your customer views the Horace Mann brand in any, you know, the dimension across products or the dimension across service? I don't know. If you could share anything, that'd be helpful in understanding what's going on out there. Yeah. Gary, I really appreciate your thoughtful questions, first in auto and then the one you just asked on strategy. I do feel compelled on the auto strategy question to go back a little bit, and I think I probably said it over and over again in the script with a lot of words, but I think it's important. We did the hard work to set a solid profitability foundation in auto. That's really working out quite well for us. We'll react to these trends as we are now appropriately, and we'll ensure ongoing solid results in our auto segment as we always had. I appreciate Mark's answers. I think he, you know, he gets this well, and we're lucky to have his expertise here in our company, and that serves us well. On the strategy question, we tried in the investor deck on page 17 to begin to give you a glimpse into the answer to that question. I think it's remarkable that we actually closed on Madison National in this quarter, and you're asking that question, and that does say a lot about us. We, just like NTA before it spent an awful lot of time with these people, we're in the same space. NTA was 80% educators, MNL is 80% educators. We have learned a lot even before the close. For us, beginning to show you how we think about our total addressable market and working up, you know, at the top of that page, there's obvious cross-sell opportunities between our retail products, our retail segment, P&C and L&R, with individual supplemental products, and we're seeing that today. When you look at April, the first sign of us being able to have a little more access, the world start to open up a little bit. We're seeing that momentum in our sales numbers across the board. It's early. You know, there's still noise in the system. It's still, you know, a hard world out there for all of us, but we're very encouraged by the signs we see in April, where we can get out there and take advantage of the natural cross-sell that we see in these businesses. There are places where the relationships were on one side of the house, and we're leveraging them on the other and vice versa. We showed you a map where we could begin to show you where we have strength in these businesses, where we can simply leverage the relationships that we have in our educator segment, in a known set of customers for these individual entities coming together. We feel great about that. The learnings that we're also talking about is on the work site side, that might not be as natural, that might not be as obvious, but we still think it's there. We are learning also on the work site side that the superintendents and business officials that are making these decisions have a brand affinity to Horace Mann. They know who we are. We've spent a lot of time, you know, talking about DonorsChoose and bringing dollars to their schools. We are introducing student loan capabilities that help their educators. Our strategy has been about helping educators attract educators, keep educators, and help educators retire, you know, soundly. By doing that, I think we've really built our reputation, and, you know, we're invited in, and we're able to solve more problems in that addressable market. 17 was kind of a start to show you how we're thinking about it, and there are numbers around this, and we're gaining the numbers. The hope is over time, just like we do with everything we do, is to be able to give you more transparency, you know, on the buckets. If you look at page eight, where we've always talked very openly about the stages of our journey. You know, in that fix and build stage, we told you what we were gonna do. It was about PDI. We needed to build products. We needed to strengthen distribution. We needed to modernize our infrastructure. We've been clear about what we did in that phase. In the transformational stage, we added capability, we built scale. Now we're gonna be just as transparent in that growth phase. We've showed you the levers. We've told you what it's gonna take to do it, and we're gonna be transparent in showing you the success we have in each one of those levers. Probably a longer answer than you expected to that question, but we're pretty passionate and pretty, you know, we've got a lot of energy around what we're learning and what we plan to do around executing around it. No, that was terrific. I appreciate it, Marita. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Our next question will come from Matt Carletti with JMP. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks. Good morning. Just sort of to follow on, Gary's last question there actually was what I was gonna ask, but if I could ask you to dig in a little deeper there. I mean, it's. I'm looking at page 22 in your slide deck, and it's clear that at least at a state level, there's a lot of overlap between Madison National's footprint and kind of the core P&C life and retirement businesses at Horace Mann. If we were to dive in deeper into a lot of those, you know, darker blue states, at like a school district level, is there a lot of overlap at that level, or are they? Is more of it kind of, you know, Madison National has the school district that, you know, maybe legacy Horace Mann doesn't have a lot of access into? I'm just trying to get an idea of how much kinda overlap already exists there versus potential opportunity to, Marita, to your comments on, you know, brand affinity and name recognition to kinda open a door and maybe, you know, get you in there on the other side of the fence. We can certainly provide. You know that we give you the tip of the iceberg, and then we give you more and more data over time to support it. Because I again want to remind everyone that you know this transaction did take place in the quarter so we're giving you an early read here. But for us it's all across the board. We have some places where we have very strong presence in a given state with long-standing agencies and good penetration like we have talked about before with P&C and L&R. Many of those states we also have both an MNL and an NTA relationship and you can see that. There's other places where maybe from a Horace Mann traditional perspective we didn't have a strong presence. Lo and behold, NTA does or Madison National does. The dissection of, you know, we can double down in places where, you know, we've got the triple whammy and everybody has a very strong relationship and we can leverage those. We also have the benefit of entrance in places with either starting with an NTA relationship, and we've already seen that over the course, over the last, you know, year and a half. Now with MNL, we can start with an MNL relationship where maybe we did not have an NTA or a Horace Mann relationship. For me, it really is about all these things coming together, all with a homogeneous understanding of our niche in the educator space. It is about that dissection. It's about, you know, several different ways to go about this and starting with your strength and leveraging the ultimate cross sell. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Matt. Matt Sharpe's been front and center in the integration, first acquisition and integration of NTA, and then where we are with MNL. I don't know if you have any color to add on top of that, Matt. If you don't, it's okay, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to comment. Yeah, sure, Marita. Thanks for the opportunity. Matt, thanks for the question. There's one other thing I just wanted to clarify or just go a little bit deeper on. When you look at the maps on the top of page 22, you're looking at two different distribution models. The left-hand side is the worksite model where we're selling individuals from the bottom up. On the right-hand side, you're dealing with the top-down sales process using independent benefit consultants that are coming into the district. They, whether they line up or not, the two approaches are different, and they can live in the same environment together. The key is being able to integrate those two sales models so that we can maximize our ability to sell on the ground through the worksite sales environment, as well as maximize the number of districts that we get that are employer sponsored and give us a much broader access to the district that can then be leveraged by the retail side of the house for all of our traditional products. Great. Thank you. That's great color. My next question is kind of unrelated to Madison National in particular, but Marita, in the press release and in your comments, you provided some statistics on a few of the businesses for production in April that was encouraging. Can you give us a sense of, you know, we just see the quarter numbers, you know, when you report Q1, but how did kind of that production go kind of January, February, March across the quarter? I'm just trying to get a feel for if it kind of built across the quarter or if you are seeing, you know, or if it kind of just April just kind of sprung up a little more and the, you know, each month within the quarter kind of look more like the average in Q1. Yeah, you know, it's really been pretty gradual and pretty sequential until April. Basically, the way I think about it is if you remember our pre-pandemic numbers, that first quarter of 2020, we saw some pretty good momentum in that first quarter from a growth perspective. Then through the pandemic, obviously, with the ebbs and flows of closures and masks and distraction in our teacher market, it was a tough slog from a sales perspective. I think we navigated it quite well and concentrated on what we could concentrate on, getting ready, ramping up, doing a lot of the internal work that we certainly did. Over the course of the last five, six months, really seeing a nice gradual uptick, pretty sequential across the board. Then when we look at April, it looks very different. That makes some sense. You had, you know, variants and certain things occurring during the first quarter that made it sometimes a little more difficult as things were opening, closing. But clearly in April, the world changed a bit. I think our agents clearly combined what they learned during the pandemic and want to keep that going from an ease of dealing with customers, you know, in a more virtual way, but also had the added benefit of being a little more connected live and in person with those educators, and we saw that in April. I think as it relates to individual supplemental sales, where those things tend to be more in person, more enrollment related, more getting back to the additive effect of doing those things the way they're normally done pretty much across the industry, we saw a really nice ramp up with individual supplemental sales in April as well. You know, from a retirement standpoint where our customers have been engaged in retirement discussions for obvious reasons throughout the pandemic, that was really more consistent throughout the pandemic. We're happy to see that it's continuing because we took the opportunity to remind them how important it is and did a lot of work around retirement planning, financial literacy. I think Mike and his team did a really good job doubling down on making sure we were having those conversations and that momentum continues. Great. Thank you very much for the answers. Very helpful. Thank you. Our next question will come from Greg Peters with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Oh, hey, good morning, everyone. Hey, most of my questions have been answered, so I'd like to focus in on the comment in your segment outlook around market volatility. It's two-part. I realize it's not relevant to all the products in Life and Retirement Supplemental Group, but I'm curious about the impact of market volatility on sales, if there is any. Then the second piece or the second part of the question would be just if you can provide us any sort of benchmarks about what the volatility means to DAC unlocking now that Madison National is part of your footprint and, you know, there is obviously in the marketplace increased volatility. Any color there would be helpful. Sure, Greg. This is Bret. Good question. Certainly, we did see some of the volatility that we're referring to show up in the first quarter. We did record about just a little bit over $2.5 million of negative DAC unlocking. Obviously, that is confined, if you will, to our Life and Retirement segment, which is now combined for the first time in this quarter. But specifically, it relates to our variable annuities. You know, the largest factor, if you will, that comes into play is usually the market performance, you know, which is you're comparing the actual performance of the underlying mutual funds to our underlying assumption in the pricing. Obviously, the markets were down, specifically the S&P 500, I believe, was down about 5% plus in the first quarter. Obviously, we would assume it's embedded in our critical accounting estimates in our 10-Qs and 10-Ks, where we would typically assume an 8% return. The delta between the two for the quarter resulted in that negative unlocking. Obviously, the equity markets continued to go down in the month of April. We're just signaling that as the markets go down, we will have some additional negative unlocking to report. It really doesn't relate to sales per se with respect to that. But obviously, you know, rates going up as they have, you know, do help us with respect to the investment yields on the portfolio. Certainly we're seeing, as we highlighted in my comments for the quarter, what our new money rate was. It was hovering above our plan of 3.50. I think the actual results for the quarter were just slightly above 4%. The money we're putting to work, certainly in April and May, is even higher than that. That does bode well for net investment income. Really my comment and the talking points of the volatility, and it was in the release, was solely related to the DAC unlocking in the Life and Retirement segment. Bret, that's well said. I'd add one thing, to that, and that is, we're an educator company, and the complexity is we have a P&C segment, we have a Life and Retirement segment, and we have a Supplemental and Group Benefit segment. The complicating factor in there is on any given quarter, whether it's DAC unlocking, whether it's auto trends, whether it's CAT, whatever it is, there could be something that would affect one of those individual pieces that you are right to ask about, we are right to talk about. The value of this company is the sum of its parts. What I look at is I look at the trajectory of our increased shareholder return, our total return over a long period of time, and the ability to really build and grow this company over a long period of time, and not the quarter-over-quarter discussions on some of the smaller pieces. I like the way that line looks. I like the earnings power that we've built in this company, and we're building it for the long haul. On any given quarter, because we have the sum of the parts, there will be a piece that you will ask about and we will talk about. Those pieces are important. We need to manage them, and we do. We are focused on growing our market share in this segment and doing it profitably for the long haul. Your messages make sense, Marita, but I just wanna clarify. In the answer, I think you said 5% decline in the market and $2.5 million DAC, and I realize it's a non-cash issue. Is that sort of a good benchmark to use in terms of ratios, or am I- Yeah, I guess. Am I getting it? No, I think you're getting warm. You know, as I referred to earlier, I think I don't have it in front of me, in our 10-K. I wanna say for every 100 basis points difference between our underlying assumption, the actual results, it's about $300,000-$400,000 pre-tax. You know, obviously if we're assuming 8% for the year, that's assuming a +2%. The markets were -5%, you know, 7 times 400, you know, between 300 and 400 kind of gets you to that $2.5 million number. Hopefully that helps. We do disclose that in our critical accounting estimates with the sensitivities for the bigger pieces of the assumptions. Makes complete sense. Thank you for the answer. Sure. Thanks for the question. Our next question will come from John Barnidge with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. Can you maybe talk about your floating rate portfolio, whether it reprices completely in Q1 2022 and the upside we should be expecting prospectively from that? Thank you. Sure. John, this is Ryan Greenier. Thanks for the question. I'll start with our core fixed income portfolio is nearly all fixed rate, which is aligned with our liability-driven investment strategy. You know, that's focused on book yield. A rising rate environment certainly helps with. We put $1 billion to work on an annual basis. Bret alluded to the new money yields, but just to put some color around it, you know, we're putting money to work about 50 basis points higher than our current portfolio yield. You know, we're hitting 4%, 4.50%, 4.75% at this point in time. You know, I'm encouraged by that. Like I said, you know, we put $1 billion to work in that fixed income portfolio. Specifically to your question on floating rate, we do have a commercial mortgage loan portfolio that is almost entirely floating rate, tied to LIBOR or SOFR, depending on when the loan was originated. Obviously we will see an income lift there as we move through a higher rate environment. Our longer term target for that portfolio is 10% of the total portfolio, which would be about, say, $600-$700 million. You know, where we sit today, we've got $430 million in the ground funded. We've talked about our expectations there of a mid-single digit return, but with the repricing in rates, I think you can comfortably move that up to about 6% at this point in time for that portfolio. Finally, I will touch on, we do run an FHLB spread lending program. We take predominantly floating rate advances, and invest in very high quality CLO floating rate securities. We're matched. It's floating to floating. The opportunity there really is spread. You know, while the portfolio is, you know, the floating rate component of that portfolio is meaningful, it really, the return profile is spread based. To put a finer point on it, the CML exposure is where we're gonna see a pickup. One other comment before I turn it over back to you. The CML portfolio is in our life and retirement and supplemental and group benefit segments. We've talked a little bit about our investment strategy, of where we deploy limited partnership and commercial mortgage loan investments, and we focused on capital efficiency. From a statutory RBC charge perspective, it's more efficient to put them in L&R and supplemental and group. Now, I will say more of the P&C LP exposure is more equity sensitive. So you're going to see more volatility in the P&C net investment income line, during periods of equity market volatility, and you saw that this quarter. So just wanted to put a finer point on that for you. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate that. My follow-up question, I'm looking at slide 14 of the supplement, talking about the supplemental and group benefits voluntary products. I see the benefit ratio actually declined year-over-year. I was curious if you could talk maybe about the claims utilization trends in the quarter and whether we should think of that product having hit normalized exiting the quarter. Thank you very much. Yeah, I mean, I can start with that, and then I can turn it over to Matt. I think it's important to remember what we told you about the difference between those two businesses and how they run from a benefits ratio perspective. As it relates to both NTA and MNL, it is different. The MNL benefits ratio does tend to run higher, and we've shared those numbers with you. When you look at the division on a blended basis, you'll see that blended number. We have provided a lot of disclosure before the deal closed in the first quarter. Certainly as we go on, those benefit ratios just for us in the industry are different. For the group business, it is higher than the individual business. I don't know if you have any more color to put on that, Matt. Yeah, sure, Marita. I'd have to. If you look at the benefit ratio, I'll talk about it from both perspectives, both the individual product and the group perspective. In the individual product, we saw a little bit higher benefit ratio, a little bit higher benefit payment on the short-term disability. That's mostly seasonality, which is similar to the way the seasonality works in the group business. There might also be some deferred procedures that are part of that elevation that we saw in the quarter, which resulted in some increased utilization on the individual short-term DI block, which is not a surprise, given the fact that there may have been deferred procedures embedded within it. That is as expected or at least not a surprise. On the group side, the long-term disability claims were slightly elevated, but it was consistent with the historical seasonality that we've seen. There's also a little noise in that number because of key gap and potentially a little from claims backlog. Overall, it's performing the way we would have expected it to perform overall. I don't know if that, if you had any follow-up to that, John, or if that answered your question. No, that was helpful. I mean, my follow-up really is persistency in the voluntary products improved 60 basis points year-over-year. I know persistency in the voluntary business is something, not you, but other participants have actually seemed pressured as the labor market has become more competitive and people have left. Can you maybe touch there on the improvement in the persistency year-over-year, which is great to see? Yeah. The persistency on the individual products, it's. You're correct, it continues to improve. I don't know that I have an exact explanation for why the persistency is continuing to perform other than we see a similar persistency trend in the group business, and I think it is unique to the segment that we serve. We've got very strong persistency, both in the individual and on the group side. Yeah, I do think, Matt, that's very well said. I think it's another place where, you know, insulated but not immune, where our market segment does help us. That stickiness has been pretty consistent over the years when we go back and historically look at both NTA and MNL's trends. I think Matt's right. You know, the work that we did. This has really come out pretty much as expected. Our next question will come from Meyer Shields with KBW. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks. Good morning, all. Two, I think, very quick questions. Good morning. I guess just for Ryan Greenier, as we see interest rates rise, does that impact the planned allocation to alternatives or should we expect that to stay constant? Good morning. Thank you for the question. You know, we take a longer-term view of the investment portfolio, and we balance a number of considerations. Obviously, rates are one of them, but capital efficiency, risk parameters and, you know, at the end of the day, it's a liability-driven investment strategy. You know, our longer term targets are about a 5% allocation to the limited partnership bucket. But remember, Meyer, when I talk about limited partnerships, it's a variety of different strategies there. Two-thirds of them are fixed income-like with lower volatility in returns, and so a higher rate environment, in general, will impact in a positive way, the returns that we get out of those. Like I said, about a third of them are equity sensitive. We've been pushing a little bit more into real estate equity as of late. It's a nice hedge against inflation. We like the dynamics of the U.S. real estate markets. You know, that's an area where current market environment and events have shifted our allocation somewhat. L onger-term allocation targets, you know, are generally within an acceptable range. You know, that 5% target is probably right. I will comment on the core fixed income portfolio. The rise in rates allows us to invest up in credit quality. We're putting money to work at a marginally higher credit quality position today than, say, where we were a couple of quarters ago. You know, that dynamic is nice to be able to put into the portfolio. Okay. No, that's very helpful. Maybe a broader question, I guess, for Marita. It seems clear to me that the trajectory of rate increases in P&C is gonna catch up with losses. Should we understand from the comments you made about April sales that you're comfortable growing at current rates with expected retention renewal retention holding up simply because that's where the entire market is going? Yeah, I think it's a great question because it's one that we ask ourselves every day and monitor every day. W hen you have this many states in a portfolio, you obviously have many states that are at or beating our hurdle rate from a loss perspective, and we're very pleased to see the growth in those places. When you're growing in the right places, it's actually a double whammy, right? It helps your top line perspective for all the reasons why we want that to, but it also helps the bottom line from a mix perspective. We've been very thoughtful. I think a lot of this emanates from all that really good basic blocking and tackling to understand and improve our profitability that we undertook in the last phase of this journey. We know very well where we're rate adequate. One of the benefits, and we talk about this a lot, of our approach is by having the Horace Mann General Agency and by leveraging other companies who have a price point or believe their price point is where they wanna set it to write business. If ours isn't, we can rely on those strong third-party relationships we have for them to grow the auto. We do a lot of back and forth there. The combination of those things make me feel really good about where we're getting the growth, how we're getting the growth, the cross-sell numbers with that growth. You know, trust me, in places where we feel we need more rate and are filing more rate, we have not put our pedal on the metal. We are all underwriters at our core, understand this well, and have all the levers we need not to have to do it. We talked about this a lot. I mean, we are not a market share grab company. We didn't lower rates to gain market share and then have a bigger gap between, you know, what we need and what we have. As a matter of fact, we got out of places that we thought were systemically, you know, flawed or harder to do auto business. Florida's probably the best example. We've done a lot of work to make sure that, you know, we can, you know, we can grow where it makes sense to grow, when it makes sense to grow. I think it's a great question. We look at that all the time. No, that's very helpful clarification. Thank you so much. You're welcome. That's all the time we have for questions. I would like to turn the conference back to Heather Wietzel for any closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I know we'll be speaking with many of you over the coming weeks, and look forward to those conversations. Of course, if you have any detailed questions you wanna follow up on, feel free to reach out. I'm available in particular next week now that earnings season's winding down. Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.