Welcome to the Hanover Insurance Group First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Richard, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Oksana Lukasheva. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and thank you for joining us for our earnings conference call. We will begin today's call with prepared remarks from Jack Roche, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and our Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Farber. Available to answer your questions after our prepared remarks are Rick Lavey, President of Agency Markets; John Fowle, Chief Executive Officer of Chaucer; and Bryan Salvatore, President of Specialty Lines. Before I turn the call over to Jack, let me note that our earnings press release, financial supplement and a complete slide presentation for today's call are available in the Investors section of our website at www.hanover.com. After the presentation, we will answer questions in the Q&A session. Our prepared remarks and responses to your questions today, other than statements of historical fact, include forward-looking statements, including our guidance for 2018. There are certain factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. We caution you with respect to reliance on forward-looking statements and in this respect refer you to the forward-looking statements section in our press release, Slide 2 of the presentation deck and our filings with the SEC. Today's discussion will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures such as operating income and accident year loss and combined ratios, excluding catastrophes, among others. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the closest GAAP measure on a historical basis can be found in the press release, the slide presentation or the financial supplement, which are posted on our website, as I mentioned earlier. With those comments, I will turn the call over to Jack.

Thank you, Oksana. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call. This morning, I will provide an overview of our first quarter results and business performance as well as comments on our strategy. Jeff Farber will review our financials in detail, and then we will open it up for questions. We are very pleased with our first quarter performance. Our businesses performed well, delivering results consistent with our expectations despite higher than expected winter weather catastrophe losses in our domestic business. This performance further demonstrates the strength of the foundation on which we are building our company, as we continue to advance and execute on our strategy, provide exceptional insurance solutions to our distribution partners and policyholders and deliver superior returns for our shareholders. For the quarter, we posted operating income of $84 million or $1.95 for full diluted share, a consolidated combined ratio of just below 97%. The combined ratio, excluding catastrophes of around 91% and an operating return on equity of 11.8%. In addition, I want to call your attention to the following first quarter high lights. First, we produced solid top-line consolidated growth of 6.6%, while maintaining stable underlying loss ratios. We grew responsibly in the quarter, carefully building our presence in markets with attractive returns and effectively leveraging our distribution strengths in our distinctive business model. Second as previously announced, we experienced elevated catastrophe losses in the first quarter due to severe winter weather in the Northeast and Midwest. While higher-than-expected at $71 million, our losses were in line with our market share in the affected states. Third, the underlying trends in our businesses are strong and improving, driven by our enhanced business mix, prior underwriting and pricing actions and effective execution of our expense management initiatives. Our ex-cat combined ratio in the quarter…

Thank you, Jack. Good morning, everyone. For the quarter, we reported net income of $67.7 million or $1.57 per diluted share compared to $45.2 million or $1.5 per diluted share in 2017. After-tax operating income was $84 million or $1.95 per diluted share, compared to $40.8 million or $0.95 per diluted share in the prior year quarter. The difference between net and operating income in the quarter was due to the decline in fair market value of equity securities of approximately $23 million before taxes, which are now recognized in net income in accordance with the new accounting standard. Our combined ratio was 96.9% compared to 99.5% in the prior year quarter with higher-than-planned catastrophes in both periods. Catastrophe losses in the quarter were elevated and reduced our income by $71 million or 5.6 points. Domestic businesses accounted for $65 million of cats or 5.2 points of our total combined ratio, primarily from severe winter weather storms in the Northeast and Midwest during January and March. Meanwhile, Chaucer catastrophes were light at under $6 million. Our catastrophe results included the benefit of favorable development of approximately $9.5 million with $6.8 million and $2.7 million coming from domestic businesses and Chaucer, respectively, primarily from 2017 hurricanes and California wildfires. Excluding catastrophes, we achieved a combined ratio of 91.3%, 1 point lower than the prior year quarter driven by improvements in both the domestic loss and expense ratios, partially offset by higher expenses at Chaucer, mainly due to the impact of foreign exchange rates. Now to review our underlying results starting with Personal Lines. Our combined ratio, excluding catastrophes of around 89.1% was nearly 2 points lower than the 91% posted last year, reflecting an improvement in both the expense and underlying loss ratios. Our accident year loss ratio, excluding catastrophes improved…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question in the line comes from Matt Carletti from JMP securities. Please go ahead.

Hey good morning.

Good morning.

Just a couple questions. First, I was hoping you could give a little bit of color surrounding how the workers’ comp plan of business is progressing? Nice improvement in the accident year loss ratio in the quarter. And I think that’s also where the favorable development came from in that segment. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of the trends you’re seeing in that market? And how you are addressing them?

Sure. Thanks Matt. Overall, we’re very pleased with the trends in the workers’ comp line after, as you know, several years of improving the portfolio, moving into a better mix, driving towards a lower-average account size, somewhat anticipating some of the competition in the upper middle market and the mid-middle market space, improving through some of our new areas in verticals, including technology that tend to have an advantaged workers’ compensation profitability. So overall, as you stated, we continue to have a good balance sheet on the workers’ comp line, the trajectory of our accident year performances as expected. And we feel – we couldn’t feel better about the performance to the line.

Great. And then maybe just shifting gears quick over to Personal Lines. I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I just wanted to ask you about kind of how the kind of revamped Platinum product is being received in the market? And then kind of looking further ahead, where do you stand on that? And do you still have plans to kind of grow into additional states kind of maybe push westward? Or do you – is it more of continued growth in your current footprint strategy for the near term?

Yes. Good question. Because, obviously, we have a real unique position in the Personal Lines space right now. I think we’re one of the better performing Personal Lines businesses. And so we are really excited about deliberate steps we took several years back to move towards being an account player, trying to leverage the skills and the capabilities that would most lend themselves to an agency distribution approach in Personal Lines. So I’ll turn it over to Rick Lavey to kind of talk about how confident we are in – going forward and how that’s going to lead towards how we further invest in the Personal Lines business.

Yes, Matt. So yes, we're really pleased with the progress that we're making on the Platinum product. If you look across our whole book, it's about 37% of the book today, 43% if you exclude Massachusetts where it doesn't reside. And you've heard us in the past that the profile of that business is just terrific. So limits profiles of 100 and 300 are over 90%, our umbrella penetration is over 30%, multi-car account is close to 60%. So we just – it brings to us that – the profile of the customer that we like. In addition to Platinum, as you know, we've rolled out a new platform, which is going to allow us to move into the more complex account arena sort of moving upstream on the coverage acre. And we launched that in Pennsylvania, which is, to great success, with the agents there. They're really happy with both the product features as well as the system. So to your second part of your question, we are now poised to roll this platform out to the rest of our footprint, which we're doing. This year is a big year for us. By the end of this year, we'll be in the bulk of our state. So into next year, we should be complete with that. We believe strongly that there is a lot of headroom within our current footprint. So the rollout of this platform, we're thrilled to bring it to our current agents and that will bring us some upside, but it also position us to think about state expansion eventually. Our view on that is that we'll likely fill out current footprint before we start to step outside our Eastern Hemisphere footprint. But you can imagine we're thinking hard about that strategically. So all-in, very good.

Great. Make sense, very helpful. Thank you for the answers. And congrats on very nice start to the year.

Thank you. Our next question in line comes from Paul Newsome from Sandler O'Neill. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Is there much of any of a tenure effect in the Personal Lines business given the new product and mix shift there?

Absolutely. That was our view going into our refocus, if you will, on account business. We clearly saw several years back that the fascination with multivariate pricing and monoline strategies was not serving most people well unless you play it on the periphery of the better business. So we absolutely are seeing improved tenure related to the movement towards account business and the movement towards a better product.

Yes. Paul, I would just add that we see retentions in the Platinum product upwards of 90% – 89%, 90%. So as you know, we have strong retention overall in the 85%, but when you – which is the account focus. But you step into this Platinum products, we're actually seeing higher retention. So it's starting to take hold.

So let's retention, I was actually thinking about what they call tenure effect, meaning when you enter a new product usually and you have a seasonality – seasoning effect where you end up with some profitability depressions. And I was wondering, if your book would have any of that embedded or is that fully through the book at this point?

Yes. Okay, now I better understand where you're going with. I thought tenure in this kind of broader sense is how long do we keep at a customer once we acquire them and that what we were speaking through to those retention statistics is that the tenure continues to improve and further extends the lifetime value the customer comes through at least on the acquisition cost side. To your point though that any time you go to a new place, you bring in an element of new business penalty or loss ratio risk. And the early indications are that our loss ratios are performing at or slightly better than what we expected. So we do not anticipate any new business – enhanced new business penalty to our book in Personal Lines as we continue to grow.

Great. Thank you very much.

Our next question in the line comes from Chris Campbell from KBW. Please go ahead.

Starting with Commercial Lines. So all the products showed year-over-year core loss ratio improvement, but the presentation also says that the current pricing is below loss cost. So how should we think about the potential for future commercial core loss ratio gains given the adverse pricing dynamics?

Sure. I think we'll try to kind of bring you back to the messages that we've been stating, I think, for several quarters now that while pricing overall is slightly below what we believe to be long-term lost trend, we also know that in the short term, there are some favorable trends that kind of take a little bit of pressure off of that. But probably more importantly, as you know, we are executing a much more sophisticated pricing segmentation that we think serves us extremely well, getting more price on the accounts that need it, pushing out the accounts that frankly don't validate and getting even more sophisticated in terms of how we price to the existing portfolio. We also think that another lever that allows us to maintain stable Commercial Lines loss ratios in the core business is through the focus on new business in the most advantageous sectors. A lot of the niches that we built products for, technology sector, human services sector, the educational institutes, that's where we're getting a disproportion of our growth. And frankly, those sectors greatly outperformed the more general business. The workers' comp mix changes we've made are serving us as you see our trends are quite favorable there, and so that's contributing to our ability to have some improvement despite not fully reflecting loss trends in our pricing. And then, last but not least, as you know, we have had some bumps in the road in the past in some of our specialized businesses, in the program business, in the contractor surety business. And as those businesses start moving in a very better direction for us, we believe that's contributing and making up for any gap we have between pricing and loss trend.

Great. That's very helpful. Just another one on commercial. There was a little bit of adverse development in commercial auto in the quarter? So just any color you could provide on what's driving that? And how are you thinking about your current year loss picks there?

Yes, for the most part, it really was an extension of some weather that caught us at the end of the year, and frankly, wasn't contemplated. We don't have any particular concerns about that late development out of 2017.

Okay. Got it. So that was kind of similar to what you saw in the Personal Lines book? Just…

Exactly. There was a pretty good correlation between the personal auto and the commercial auto late weather that hit us on the fourth quarter picks.

Great. And then just shifting a little bit to capital management? So I know there is a strategic alternatives and you're kind of earlier – you're early on in that process? And Jack was very helpful to kind of lay out what the capital management priorities would be. I think one thing you mentioned was potentially inorganic growth. So what – just thinking strategically, what would Hanover be interested in buying that it doesn't have right now? And then, how would you view that just in terms of a lens of elevated M&A pricing right now?

Okay, great question. Yes, I want to be very clear that we – you should think of us going forward like you have seen us over the last six or seven years focused on opportunities – inorganic opportunities that are on the smaller end, more on the nichey end. We were fortunate to get a renewal rights deal in the OneBeacon deal, it doesn't come around very often. But for the most part, what you've seen us do is go off at specialized capabilities that are of the right size, that we can assess the balance sheet implications that we're not going to overpay for. And then, we can translate through our distribution approach and to deeper penetration with our franchise partners. So I don't want to overemphasize this. It really comes down to the opportunities that present themselves. Our planning is around getting deeper penetration with our existing capabilities into our agency plan, and we see plenty of headroom. But like we have in the past, if we see some smaller niche kind of specialized capabilities come available, we'll certainly give those a good review and see if they can add to our arsenal.

Okay, great. And then just one more or so like – so assuming hypothetically if Chaucer were to be sold, right? Now Hanover would be shrink, right? And so a smaller, more nimble Hanover might be more attractive to especially we've heard some larger account competitors talking about how they want to move into smaller business? Now would a sale be something that you would consider? Like – if it was like a reasonable offer that made sense?

We’re obligated to manage the business in a way that's in the best interest of our shareholders. That said, we have a lot of confidence in the business that we're building. I think the performance in this quarter, we can continue to build on a more consistent top quartile performance, we think that's less likely. But at the end of the day, we're here to pay a return to the shareholders, and we realize we have an obligation as a publicly traded company. I can't emphasize enough to you though that as we – every quarter, we gain more and more confidence in our ability to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. We have plenty of growth opportunity. And we believe this market environment allows us to navigate quite nicely to continue to grow this business.

Thanks for all the answers, Jack. That’s a lock in 2Q.

Thank you.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]

All right. It looks like we don’t have any more questions today. Thank you all for participating and we’re looking forward to talking to you next quarter.