Travelers Stock

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As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on October 16, 2026. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abby Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers' discussion of our Third Quarter 2026 results. We released our press release, financial supplement and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All of these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section. Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO; and Dan Frey, CFO; and our 3 segment presidents: Greg Toczydlowski of Business Insurance, Jeff Klenk of Bond & Specialty Insurance; and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take your questions.

Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors.

These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also, in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release, financial supplement and other materials available in the Investors section on our website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abbe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to report excellent third quarter results. It was another in a run of successful quarters with very strong underwriting performance across all 3 segments, and a record result from our investment portfolio. We also continue to make steady progress on important strategic initiatives that will continue to set us apart. For the quarter, we had core income of $1.95 billion or $9.18 per diluted share, generating core return on equity of 22.1%. Over the trailing 4 quarters, we generated core return on equity of 24.1%. Underwriting income of $1.4 billion pretax was driven by strong levels of underlying underwriting income and net favorable prior year reserve development.

Profitability was excellent on both a reported and underlying basis. The combined ratio improved to 86.8%, and the underlying combined ratio remained very strong at 84.1%, with all 3 segments posting strong contributions.

Turning to investments. Our high-quality investment portfolio continued its trajectory of delivering higher levels of net investment income. After-tax net investment income increased by 7% to $908 million benefiting from strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio and a strong result from our non-fixed income portfolio. Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return $1.8 billion of excess capital to shareholders during the quarter, including $1.5 billion of share repurchases. Just since the beginning of 2025, we have returned $8 billion of capital through share repurchases, retiring 12% of the shares then outstanding in the process. Even after the return of capital and having made substantial investments in the business, adjusted book value per share at the end of the third quarter was 24% higher than at the beginning of 2025 and 15% higher than a year ago.

Turning to the top line. We generated net written premiums of $11.5 billion in the quarter. In Business Insurance, we grew in every line other than property, generating net written premiums of $5.9 billion. That's 4% higher than the prior year quarter, adjusting for the sale of our Canadian business. Across the board, the triad of renewal premium change, retention and returns reflects outstanding and deliberate execution. Renewal premium change in this segment was 4.1%, including renewal premium change of 5.4% in our core middle market business and 7.8% in our small commercial select business.

Excluding the property line, we know premium change in the segment was 7%. Retention, which as you've heard us say before, is an important indicator of marketplace stability, remained very strong at 86% and was higher or stable on every line. New business of $699 million was up 4% over the prior year quarter. To be growing 4% ex Canada at such strong returns is a terrific achievement. In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we also delivered trigger growth and strong returns. We grew net written premiums by 12% to $1.2 billion. In our Management Liability business, renewal premium change improved sequentially to 3.8% while retention remained steady at an excellent 89%. New business was up 18% over the prior year quarter. In our leading surety business, we grew net written premiums by 21% reflecting continued strong production across the portfolio. In Personal Insurance, we generated net written premiums of $4.4 billion with solid retention in both auto and homeowners and higher new business in homeowners. We will hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff and Michael about our segment results.

Before I turn the call over to Dan, I'd like to spend a few minutes on an important focus of our innovation work, defending our customers against legal system abuse. Lawsuit abuse raises cost for everyone from the businesses and families we insure to every corner of the broader economy. Liability across GL, umbrella, auto and CMP is a significant share of our loss costs. While conditions have been generally consistent with our expectations, the drivers remain active and continue to put upward pressure on liability losses. Our approach is straightforward, resolve legitimate claims fairly and promptly by paying what we owe. We were early to recognize the change in the litigation loss environment at the end of 2018 and that gave us a head start in investing in technology and developing innovative claim strategies.

We believe that gives us a meaningful early mover advantage and our innovation efforts are now giving us tools we've never had before. Let me share a few examples. For unrepresented claimants, we've developed a digital tool to help resolve claims promptly and fairly. It's grounded in our simple philosophy of empathy, education and empowerment which we've built directly into the experience. In a pilot, more than 80% of the claimants to whom we've offered the tool have engaged with it, and overall results are very encouraging. When the claimant has an attorney, we're using AI to sharpen our responses to their demands. It starts with the file. AI gives our claim professionals a faster, deeper command of claim files that can run hundreds of pages.

It services key facts and issues and help shapes arguments. That makes our people both more effective and more efficient. Consistent with our longtime practice of maintaining a tight feedback loop between claim and underwriting which is how we were so early to recognize social inflation in the first place. The technology also feeds granular loss information back to our underwriters. A more accurate view of loss information as better risk selection, pricing and claims strategies. We pay what's fair. And when we can't resolve a claim of what we believe is a fair outcome, we're prepared to defend our customers in litigation.

We choose our matters carefully, and the outcomes demonstrate that we're effective when we do. Beyond the direct financial impact of our successful litigation, our approach helps set realistic expectations from the start and that's part of the value proposition we bring to our customers. These are just a few illustrations of a broader proprietary effort that leverages talent, technology, behavioral science and more. What we're doing now isn't about doing what we've always done a little better. We've developed new and growing capabilities that let us do what simply couldn't be done before. We believe our expertise, capabilities and approach will help us bend the loss cost curve. As we continue to invest, we expect this to deliver growing value for our customers and shareholders, building on the benefits we've already seen from some of our initiatives.

To wrap it up, our excellent underwriting and investment results through the first 9 months of the year reflect our unmatched competitive advantages and the strength of the value proposition we offer to our customers and distribution partners. We are well positioned to close out an outstanding year. That momentum, the advances we are making on our innovation agenda and the best talent in the industry give us tremendous confidence heading into 2027 and beyond. And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.

Thank you, Alan. In the third quarter, we once again delivered excellent financial results on a consolidated basis and in each of our 3 segments. Core income for the quarter of $1.95 billion marked our sixth consecutive quarter with earnings of more than $1 billion and brings our trailing 12-month core return on equity to 24.1%. Both the quarter and the trailing 12 months reflect excellent underwriting results, coupled with strong investment income.

We generated slightly higher net written premiums despite the absence of the Canadian businesses we sold at the beginning of 2026, while delivering excellent combined ratios on both the reported and underlying basis. At 84.1%, the underlying combined ratio marked its ninth consecutive quarter below 86%. The combination of strong earned premiums and the excellent underlying combined ratio led to after-tax underlying underwriting income of $1.4 billion, continuing our run of historically strong underlying underwriting results. Our year-to-date after-tax underlying underwriting income of $3.9 billion is virtually identical to last year's record level despite moderating pricing and the sale of our Canadian business, demonstrating the durability of our underlying underwriting earnings power.

The expense ratio for the third quarter was 28.9%, bringing the year-to-date expense ratio to 29%. Regarding the expense ratio outlook, the continued strength of our consolidated underwriting performance I just described, results in variable expenses like profit sharing and contingent commissions coming in higher than planned. That's a trade we're very willing to make, and it results in an uptick for our expected full year expense ratio, which we now expect to come in a little below 29% for 2026 and about the same for 2027. Catastrophe losses in the quarter were $538 million pretax, consisting mainly of tornado hail events in the Central U.S.

Turning to prior year reserve development. We had total net favorable development of $234 million pretax with favorability in all 3 segments. In Business Insurance, the annual asbestos review resulted in a charge of $295 million. Excluding asbestos, Business Insurance had net favorable PYD of $336 million with favorability in every line. In Bond & Specialty, net favorable PYD was $95 million pretax with favorability in Fidelity and Surety as well as management liability. Personal Insurance had net favorable PYD of $98 million pretax with favorability in both home and auto.

Turning to investment income. For the first time ever, after-tax net investment income surpassed $900 million for the quarter, up 7% from the prior year quarter. Fixed maturity NII was again the driver of the increase reflecting both the benefit of higher invested assets and higher average yields. Through the first 3 quarters of 2026, we've grown our investment portfolio by approximately $6 billion even after having returned a record level of capital to investors through dividends and share repurchases.

Our outlook for fixed income NII in the fourth quarter, including earnings from short-term securities, is up slightly from the outlook we provided a quarter ago, now expecting approximately $875 million after tax in Q4, bringing the full year 2026 total to $3.3 billion. For 2027, we expect more than $3.6 billion with quarterly figures starting at around $875 million in Q1 and growing to around $965 million in Q4. New money rates on purchases during the third quarter were roughly 120 basis points above the yield embedded in the portfolio. The significant increase in interest rates during the quarter resulted in an increase in our net unrealized investment loss from $2 billion after tax at June 30 to $6.4 billion after tax at September 30. This is a good time to remind you that the unrealized loss in our investment portfolio is interest rate driven, not credit quality driven.

Remember, the changes in unrealized investment gains and losses do not impact how we manage our investment portfolio. We generally hold fixed income investments to maturity. The quality of our fixed income portfolio remains very high and the changes in unrealized gains and losses have little or no impact on our cash flows, statutory surplus or regulatory capital requirements. And of course, the same rise in rates that increased the unrealized loss is a tailwind for future results as we reinvested higher yields, it supports higher continued growth in net investment income.

Adjusted book value per share, which excludes net unrealized investment gains and losses, was $172.47 at quarter end, up 9% from year-end and up 15% from a year ago. Turning to capital management. Operating cash flows for the quarter of $3.9 billion were again very strong and brought the year-to-date operating cash flow figure to $8 billion. Also of note for Q3, in July, we issued $750 million of 5-year debt at an attractive rate of 4.95% as part of our ordinary capital management, maintaining a debt-to-capital ratio in our target range as we continue to grow the business. Sticking with the theme of capital management, we returned $1.8 billion of capital to our shareholders in the quarter with share repurchases of $1.5 billion and dividends of $261 million.

Before I wrap up, let me add 1 comment about the fourth quarter for your modeling purposes. Effective October 1, we increased the percentage ceded to our cyber reinsurance quota share. That will reduce net written premiums by about $165 million in Q4 and by about $230 million for full year 2027, primarily in the Bond & Specialty segment. We expect the impact on bottom line earnings to be de minimis in both years.

Recapping our results, Q3 was another quarter of excellent underwriting profitability on both an underlying and as-reported basis and another quarter of rising net investment income. These strong fundamentals delivered core return on equity of 22.1% for the quarter and 24.1% on a trailing 12-month basis, and we continue to be very well positioned to deliver strong results in the future. And now for a discussion of results in Business Insurance, I'll turn the call over to Greg.

Thanks, Dan. Business Insurance had another very strong quarter, delivering record third quarter segment income of $1.04 billion and continued solid top line growth. This quarter's results reflect the continued benefit of strong underwriting results, driven by higher earned premiums and a combined ratio that improved 2 points to a terrific 90.9%. We're particularly pleased with our underlying combined ratio, which remains strong at 88.9%. Beyond our execution in the marketplace, we're encouraged with the contributions we're seeing from our ongoing strategic investments. For example, our ongoing advancement of analytical capabilities, including the utilization of sophisticated predictive models continues to enhance our risk selection and pricing segmentation. The expanded use of external data sources such as aerial imagery in combination with our proprietary historical claim data, further equips our frontline underwriters with the insights they need to make better decisions at the point of sale.

Within property, analytics have supported our improvements in insured to value and deductible adequacy, which has contributed to a stronger and well-positioned book. We believe these and other strategic investments will be important contributors to our continued success and long-term profitable growth.

Turning to the top line. Our net written premium reached a third quarter record at $5.9 billion. Domestic net written premiums grew 4%. Excluding the property line, domestic net written premiums grew 6%. Net written premiums in national property continued to decline, we remain focused on writing business only where pricing terms align with our view of the risk and our return objectives.

Turning to production across the segment. Renewal premium change was 4.1%. Excluding the property line, RPC was 7% and positive in all lines. Retention remained excellent at 86%, a reflection of strong returns and our continued focus on retaining our high-quality book of business. New business was strong at $699 million, up 4% from the prior year. We're pleased with these production results in our fields continued execution of our proven segmentation strategies, aligning price, terms and conditions with environmental trends for each life. As for the individual businesses, in select, renewal premium change was strong at 7.8%, while retention was steady at 81%. The new business of $139 million was up 3% over the prior year. These results reflect the industry-leading segmentation in our product offerings including BOP 2.0 and TCAP, our commercial auto product as well as the digital experience we deliver to our distribution partners.

In middle market, renewal premium change was 5.4% while retention remained exceptional at 89%. New business of $431 million was up 10% over the prior year. Our continued profitable growth is supported by predictive models that guide our underwriters' granular execution at every step from prospecting and quoting new business through renewals, once again another terrific quarter for Business Insurance. We're energized by both the strength of our current execution and the additional capabilities we continue to build capabilities that we believe will drive our continued success through the remainder of 2026 and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to report that Bond & Specialty posted an outstanding quarter on both the top and bottom lines. We generated record segment income of $309 million, driven by strong earned premium and a terrific combined ratio of 77.3%.

Turning to the top line. We grew net written premiums by a very strong 12% in the quarter to $1.2 billion. In our high-quality domestic management liability business, we drove retention to a very strong 89% while improving real premium change by nearly 1 point sequentially. We are very pleased that we also increased new business by 18% from the prior year quarter. These results reflect terrific execution by our outstanding field organization, leveraging our strategic investments and enhanced pricing segmentation tools and sales effectiveness capabilities.

Turning to our market-leading surety business. We posted excellent net written premium growth of 21% from the prior year quarter, continuing the recent trend of strong production across our high credit quality portfolio. Our growth this year is primarily attributable to our portfolio of premier contractors that are well positioned to deliver on large public and private infrastructure projects that have driven construction spending as well as meaningful contributions from new account relationships as more customers choose a carrier with exceptional financial strength, market-leading value-added services and an unparalleled team. So bonded Specialty Insurance delivered terrific profitability and excellent growth in the quarter while continuing to make strategic investments to further extend our competitive advantages. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to share that Personal Insurance delivered third quarter segment income of $706 million. Strong underlying income and favorable prior year reserve development, both contributed to this excellent bottom line result. The combined ratio of 83.5% was a terrific result in the quarter. Catastrophe losses were favorable to our plan and continue to benefit from the actions that we've taken to reduce volatility across our portfolio. The underlying combined ratio of 76.7% improved by 1 point compared to the prior year and continues to demonstrate strong profitability in both automobile and homeowners and other. Net written premiums for the segment were $4.4 billion in the third quarter as pricing continued to moderate, reflecting strong profitability, while retention remains solid. New business premium and homeowners was higher year-over-year as we thoughtfully deployed property capacity in support of our efforts to generate profitable growth.

Third quarter homeowners net written premiums also benefited from our decision not to renew the PI property XOL treaty, which would have taken effect July 1. As Dan mentioned last quarter, it was more cost effective to obtain the coverage we sought through the lowering of the attachment point on the corporate catastrophe XOL treaty. In auto, the third quarter combined ratio of 87.1% reflects a strong underlying combined ratio and favorable net prior year development. The underlying combined ratio was 87.3%, a 1 point improvement compared to the prior year. This strong result was driven by continued favorable loss experience across coverages.

This quarter's results included about a 1.5 point benefit related to the re-estimation of prior quarters in the current year. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter of 2026, it's important to remember that the fourth quarter auto underlying loss ratio has historically been about 5 to 6 points above the average for the first 3 quarters because of winter weather and holiday driving. In Homeowners and Other, the third quarter combined ratio was a very strong 80.5% and the underlying combined ratio of 68% was outstanding and comparable to the prior year.

Turning to production. In auto, retention was 81%, while renewal premium change was slightly negative as we continue to incorporate sustained levels of profitability into our pricing. We remain pleased with the high-quality profile of the new business we're writing as we maintain our disciplined approach to managing base rate levels and further enhancing our sophisticated segmentation.

In homeowners and other, retention of 85% remained strong, while renewal premium change continued to moderate, reflecting strong profitability and replacement costs that are generally aligned with insured values. We were pleased that for the third consecutive quarter, new business premium was higher year-over-year, driven by our intentional and disciplined efforts to deploy property capacity. We continue to invest in strategic capabilities that will deliver sustainable profitable growth. At the same time, we're executing complementary marketplace actions that include expanding distribution by appointing new agents and actively pursuing book consolidation opportunities. These deliberate efforts, combined with our strong agent relationships, portfolio solutions for customers and industry-leading claim capabilities position us to be the undeniable choice for consumers and an indispensable partner for our agents.

To sum up, this was another great quarter for Personal Insurance on the bottom line, and we continue to focus on taking a measured, thoughtful approach to profitably growing our business over time. Now I'll turn the call back over to Abbe.

Thanks, Michael. We are ready to open up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]

Your first question comes from the line of Paul Newsome with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

We can come back to Paul, maybe we'll take the next caller.

Your next question comes from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore ISI.

Alan, you've discussed and Dan as well, you guys have discussed the durability of the $5.5 billion of underlying underwriting income. I didn't hear you guys say that again explicitly. And so it sounds like you guys are definitely on pace for that this year. But I'm wondering how you're thinking about that into next year, just given the moving pieces with the market cycle and where we are?

David, thanks for the question. We would absolutely reiterate the durability of underlying underwriting income. And just to give you a little color behind that. I mean putting in some historical context, we are a larger, more profitable company than we've been historically, strong competitive advantages with a strong value proposition demonstrated success with innovation and investing. We think AI gives us tremendous opportunity. And as I've been saying, I think I read for the first time in my 2022 annual letter, we think scale is going to be increasingly important. So we think all of that will continue to give us the ability to out select and out price. And so that gives us great confidence in the durability of the underlying underwriting impact.

David, it's Dan. The only thing I'd add to that is you shouldn't mean that doesn't mean it's not going to move a little bit one way or the other. The other comment that Alan has made relative to that metric is we don't know if 2027 is going to be a little higher than that, a little lower than that or flat. But the ZIP code that we're in now is just a completely different ZIP code than we used to be in, and we don't see any reason that that's likely to change.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just maybe on the favorable PYD in Business Insurance. So it sounds like that was across all lines. So I'm assuming that, that included general liability. Could you just confirm that, maybe talk about which accident years you're seeing that? And maybe just how you guys are thinking about the level of IBNR that you guys have been putting up over the last few years?

Yes, David. So we feel great about where the balance sheet is, as we've said now for a couple of years. It was all lines across the board. So we saw favorability in commercial auto, commercial property, CMP, general liability, workers' comp, None of them were particularly outsized, although in aggregate, a number as big as we talked about on the call, is a very good result. So I would say we continue to be thoughtful about the reserves that we carry on the book, respectful of the long-term loss trends that should come out of the liability or the comp lines.

And as things emerge somewhat favorably to what we had provided for in our prior picks, we're getting PYD. But yes, across the board, including GL.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

So I guess kind of building on the last question, but I'd like to see if you could give us some comments on your view of loss cost trend inside business insurance. And I guess I'm looking at it because I'm watching the renewal rate change premium slide down? And also, I was intrigued by your comments, Alan, about the commercial auto liability and the other casualty claims and the pressure you continue to see there. And I just kind of brought to my mind, are you foreshadowing another negative step change in sort of how the loss cost trend is moving in those lines?

No. Quite the contrary, actually. There's -- just looking at the loss environment broadly, I would say it's as we've expected. No surprises at all, whether we're talking about social inflation or anything else. And so no surprises at all in terms of the loss environment.

Okay. I guess then a pivot this year -- this quarter's new development was the rollout of us. And obviously, there's other tech initiatives that are spooking the market with their potential to disrupt distribution. Maybe it's mostly focused in personal lines, but there is some crossover into the small and middle market commercial area, too. So maybe you could just step back and provide us some perspective on your value of your current agency distribution model? And maybe also give some nuggets on how you are working with these new initiatives to help get to your objectives.

Thanks for the question, Greg, Mike, you want to take that?

Sure. I'll take it, Greg, because to your point, Muse in particular, at least today is mostly focused in the personal insurance space, certainly Greg's team and mine have been collaborating and he can chime in as well. The first thing I would say just broadly about Muse and AI assistance, it's early days, right? I mean the actual volume of observable activity is pretty minor. And I think there are a lot of things that could potentially impede the pace and scope of change there. We've got to pay attention to consumer adoption. We've got to work through technology and data dynamics. There's a variety of legal and regulatory considerations as we deal with these developments and work in this space.

And just to put a point on it, if and when you're engaging with an AI assistant, you got to confirm a number of things, right? First and foremost, is that AI assistant actually authorized by the consumer that's doing the shopping. Secondly, is the consumer affirming and confirming that the information provided is accurate. And third and probably most importantly, does the customer actually understand what they're buying. And those things aren't sort of particularly transparent and clear as you engage digitally in this space. And those considerations grow in importance with the size and the complexity of the asset or the risk that you're insuring.

So we're engaged in exploring the opportunities and the threats here. We're going to continue to test and learn and make sure that we're prepared to respond and we've been building digital capabilities across the organization for a really long time. On the commercial side, we've got Simply Business and Zen. In Personal Insurance, we've got Insurer Match and D2C. And I think we'll be prepared for wherever this goes.

Yes, Greg, I would just add to that, that if you look at a continuum of risk from the most complex to the least complex, the stuff that trades digitally today, and I do think it's important to remember that customers can trade digitally today, but the things that actually trade digitally are way over at the simplest end. It's renters, it's [indiscernible], it's that sort of stuff, you get mildly more complicated. People might use the technology to shop and do some price discovery, but very often, they opt out to talk to a person. And so unlike a lot of other commerce where you can imagine digital trading being more popular in a complicated domain like insurance. So far, it hasn't been the case. But to Michael's point, going back 20 years talking about D2C we contemplated the world would get more digital. And that's -- we didn't invest in D2C because we thought we were going to be a leader in D2C. We invested in D2C 20 years ago because we wanted to make sure we have the capabilities of a digital company.

We wanted -- certainly, we want to understand distribution, but we also wanted to understand how to engage with our distribution partners, how to service our customers. And then more recently, when we acquired Simply Business and [indiscernible], that was also with the thought that the world was going to be more digital. So you can get a sense of our view that we think this is going to be sort of a measured adoption to the extent there is adoption. But wherever it goes, we are very prepared for.

Your next question comes from the line of Tracy Benguigui with Wolfe Research.

I want to go back to David's reserve development question. It sounds like you built conservative loss picks. So the loss experience might be more favorable to that. I'm just curious how much time needs to pass to assess that. I appreciate your confirmation. The releases came from GL and commercial auto. But I think it's important to have a better understanding of those accident years. I noticed in the 10-Q, you said that it was more recent year.

Yes. Tracy, it's Dan. So I don't know that I would use the word conservative when we came up with our loss picks. I think what we've tried to say is we're making certain that we're leaving a provision for the level of uncertainty that comes out of those long tail lines and more recent changes in development patterns and attorney rep rates and things like that.

Look, we had a number of years contribute to the favorability in PYD this year. I think if you just look at the gravity of where most of the reserves and particularly IBNR is it is naturally going to be in the most recent accident year. So I think not a big surprise there. You shouldn't read that as saying that we've changed our view in terms of whether there still needs to be consideration for and respect for the potential uncertainty in those lines and the health of the IBNR that we continue to maintain. But as quarter after quarter goes by, and we've seen things come in a little bit better. We we felt it was appropriate to take some reaction here. We certainly have not run to the other side of the boat.

Okay. Got it. So select renewal premium change improved in the second quarter, but you gave that improvement back in the third quarter, and the slowdown was driven mostly by rather than exposure. So I'm just curious, which quarter was the anomaly and how we should be thinking about the underlying trend from here?

Tracy, this is Greg. Yes, I did share with you last quarter that depending on what filings state-by-state get approved quarter-to-quarter, you can have some variation. And of course, you have separate accounts that are coming up for renewals in each quarter. So I wouldn't say 1 quarter was an aberration more than the other. Every day, we look at that business in terms of what the returns are in that business and what the pricing and new business needs to be, and that's how we execute.

Your next question comes from the line of Katie Sakys with Autonomous Research.

A quick one for me. Just kind of wanted to get your thoughts here on the Business Insurance segment. Premium growth results, I think, pro forma ex property quite a strong result there this quarter. If I think about where RPC has trended this year and might continue to trend going forward as well as Greg's prepared remarks on underwriting discipline. How are you guys thinking about growth momentum as you start looking at 2027 in BI.

I don't think we're going to give outlook on the top line other than to say we feel great about the execution and the growth we put on the books this quarter, and we feel like we've got all the capabilities and value proposition to continue to be successful executing in the market. So we're -- we feel great about next year, and we're optimistic, but we're going to stop short of indicating a trend or giving you a number.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Shanker with Bank of America.

Yes. The margins are fantastic, and I'm sure that you'd like to get every piece of business that fits your underwriting appetite, but the growth across a lot of lines is flattish or not moving very much. As you innovate with all these opportunities in technology and artificial intelligence, and you're able to save money, to what extent is the goal to pass those savings on to the customers to make your value proposition more attractive than your competitors in terms of price actions? Do you see an opportunity for you to outgrow your competitors by cutting costs with no impact on your margins?

Yes, Josh, I do think that there will be an opportunity for us to do that. We know that we are generating operating leverage. And just to -- just to give you a little bit of color into that. So there are some things that we know and we have a lot of confidence in. So let me give you a couple of examples. Our cost per unit of software development much improved. Our labor costs associated with first notice of loss down, our cost to service a policy has come down. There are just some areas where we know, and that goes into operating leverage. There are other areas where attribution is a little more difficult. So for example, we're very confident we're giving our underwriters better insights. And you can look at the excellent underwriting result, but it's hard to draw a very straight line from the improved insights for giving the underwriters and exactly that outcome. So it's a little bit harder to see that. But taking a step back, the combination of the ways that we can deploy the operating leverage and the benefits that we can't quantify are embedded in the results that we have. And if we decide that we want to redeploy some of those into pricing without compromising our return objectives, we'll do that.

Well, do you have a confidence if we look 5 years out, you will be taking a greater share of your agent business overall, a higher percentage of their footprint, I guess, that you have right now?

Josh, it's really hard to look 5 years out, I think, in any business, but we've said for a long time that we think there are meaningful benefits of scale, including the ability to invest at the level that we're investing and I think the early benefits come through expenses and the loss ratio, so we'll see it in margins. And over time, that's going to translate into growth. So I do think that Travelers will be a consolidator of premium.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO.

In Commercial Lines, I don't believe there was any kind of color on RRC rate change drivers this quarter. If you would be willing to kind of just unpack whether there's any particular line or lines that kind of are driving the downwards trend line?

Yes. Let me just step back and just make a few observations about the overall pricing environment. If there is there's 1 word over the top to describe it, I would say it's stable. I'm not going to get into what RPC did by every single line, but just for example, the sequential change in our PC and property was small, it was very small. We're not prepared to call the bottom. Certainly, you couldn't call a bottom off 1 data point and who knows what's going to happen 90 days from now, but we were very pleased to see a very, very small change there. The sequential movement in RPC in the liability lines, and now I'm talking about GL umbrella was also modest. So all in all, pretty orderly. And we talk all the time about the fact that we execute 1 account at a time. We're looking at the next account and deciding whether we want it in the portfolio and at what price. And it's also just a reflection of the returns by line. If you look at by line pricing, retention and return, it's a perfectly rational picture across the board. It's just -- the execution couldn't be better.

Got it. And my follow-up, just going back to A lot of the good color you've given on, kind of, Travelers innovation on the claims front and underwriting front. And I think, Alan, you talked specifically about expecting to bend the loss curve I believe, in casualty. If I juxtapose that with IBNR levels currently in the long-tail casualty line specifically commercial auto and commercial casualty, noncomp. Is it fair to say that the current IBNR are, kind of, higher than the company's long-term targets. And if you do bend the loss curve trend, the IBNR levels would kind of mean revert over many years, lower?

Mike, it's Dan. I'll try that. Look, I think 1 thing that's happened, especially if you want to look at the components of reserves between case and IBNR now versus 3 years ago or 5 years ago or 10 years ago, I don't think we're ever literally ever going to go back to the levels that we saw 10 years ago because attorney report is higher, that lengthens the tail, more claims come in later. So -- and that's really the point that we made a few years ago in 2024 when we started talking about an uncertainty provision to allow for the possibility that those trends would continue. And so when Alan referenced earlier in his comments, pressure on the loss cost, which somebody else asked about, that just means loss costs continue to go up, but they are not going up by any more than we anticipated than we anticipated in our picks. So I think the component of our ultimate loss pick is perfectly logical given the current development patterns. If, in fact, the actions that we're taking in our client organization, translate into a better outcome than for sure, there's going to be some IBNR that we ultimately don't need, but we are not projecting that as we sit here today.

Your next question comes from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo.

My first question is on the expense ratio guide. I think you guys said right, a little under 29 this year. And then guided to the same level next year. Understanding right this year is a little higher than expected on variable comp. But as we think about the next year or some improvements around AI maybe being offset by other things that you expect '27 to be more or less stable with where you're now expecting '26?

Yes, Elyse, it's Dan. So -- look the expense ratio, as we say all the time, we'll decide what we want the expense ratio to be and then dial into that number. A big component of that is what do we think we need the expense ratio to be in order to have a competitive position in the marketplace. And -- so we're pretty copacetic with where that is right now. As you mentioned, and as I said, keep in mind that pretty much the largest component of the expense ratio is commissions, which includes the contingent commission and the profit sharing. And so we're in a very strong position from a margin perspective. I don't expect that to reverse itself in the near term. So about where we are is pretty good with us for right now.

And then my second question is on the Business Insurance underlying loss ratio. That went up by about 50 basis points from last Q3. You guys didn't call it anything in the prepared remarks, so maybe there was nothing not significant, but was there a non-cat weather or anything else you would describe as the drivers of the year-over-year change there?

Yes, Elyse, it's Dan. So I think you're right in the first place, not a very big change and nothing in particular to call out. It's a great number, and it moved by about 0.5 point year-over-year, which could have easily moved to 0.5 point the other way. A bunch of stuff in there as there always is, the impact of pricing, product mix, there are changes in non-cat property losses. There's base year changes, there's the impact of strategic investments we're making, as Greg mentioned in his remarks again, but none of those things were particularly noteworthy this quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Kligerman with TD Cowen.

I'm looking at Slide 7 of your presentation, and it just really strikes me how strong net investment income improved year after year. So the question is, is that now finally -- and your combined are fantastic. Is that going to start to weigh into your pricing? How are you thinking about net investment income with respect to pricing?

We do have a link between our expectation for net investment income and our insurance pricing. It's it's, of course, part of the model. Just a couple of things to think about, though, the portfolio turns over relatively slowly. So it takes a while to earn in. And as the risk-free rate goes up, our hurdle returns go up. So you, sort of, have to put all that into the blender to figure out what the impact is.

Got it. Personal Lines, so we saw renewal premium change go down 0.6% in auto, it was down 3% in auto, down 4% in homeowners. Could you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape in personal lines. And with all this competition, how are you defending the for? How are you going to keep if up rather than down?

Sure, Andrew. It's Michael. I mean, I think the comments that I made in my prepared remarks are really key to what we're doing there. And to be clear, we're definitely not want to chase premium growth at all costs in any given short period of time, right? Our objective is to profitably grow this business over time. We do that by matching price to risk. And so you see that activity in the RPC numbers that you're looking at, right? In the third quarter of this year, we took about 10 rate decreases in auto. Again, still in that same low single-digit range that we've been talking about. But as we monitor our performance and look at loss costs, we adjust pricing.

So that's certainly a lever that we pull. We continue to make strategic investments in products and services and capabilities that make sure that we have the products and services our customers want to buy and our agents want to sell. And then we do quite a bit around distribution management, making sure that we've got the agents appointed that we need and that we are taking advantage of opportunities to solve problems for them.

When I talk about book consolidation opportunities, as an example, that's when we're working with an agent or a broker who's having issues with another carrier, and we talk to them about bringing that business over to travelers. So there are a number of things that we're doing from an appetite, pricing and distribution management standpoint, both to defend the force to use your words, but also to play offense to make sure that we're leveraging the capabilities we have to profitably grow the business over the long term.

Your next question comes from the line of Yaron Kinar with Mizuho.

I want to start maybe with the cyber insurance. Just given hugging phase, AI agents, maybe more hacking activity and capabilities, is this the line of business that is a viable business line for the private market? Do you need maybe more government support or more systemic intervention here? How are you thinking about that?

This is Jeff. As consistently highlighted by the Travelers Business Risk Index, Cyber is 1 of the most important topics that our customers are facing. It's a dynamic exposure, and it has been, and there's no question that the advanced AI models are adding to that dynamic. I'd remind you when you think about our portfolio, it's heavily weighted toward the middle market Main Street businesses. We've always been focused on limits management. If you look inside our book of business, a substantial majority of our limits are at $1 million or less. Those accounts that are above that are predominantly at $5 million or less. And that's before you take into account any reinsurance that we have in place, and cyber has always been one of our most heavily reinsured lines of business.

And then the last thing I'd share with you is that we've really invested heavily in risk control capabilities, including our acquisition of Corvus a few years ago that we've shared with you. We're not just assessing these accounts on the front end as we put them into the portfolio. We've got ongoing risk control capabilities to help them manage the risk. And so I think we are investing to address the exposure in partnership with our customers in many ways.

Yaron, to the extent that was a public policy question and a question about whether we need a government backstop. I don't really know. I mean there's active conversations about that now, and we'll see how that plays out.

Okay. And then maybe going back a second to Business Insurance. So obviously, you see a little bit of noise quarter-over-quarter. But if I look at the year-to-date numbers, they're flat, right, on the combined ratio of the loss ratio. Is that kind of a fair way of thinking about where the company is today and what the expectations would be going forward?

We should start with the noise comment. I mean these are spectacular numbers. And so there really is no noise in them. There are, as always, a bunch of puts and takes, some things some things are favorable. Some things are going the other way, but this is a spectacular number.

And I think to Alan's earlier comment on top line, we're not going to give guidance on combined ratio expectations in any of the segments other than to reiterate, like the profitability of the business is really strong. We're generating all-time high levels of underlying underwriting income, and we think that's got some staying power.

Okay. And just to be clear, I did not mean noise, right? I meant puts and takes to your point.

Thank you for the clarification.

We have time for 1 last question, and that question comes from the line of Matthew Heimermann with Citi.

I guess the question I had was just we're seeing more at an industry level scrutiny of just claim settlement practices in general. There's some litigation Oklahoma, California obviously has been active. I'm just curious, I know that your claims practices are unique to your company and the industry isn't necessarily represented a view. But I'm curious, just how you would frame the risk from continued scrutiny on practices? Just from a regulatory perspective, I have given me a value in the back of my head as -- I don't know if it's the right analog, but something similar where claims practices were scrutinized and you saw some changes on the back of it, both in terms of coverage and how companies operate.

Yes, let me just start, and you referenced our practices. I should just say there have been a couple of articles recently about this. One we weren't in at all, and the other, we were profiled as pretty favorable. So I just want to distinguish that from what's going on out there. Do you want to talk about close to that page and the things that could impact that, Michael?

Yes, sure. I mean I think again, those couple of articles really focused on close without pay percentages across carriers. To Alan's point, in that first article, we looked favorable. That said, comparing close without paid percentages across carriers is very fragile. The definition of claims, when they're established, why they're established, what causes them to be paid with and without -- or close with and without payment vary from 1 insurer to the next just from a definitional standpoint. But you can have a claim filed and have the loss be below the deductible, for example, as a reason that, that claim gets closed without payment.

And then, I guess, to your broader question about seeing these cases in Oklahoma and other places against other carriers for their claim handling practices, just reinforcing Alan's comment. I mean we have well-established claim handling practices. They're grounded in the philosophy to pay what we owe to deliver exceptional customer experience and do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. And I would say our claim handling and our claim organization is the best in the business. We're proud of it. We hear from our agents and brokers that it's one of the reasons they are proud to represent and sell travelers. So I think we've really got a strong foundation in that space.

Matt, with all that said, let me try to answer your question. We are very active as a company and just an effort to be an honest broker out there in state capitals and with insurance commissioners and with the media and our trade association is very active in the same places, making sure that we're educating people and people understand the good work this industry does, the billions of dollars that we do pay out, the speed with which we pay it out, the risk control services that we provide. So we are very attentive to this as a topic of interest, and we are very engaged in speaking to it.

I appreciate that. If I could sneak one last in mindful of time is just is it fair to say then when you think about creating benchmarks for measuring the performance of your claims organization and how you organize it that, that's an internal effort rather than relying on third parties to shape practices and targets, et cetera.

I'm not exactly sure of the question, but I mean we certainly have our internal benchmarks and our service level objectives. For example, our objective is to close 90% of claims within 30 days after every catastrophe. And over the course of the year, we routinely achieve that objective. But our real objective is to pay what we owe and to pay it quickly. And we are very disciplined about that.

Yes, that's fair. I'm sorry, I butchered the question. I really meant the source of some of the litigation at least is use of third-party consultants shaping policies and procedures and other incentives within the organization, and that seems contrary to at least my historical recollection and experience with our company.

Yes. We and others endeavor to use the data that we have about the good work we do to rebut some of the data others are using to try to make the other case. I think this industry is highly responsible and disciplined. And we use the data that we have to make that case.

We have reached the end of our call. I will now turn the call back to Abbe Goldstein for closing remarks.

Thanks very much for joining us today. As always, if there's any follow-up, please reach out to Investor Relations, and have a good day.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the second quarter results teleconference for Travelers.

[Operator Instructions]

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on July 17, 2026. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abbe Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers discussion of our second quarter 2026 results. We released our press release, financial supplement and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All of these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section. Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO; Dan Frey, Chief Financial Officer; and our 3 segment Presidents, Greg Toczydlowski of Business Insurance, Jeff Klenk of Bond & Specialty Insurance; and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take your questions.

Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release, financial supplement and other materials available in the Investors section on our website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abbe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to report an excellent second quarter and another in a sustained run of successful quarters. With very strong underwriting performance across all 3 segments and a terrific result from our investment portfolio, our results continue to reflect steady progress on the innovation front, as many of the initiatives we've shared bear fruit. Everything from product enhancements to the impact of AI on straight-through claims processing. There's more of that to come as we continue to invest with discipline and focus on the initiatives that matter most. For the quarter, we earned core income of $2.2 billion or $10.04 per diluted share, generating core return on equity of 24.9%.

Over the trailing 4 quarters, we generated a core return on equity of 24.2%. Underwriting income of $1.7 billion pretax was driven by very strong levels of underlying underwriting income and favorable prior year development. Reported and underlying profitability in the quarter were excellent in all 3 segments. The combined ratio improved to 83.6%, and the underlying combined ratio improved to 84.1%, driven by a lower underlying loss ratio.

Turning to investments. Our high-quality investment portfolio continue to perform well. After-tax net investment income increased by 14% to $883 million, driven by strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio, and a strong result from the non-fixed income portfolio. Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet enabled us to return more than $1.5 billion of excess capital to shareholders during the quarter, including $1.3 billion of share repurchases. Even after that return of capital from having made important investments in the business, adjusted book value per share was 16% higher than a year ago.

Turning to the top line. We generated net written premiums of $11.5 billion in the quarter. In Business Insurance, we grew net written premiums to $6 billion, 5% higher than the prior year quarter, adjusting for the sale of our Canadian business. We grew in every line other than property, but we continue to be very disciplined about writing national property. Property premiums were higher in both our small commercial and our middle market businesses. Renewal premium change in the segment was 4.8% with stable renewal premium change of 6.1% in our core middle market business and sequentially higher renewal premium change of 9.4% in our small commercial select business.

By product, RPC was higher or stable in every line other than property. Excluding the property line, RPC was 7.8% and about flat sequentially. Retention remains very strong at 86%, reflecting deliberate execution on our part and a generally high level of stability in the market. New business was a record $805 million, up 8% over the prior year quarter. As I've shared before, pricing, retention and returns need to be evaluated together. The optimization of that combination, together with new business creates shareholder value.

Looking at them in concert, these results reflect the exceptional execution of a sound strategy by our experienced field organization. In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we grew net written premiums by 14% to a record $1.2 billion. In our high-quality management liability business, renewal premium change remained steady, while retention improved to an excellent 88%. New business was up 8% over the prior year quarter. In our leading surety business, we grew net written premiums by 40%, reflecting our success with large accounts and continued strong production across the portfolio. In Personal Insurance, we grew net written premiums, we generated net written premiums of $4.3 billion with solid retention in both auto and homeowners and higher new business in homeowners.

You'll hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff and Michael about our segment results. Before I turn the call over to Dan, I'd like to take a minute to step back from the quarter and talk about what's behind the sustained period of strong results we've delivered. In short, to the earnings engine we've built. There are 4 components that comprise core income: underlying underwriting income, investment income, catastrophe losses and prior year development, all 4 have contributed to our success. We've shared before the significant increase in underlying underwriting income over the past decade.

You can see that on Slide 19 of the webcast presentation. That success is in large measure, the result of investments we've made through our focused innovation strategy to strengthen and extend our broad portfolio of competitive advantages. Leveraging those advantages, we've driven underlying underwriting income higher by growing the top line while at the same time improving underlying margins. You can see the strength of the result and the contribution of underlying underwriting income to return on equity.

Looking ahead, we expect to continue generating strong premium levels at attractive underlying margins. With the next chapter of our investment work, Innovation 2.0 and our growing scale has added tailwinds. That's why you've heard us describe our strong level of underlying underwriting income as durable.

Net investment income is also a growing and reliable contributor to our bottom line. Strong underwriting cash flows and predictable returns from our fixed income portfolio, complemented by positive returns from our alternative investments have contributed to an investment portfolio that is now more than $100 billion. Net investment income has been a consistently strong contributor to ROE and new money rates in the fixed income portfolio continue to outpace the embedded yield.

As a reminder, about 95% of our investment portfolio is invested in fixed income, of which 99% is investment grade. Together, our underlying underwriting income and net investment income have grown into a formidable earnings base, substantial enough to absorb significant catastrophe losses and still produce leading returns. In each of the last 2 years, we've produced among our highest levels of returns in spite of record levels of catastrophe losses. And our resilience to catastrophes is about more than the size of that earnings base.

As we've said before, our share of the industry's property catastrophe losses over the past decade has been meaningfully lower than our corresponding market share, a direct result of our disciplined risk selection, pricing and exposure management, all powered by leading data and analytics.

Those are the same capabilities that position us to handle the prospect of continued weather volatility. That brings me to the balance sheet and prior year reserve development. We don't plan for PYD. When we set our reserves, we're deliberate about taking uncertainties into account. So we're never counting on favorable development to materialize. Yet it has. We've recognized net favorable prior year reserve development in 19 of the last 20 years, totaling $15 billion pretax, which speaks to the discipline in our process. We're confident that our balance sheet is as strong today as ever. The earnings and cash flow this engine generates go well beyond what we can effectively put to work to run and grow the business and that gives us valuable choices on how to deploy the excess capital.

Our first priority is always to reinvest organically or inorganically, but we can earn attractive returns. When we generate capital beyond those opportunities, we don't think of it as ours to keep. As responsible stewards, we return it to our shareholders. We've done that consistently and with discipline. We've raised our dividend every year for more than 2 decades at a compound annual rate of 8%, and we've returned meaningful capital through share repurchases. Since we started our share repurchase program, we've retired 70% of the shares then outstanding. And as a result, spread our growing earnings, dividends and book value across fewer shares, increasing each shareholder's stake in the earnings power we've built. Just by virtue of our share repurchase program, a shareholder's percentage ownership of travelers has increased 9% since the beginning of 2025. The percentage ownership of a shareholder who owned Travelers' stock when we began our share repurchase program in 2006 has more than tripled. As an aside, by returning excess capital to our investors, we give them the ability to allocate their investment dollars as they see fit, including by investing in companies with different growth profiles or capital needs, thereby contributing to the efficiency of the capital markets. The efficient allocation of capital contributes to a stronger economy.

To wrap it up, that's the earnings engine, tuned to continue delivering industry-leading returns at industry low volatility. And this engine funds is an improvement. The earnings and cash flow we're generating or would allow us to invest well more than $1.5 billion a year, including in focused technology initiatives such as AI, to strengthen the very advantages behind these results.

It's a virtuous cycle and on this scale only makes more powerful. Ultimately, all of this is what allows us to deliver on the promise we make to our customers, serve our 30,000 colleagues in the communities that count on us and support the distribution partners who represent us. Operating from this position of considerable strength, we remain highly confident in the outlook for travelers. And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.

Thank you, Alan. Travelers delivered $2.2 billion of core income in the second quarter resulting in quarterly core ROE of 24.9% and a trailing 12-month core return on equity of 24.2%. Second quarter earnings were driven by another very strong quarter of underlying underwriting income, which at $1.3 billion after tax, marked our eighth consecutive quarter of more than $1 billion. Net investment income of $883 million after tax and net favorable prior year reserve development of $456 million after tax also contributed to the strong bottom line results. After-tax cat losses were a little more than $400 million. The all-in combined ratio of 83.6% was again excellent. Underlying underwriting income reflects $10.8 billion of earned premium and an underlying combined ratio of 84.1%.

Within the underlying combined ratio, the second quarter expense ratio of 29% was slightly higher than in the prior year quarter. As underwriting profitability has been stronger than expected, certain variable expenses have also been higher than expected. For example, profit sharing and contingent commissions, and that's a trade-off we're happy to make. Even with those higher profit-driven variable costs, we continue to expect the full year expense ratio to be in line with our prior guidance of around 28.5%. We reported net favorable prior year reserve development in all 3 segments in the second quarter, totaling $578 million pretax.

In Business Insurance, net favorable development of $319 million was driven by workers' comp and commercial property. In Bond & Specialty, net favorable PYD of $75 million was driven by better-than-expected results and management liability coverages and fidelity and surety. Personal Insurance recorded net favorable PYD of $184 million, with favorability in both home and auto. After-tax net investment income increased 14% from the prior year quarter to $883 million. Fixed income NII was higher than in the prior year quarter and in line with our expectations, benefiting from both higher yields and a higher level of invested assets.

New money yields at the end of Q2 were about 90 basis points higher than the yield embedded in the portfolio. Our outlook for fixed income NII by quarter, including earnings from short-term securities is consistent with the guidance we previously provided, expecting approximately $840 million in the third quarter and roughly $870 million in the fourth quarter. And fixed income NII is expected to continue to grow beyond 2026 as the portfolio becomes larger and new money rates continue to be higher than the yield embedded in the portfolio. Net investment income from our alternative investment portfolio was also higher than in the prior year quarter.

Turning to capital management. Operating cash flows for the quarter of $1.9 billion were again very strong. And over the trailing 12 months, operating cash flows surpassed $11 billion. As interest rates decreased during the quarter, our net unrealized investment loss decreased from $2.4 billion after tax at March 31 to $2 billion after tax at June 30. Adjusted book value per share, which excludes unrealized investment gains and losses, was $168.20 at quarter end, up 16% from a year ago. Adjusted book value per share also increased 6% from year-end despite the very strong level of share repurchases in Q1 and Q2, a 14% increase in the quarterly dividend per share and our continued investments in technology and other strategic initiatives.

We returned more than $1.5 billion of capital to shareholders in Q2 with dividends of $266 million and share repurchases of $1.3 billion, leaving us with roughly $3.9 billion remaining under prior Board authorizations for share repurchases. Turning to reinsurance. Page 18 of the webcast presentation includes some highlights. First, we replaced our expiring cat bond in May with a new cat bond, increasing the bond size from $575 million to $750 million and decreasing the retention slightly. Second, on July 1, we renewed our Northeast property cat XOL treaty, which continues to provide $1 billion of occurrence coverage above the attachment point of $2.75 billion. It's also worth noting that we chose not to renew the Personal Lines cat XOL treaty we had purchased in 2024 and 2025. Recall that when we renewed our general corporate cat treaty at January 1 this year, we decreased the attachment point from $4 billion to $3 billion. And the efficiency of that all perils enterprise-wide program was a more attractive way of getting the reinsurance coverage we wanted.

In summary, our second quarter results once again demonstrated significant and durable underwriting earnings power, steadily increasing net investment income from our growing investment portfolio and attractive returns across our well-diversified book of business. And now for a discussion of results in Business Insurance, I'll turn the call over to Greg.

Thanks, Dan. Business Insurance had a terrific second quarter in terms of both top and bottom line results. Segment income of $1.2 billion was a second quarter record reflecting strong underlying underwriting income and favorable prior year reserve development. We delivered an underlying combined ratio of 88.2%, a second quarter record. The improvement in the underlying loss ratio reflects favorable loss experience, including favorable experience consistent with the kind of investments we make in areas like predictive models, risk selection, products technology, claim and risk control. This gives us confidence that we're investing effectively.

Turning to the top line. Our net written premiums reached a new quarterly record of $6 billion. Excluding the impact of the sale of our Canadian business in the first quarter, we grew segment net written premiums by 5%, led by 7% growth in our middle market business and 4% growth in our Select business. National property premium declined as we maintain our deliberate and disciplined underwriting standards, passing on business where pricing terms don't align with our view of the risk.

Turning to production across the segment. Renewal premium change was 4.8%. Excluding the property line, RPC was 7.8% and about flat sequentially. Retention remained very strong at 86%, reflecting our continued focus on retaining our high-quality book of business. New business was strong at $805 million, reaching a new quarterly record. The strength of these results reflects our ongoing commitment to investing in products, underwriting precision and the capabilities we are building for our field organization and distribution partners.

As for the individual businesses, in Select, renewal premium change increased sequentially to a strong 9.4% for the quarter. New business of $153 million was solid. These results underscore our continued investment in products and the industry-leading experience we deliver to our agents and brokers. OP 2.0 remains a key contributor with industry-leading segmentation embedded in the product continuing to support profitable growth. We are encouraged by the new capabilities we are piloting within Travis, our digital platform with recently developed AI advancements to make submission upload seamless through advanced data extraction, rapid prefill of submission information and the application of sophisticated underwriting rules that generate quotes in seconds, improving the speed and ease of doing business for our distribution partners and for us.

In middle market, renewal premium change remained steady at 6.1% while retention of 89% remained at historically high levels. New business in middle market of more than $500 million reached an all-time high this quarter, up 17% from prior year levels, driven by our strong value proposition. To sum up, Business Insurance had a terrific second quarter in terms of both financial results and execution. We continue to grow our high-quality book while investing in differentiating capabilities that position us for long-term profitable growth.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to report that Bond & Specialty posted another strong quarter on both the top and bottom lines. We generated segment income of $234 million and an excellent combined ratio of 82.8%.

Turning to the top line. We grew net written premiums by a terrific 14% in the quarter to a record $1.2 billion. In our high-quality domestic management liability business, retention ticked up 1 point from the first quarter to 88%, while renewal premium change remained consistent. Our outstanding field team continues to achieve rate gains where appropriate, through segmented and data-driven pricing initiatives, and we are very pleased with the 8% increase in new business, reflecting the value that our distribution partners and customers place on our products and services.

Turning to our market-leading surety business. We're also very pleased to have grown net written premiums by 40% from the prior year quarter to a record level. The exceptional production this quarter spanned across our high credit quality portfolio and included a small number of large projects and increased bonding for data center development. We are pleased that our outstanding team's efforts to build the right customer relationships and our investments to support the long-term success of our portfolio of premier contractors generated such terrific production in this profitable business. So Bond & Specialty Insurance delivered strong profitability and excellent growth in the quarter while continuing to make strategic investments in our competitive advantages, including in our market-leading team and important technology and artificial intelligence capabilities to improve risk selection and efficiency.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share that in Personal Insurance, we delivered segment income of $827 million for the second quarter. Strong underlying underwriting income, modest catastrophe losses, and favorable prior year reserve development contributed to this excellent bottom line result. The combined ratio was an outstanding 79.5% in the quarter. And the underlying combined ratio of 77.3% once again demonstrated strong profitability in both automobile and Homeowners and Other. Net written premiums for the segment were $4.3 billion, as retention remains solid, while pricing moderated, reflecting strong profitability. New business in homeowners was higher year-over-year. In automobile, bottom line results continue to be very strong. The second quarter combined ratio was 82.8%, reflecting a 4.5 point benefit from favorable prior year reserve development and a strong underlying combined ratio of 85.8%.

The underlying combined ratio improved just over 3 points compared to the prior year. This strong result was driven by favorable loss experience across coverages, including about a 2-point benefit from the re-estimation of the prior quarter and the current year. These benefits were partially offset by the impact of lower earned pricing reflective of our strong profitability. In Homeowners and Other, the second quarter combined ratio was an excellent 76.7%, reflecting modest catastrophe losses and very strong underlying underwriting income.

The underlying combined ratio of 70.1% was comparable to a strong prior year quarter. We're pleased that our property results continue to demonstrate the benefit of our disciplined approach to optimizing our risk return profile through effective management of our appetite, business mix, pricing, terms and conditions.

Turning to production. We continue to make progress toward our objective of delivering profitable growth over time. In automobile, retention of 82% was consistent with recent periods. Renewal premium change was flat as we continue to incorporate improved profitability in our pricing. New business levels in auto remain healthy, and we continue to be pleased with the high-quality profile of the business we're writing. In Homeowners and Other, retention was strong at 85%. Renewal premium change of 6.60% continued to moderate as intended, given improved profitability and our successful efforts to align insured values with replacement costs. We're pleased with the increase in both new business premium and the number of new business policies compared to the prior year as we broadened our targeted efforts to deploy property capacity.

We continue to execute a range of initiatives designed to generate growth in both auto and property, adjusting rate levels to reflect strong profitability, enhancing product and pricing segmentation refining eligibility restrictions and pursuing new agent appointments and book consolidation opportunities. This quarter's results underscore the strong fundamentals across both auto and home. The product of deliberate disciplined actions over the past few years to improve profitability, manage volatility and position our portfolio for the long term.

We also continue to invest in capabilities to deliver value to our customers and distribution partners by digitizing the insurance journey, modernizing our infrastructure and simplifying our approach. We remain confident that our disciplined approach to performing today and investing for tomorrow will generate profitable growth over time. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Abbe.

Thanks, Michael. We are ready to open up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]

We'll take our first question from Mike Zaremski at BMO.

First one is just on the competitive dynamics in Business Insurance, maybe specifically on the select account sandbox. Maybe you can kind of talk about why pricing up or be bucking the downwards trend line that the medium and larger accounts are experiencing. Is this you think more traveler specific due to things you're doing? Or do you think it's reflective of the broader environment?

Mike, this is Greg. Well, first, there's no strategic shift underneath the select book. That really is a function of the rate filings that get approved on a state-by-state basis from quarter-to-quarter. So that can just fluctuate. That's really that's what's underneath that.

Mike, leading to your question, you said bucking the trend of other pricing number is going down. I just want to point out that other than property really national property, the pricing environment was very stable.

That's helpful. I think maybe we focus a little too much or at least I'm a little guilty of focusing a little too much on property. Okay. Just my final follow-up is any -- in terms of just the excellent profit margins pretty much across the board, any prior quarter adjustments that impacted the accident loss ratio that we should be just be considering?

Mike, it's Dan. So if you're asking about business insurance, in particular, the answer is no, happy to see 0.5 point or so of improvement in the underlying loss ratio in business insurance, a little bit of pricing benefit still a little bit of mix, a little bit of an improved view of the loss environment overall. And as Greg mentioned in his comments, bunch of the investments that we've been making there, probably starting to pay off. Michael did mention in PI and auto, in particular, a couple of points of favorable prior quarter re-estimation.

We'll move next to Gregory Peters at Raymond James.

Well, everyone. So for the first question, I'm going to step back and just ask about the ROE, was the 24.2% ROE on a trailing 12-month basis versus your mid-teens target over time. Alan, I'm just curious, as we look across the enterprise, do you think you could look considerable [indiscernible] some of your underwriting standards at price get more aggressive on pricing to grow faster, considering your over -- your returns are far in excess of what your target is longer term? And I guess related to that is when do we get back to that destination of the mid-teens core ROE over time?

Well, first of all, we're happy to be above that mid-teens core turn turn on equity over time objective. But to your question, are we going to relax underwriting standards or pricing to try to grow, that's a full [indiscernible], and we've always said that's a full here. And this is a very competitive marketplace. And now relaxed pricing, all you do is end up with same size book of business with lower margins. So our objective is to compete on franchise value. And every -- Firstly, every investment that we're making is geared towards making sure that we've got the franchise value to grow this company profitably. But competing on pricing in this business is a full [indiscernible].

It seems to every quarter I ask technology questions, and I just can't help myself. In the last couple of months, there have been numerous reports and commentary about the rising cost of technology implementation, including things like token costs, et cetera. As we've been looking at it from the outside end, we thought -- at least I've been thinking about technology investments as a way to improve efficiency. So I'm just curious, as the cost side of technology implementation seems to be rising. Do you think that's going to offset the expected efficiency gains? And related to that, there was a story that popped up about some software glitch that may have happened at your company through an implementation. Just curious when you deploy technology, how you manage potential challenges as that is being rolled out.

Yes. There's a lot in that question, Greg, but thanks for the question. We are laser-focused on the cost of technology and innovation. And we have we have substantial productivity and efficiency gains. We talked about in terms of operating leverage. We've generated substantial operating leverage over recent years and even longer periods. So we feel great about that. In terms of token costs and how you manage expenses of a large innovation and investment program, you got to remember that we've been innovating as a strategy for more than a decade now, and there's a lot of hard one know-how in doing that. And we said we've done 3 things really well. We've identified the right priorities. We've executed them very well, and we've harvested the benefits. And part of harvesting the benefits is making sure that you're that you understand your cost and that you're managing your costs. And we are laser-focused on that and very comfortable that we're doing a great job there, actually.

In terms of the software glitch that you mentioned, it really wasn't a software glitch. The underlying platform is working just fine. We were moving substantial amounts of information as part of a system conversion, and that is just a highly complex undertaking. As always, we regret any disruption to any customer or agent. But sometimes these things happen when you have these large complicated programs. Many of the issues have been resolved, and we will stay at it until every single one of them is resolved.

We'll go next to Paul Newsome at Piper Sandler.

A little bit of the same question on the ROE, but more talking about capital management. I would love to hear a little bit more full discussion of the high-class problem of the ROE and how you think that we should think about the change -- any change in capital management prospectively, given you should be generating quite a bit of excess capital perspective?

Paul, it's Dan. So I think we've had a long-standing capital management philosophy, which Alan referred to in his prepared remarks that served us and our shareholders really well. And that's been throughout various cycles of either under-earning relative to the mid-teens long-term objective or over earning relative to the mid-teens ROE objective. So I think the beauty of that capital management philosophy is that you're able to apply it sort of in all circumstances. And so I said simply, again, we expect to generate strong levels of capital. We want to be a strongly capitalized company. We have consistently generated more capital than we need to run the business, including to support the growth of the business. We're going to look to deploy it, whether that's organically or inorganically, if we think we can do so and generate attractive returns. And to the degree that we've accumulated more capital than we can. We're going to return the rest of it through dividends and share repurchases, which you've seen from us here clearly in the past several quarters.

Any difference and thoughts on the M&A environment, which to be part of that capital management?

No. But we are highly attuned to M&A opportunities. And confident that whenever attractive M&A opportunities come around, that we'll find a way to finance them. So our view of M&A doesn't change. It doesn't doesn't change relative to the capital excess capital that we have.

We'll take our next question from Katie Sakys at Autonomous Research.

First, I wanted to unpack the new business momentum in domestic BI, middle market, a little bit more. Greg, wondering if you could just give us a better understanding of some of the drivers behind the uptick this quarter? And how sustainable you think new business momentum is in the middle market going forward?

Yes, Katie, thank you. Yes, we're certainly proud of the number we put up in middle market. It can be lumpy from time to time given that's a transactional business, but Dan already referenced in my prepared comments, I also talked about the investments we're making that not only impact the loss experience, they impact production also by making sure we've got the best predictive analytic tools, the best risk selections and product and technology that we're putting into the marketplace in addition to claim and risk control. Those items are definitely in demand of our distribution. And I think that helps with the new business also. But given that transactional business, it can bounce around from quarter-to-quarter.

Yes. I totally understand that. And then perhaps as a follow-up, sticking with middle market, completely understand the difficulties in national property and the desire to maintain underwriting discipline there. Are you guys seeing any signs of pricing terms not aligning with your view of risk in middle market property? Or are trends kind of hanging in higher there or stronger there, I should say.

Yes. No, we're not really seeing a material shift in terms and conditions in the middle market property. We're so much on an account provider there. And we're also going to typically have the GL and the comp but that's been more of a national property dynamic.

We'll take our next question from Ryan Tunis at Cantor.

First question is just for Michael. On the personal auto side, just looking for a little bit of an update on what you're seeing in terms of frequency and severity. Obviously, gas prices have been a little bit higher. Curious if there's any impact flowing through results from that?

Sure, Ryan. Yes, this is Michael. I would say, as I mentioned, the improvement in underlying in auto was really favorable experience across coverages. That's actually a combination of favorable frequency and severity -- as respect to the question on frequency related to gas prices, I think I've said this before, it's always a little tough to diagnose what's driving frequency improvements. There tend to be a range of factors. And we can point to a few things, most importantly, improving vehicle technology and advanced safety features in vehicles, less distraction that again, we can measure. But there's not a ton of evidence at least at this point that there have been material changes in driving behavior related to gas prices, particularly as we look through the first part of this year.

Got it. And then a follow-up just on Dan probably, but just the favorable development in business insurance. How about the -- just curious with the casualty lines outside of workers' comp, commercial auto GL. What was kind of the bottom line of the reserve review this quarter?

Sure, Ryan. So BI, good solid number. I mentioned comp and commercial property. Those were the biggest drivers. And just to give you a sense of magnitude on those, comp was a little more than $200 million. Commercial property was around $80 million and if you think about what's left and you think about all -- there's definitely ups and downs in some of the other lines of business, but the net of those things was a good guy. We have paid particular attention to the casualty lines, including umbrella and commercial auto and did not see any pressure there at all this quarter.

We'll move next to Mark Hughes at Truist Securities.

Talked about the bonded specialty. It sounds like a couple of large projects helped the premium there and then the data center impact how durable do you think that will be?

Yes, Mark, it's Jeff Klenk. We did see some exceptional growth in the quarter across the portfolio and you've referred to the things I called out in the prepared remarks. It's important to remember that the majority of surety production is coming from new bonds, right? So renewals are really limited to just a few types of obligations in commercial surety. So we've always expected there will be top line variability. I wouldn't get into projecting the durability of those things. But if you think about the type of projects, the large projects, the data center construction. As the leader in surety in North America and our quality portfolio, high credit quality customers, we believe that we're well positioned to benefit from that future investment in infrastructure particularly when it involves public spending, but also included in these other opportunities I've called out.

I appreciate that. And then a quick follow-up on the commercial properties in Business Insurance, the downdraft was less than it had been the last few quarters. Was that anything to do with mix in the quarter? Is the worst behind us in terms of your top line experience in commercial property?

Yes. This is Greg again. Yes, I think if you're just referencing the net written premium delta from the first quarter to the second quarter, the slight improvement there. there's a number of items, timing variances, reinsurance, the [indiscernible] that come up in that particular quarter. But I wouldn't read into that, that that's a signaling of the pricing cycle. I would say that it's incrementally softer and certainly not a reflection of that net written premium delta.

We'll take our next question from David Motemaden at Evercore.

Dan, in a prior question, you had mentioned on Business Insurance, you had mentioned a little bit of an improved view of the loss environment overall. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and maybe just talk about if you've changed the loss cost trend assumption?

David, Dan. So we're going to stay away from the loss trend question and sort of for that reason because we say, look, loss trend is 1 particular fairly narrow definition, you also consider things like changes in base here over time and how you view the loss environment. So not a big number, so I wouldn't shine a big light on it. It was just 1 in a series of modestly favorable items. But the reality is like if you just look back at the last couple of years, the margins in Business Insurance from an underlying perspective, have been very good. So we've seen a little bit of favorability probably relative to what we might have thought things were going to look like 1.5 years or 2 years ago, and we're cautiously baking some of that into our picks now, but very small, David.

Got it. No, that makes sense. And then one of the drivers, Greg and Dan also mentioned just -- you also just mentioned just on the investments that you've been making that are probably starting to have an impact within the underlying loss ratio in BI. I guess, how should we think about that flowing through going forward? Or is that just a step change now that's embedded in the run rate? Or is that sort of an ongoing tailwind that will keep building as an offset that we should consider to some of the pricing dynamics.

So David, Dan, again, I'll start. Again, we're talking about very small numbers, right? The underlying loss ratio and business insurance changed by about 0.5 point. So these are not big things. But it does go into sort of our thought process of why it's important to think about more than just what's the pure rate number or what's the pure renewal premium change number. There are other things that impact the loss environment, including actions we take with underwriting appetite terms and conditions, deductible levels, claim efficiency, all those things.

We'll go to our next question from Brian Meredith at UBS.

First, I'm just curious, workers' compensation insurance, we've seen some reports out there about maybe longer recovery times happening and perhaps that's related to just some of the fears of unemployment with respect to AI. Curious, are you seeing that? And maybe in that context, how does that kind of factor in your thoughts on reserving for workers' comp?

Brian, it's Dan. So I'll take it at least from a reserving perspective. So again, first quarter and second quarter here, again, another couple of favorable quarters in terms of PYD, which would tell you that we're really not seeing pressure from a severity perspective. And comp continues to be favorability, both on frequency and severity. And I would just go back to the comments we've made many times before, which is we take very respectful view of what the long-term severity trend in workers' comp is going to be. And even if the more recent periods have been pretty benign, our assumption in our loss picks and in our reserves is still that severity is going to go back to some higher more normal long-term trends. So even if there were some increase in severity, whether it's because people are out longer or injuries cost more, unless it gets outside of your pick, we're not going to have a problem. The other thing I'd say just specific to your question, we didn't really see anything specific in the most recent data that aligns with the problem you are alluding to.

But the other thing I would add, Brian, just to sort of a general matter is that is that we expect some changes in frequency and severity in workers' comp as a function of economic activity. So that will impact the frequency at which workers go out and the length that they stay out. And so we've got a view on whether improving or deteriorating economy is going to -- to what degree is going to contribute to those. And so we bake that into our assumptions.

Makes sense. And the second one, I guess for Michael. Michael, I know there's a bunch of initiatives that you're implementing to try to get growth going in personal auto insurance. But maybe I'm just curious, how reasonable is to think that growth is going to actually pick up there given just the competitive dynamics? It seems like every company out there is looking to grow and cutting prices.

Yes, Brian, I mean I think you're describing the environment. And again, you all have visibility into just like we do the rate environment, and you see the the filings and broadly speaking, rate continues to be decreasing in personal auto. I would say what we are doing is everything that we think is appropriate to profitably grow that business. The things that I mentioned, I would just put a little more color around like when we talk about adjusting rate levels to reflect strong profitability, Alan talked earlier about lowering price in this business to grow as a pool of they are in.

That's not what we're doing, right? What we're trying to do is match price to risk. And so our strategy in auto is we want to match price to risk, we want to have the most sophisticated segmented product we can have in the marketplace. We want to have the appropriate eligibility that aligns with our appetite. And then we want to make sure that we are in all the places, taking advantage of all the opportunities that we can to be able to produce profitable business. And again, as I talked about this quarter, new business levels in auto have been healthy, and we're very pleased with the profile of the business that we're writing as a result. So we're going to continue to execute our strategy. The outcome of that strategy, to your point, is going to be a little bit the function of the market, but we're going to do what we think is appropriate to profitably grow the business.

We'll move to our next question from Pablo Singzon at JPMorgan.

The first question I have is for Michael. As you pivot the growth in personal lines, can you talk about your approach to treating off or, I guess, balancing margins versus unit growth rate? And I guess sort of simplify the question right, at what combined ratio would you be comfortable running the book, recognizing that it's producing margins that are really good today, right? And that your book is more balanced between personal auto and homeowners compared to the broader market.

Sure, Pablo. Maybe just to put a point on the comment I made earlier, right? We have target returns. Our target return is mid-teens over time. When we talk about adjusting pricing to reflect profitability, that's what we're doing, right? We're reevaluating our loss experience state by state in the line of business, whether we talk in property or auto, determining what we think an adequate price is at those target returns and then we're filing for that pricing. So that's the -- that's the approach we've taken. It really is driven towards mid-teens ROE over time. Clearly, we're above the mid-teens right now. And so that's why you see renewal premium change moderating in both lines of business.

And then second question I have for Dan. I guess just on the full year expense ratio guide of 20.5. I was wondering if you could provide just more color on what gets you there in the second half of the year, right? You're implying that there's going to be improvement. Is it contingent tailing off, just premium growth picking up, expense [ ratio ]. So any color or commentary would be helpful there, Dan.

Yes, Pablo. So not a lot I can give you other than, again, I think we made this comment last quarter. If you go back and look at the last 5 years or so of our results, I think with the exception of 2025, which was pretty steady, it's not at all unusual to see the expense ratio vary within a year by a point or more from quarter-to-quarter. So we've got an outlook view of what we think some of our run rate expense levels are. We line that up against what earned premium looks like. You get little math courts like there are actually more days of earned premium in the second half of the year than there are in the first half of the year. That's our view.

Currently, there's no particular change coming in the second half of the year strategically or any kind of slowdown in investment spending or anything like that. We just think when we put the 4 quarters together, we're going to still be pretty close to that 28.5.

We'll take our next question from Rob Cox at Goldman Sachs.

Just a follow-up on the property discussion. I know large account property and cat rates get a lot of attention, but we've noticed travelers and the industry CMP loss ratios are at historic profitability as well. Maybe you could just talk about how you're viewing that book right now and if we should expect the gap between large and small account pricing could start to narrow.

Yes. Let me give you a couple of comments on that. Typically, you'll see in the change of cycles national property, large scheduled property leading both the firming and the softening the trough of the marketplace. And you won't see the rest of the property portfolio, all to the depths or the peak you would see on national property. And that's kind of the cycle we're in right now. The property outside of national property in our core middle market business, the component underneath CMP Select that you just referenced, has a little bit of softening to it, but certainly not to the degree that you're seeing in the national property and the large schedules.

Okay. That's really helpful. And then if I could just ask more directly on some of the, I think, opening comments on the claims straight-through processing, enhancements and AI initiatives there. Are we starting to see that in the business insurance margin this quarter? And how should we expect that to trend?

I think the answer is yes. I mean that was the reference in Greg Script, Dan referred to it. So we are seeing benefits coming from the investments and the innovation. I mean it's in -- it was a 0.5 point improvement in the underlying loss ratio. And there's a couple of things going 1 way or the other in there, but that was big enough that it was worth bringing some attention to it. And I wouldn't say this is still the first time it's ever appeared. It's just -- it's in the context of some other pieces that are moving 1 way or another, but we are very clearly generating benefits from the innovation and AI investments that we're making.

We'll go next to Elyse Greenspan at Wells Fargo.

My first question was just going back to the BI discussion. And just some of the commentary, Dan, you just gave around the change in view on loss trends in the quarter. Does that mean that you took down the uncertainty provision that you guys had put up over the last couple of years?

No, Elyse, it does not. So we had the uncertainty provision in '24 and '25 and said I think at the end of the first quarter, we had carried it into '26, and we continue to carry it into 2026.

Okay. And then my second question, going back to the capital discussion. I know at times you guys have kind of balanced capital return relative to capital needed for growth as as premium growth, right, is slowing relative to some of the more recent years, should we think about repurchases and dividends combined, constituting a greater percentage of operating earnings from here?

Yes, Elyse, it's Dan. So I think the short answer would be, over time, yes. I don't think you could sort of apply that to any particular quarter or even necessarily full year, we're going to always see what's happening in a particular quarter given profitability, cat activity in particular. But over time, yes, and that's why we made the comment probably going back now 3 years when the business was growing, That Street, we thought, had gotten a little ahead of itself in terms of expected buybacks by not factoring in the need to hold capital for additional growth.

We still expect to grow and are still growing, but to the degree that, that growth might be a little slower than it had been in recent years. the need to accumulate additional capital is going to come down a little bit with it.

And we have time for one more question, and that question comes from Meyer Shields at KBW.

Alan, if I can go back to the comments you made on trading some excess margin for growth. I guess the question is, that I would assume that in the fragmented small or middle market, that there are companies that simply can't keep up with their pricing because of their scale and analytical advantages. Am I missing something there?

I'm trying to understand the question, Meyer?

So let me try and rephrase like when -- so you talked about how it's the [indiscernible] to lower pricing to gain share. And I understand that conceptually, but my impression or presumption is that you won't necessarily invite the same level of competitiveness because business that's very profitable for travelers is not going to be anywhere near as profitable for companies with higher expenses and less capable loss control, which would, I think, call for maybe a little bit more aggressive pricing. So wondering what I'm not thinking of there.

Yes. So I shared sort of a principal mayor. And of course, there are going to be variations from that principle in different circumstances. The other thing I would distinguish is lowering price where you're actually lowering returns versus lowering price because you can do so without impairing returns. And those are 2 different scenarios. But there's circumstances that are exceptions to every rule. But as a general rule, it's our big preference not to compete on price because for all the reasons we've shared, and we prefer to compete based on franchise value.

Okay. Understood. And then just a real question on Surety, how should we think about the policy terms, especially for the larger projects on the data center stuff, does that extend the earnings period for the written premium?

So larger projects might have longer durations, Meyer. This is Jeff Klenk, by the way. So there is an aspect on some of that. The underlying terms of all of these projects are bespoke, the contract between the contract or the project owner are carefully analyzed. We actually provide consultative underwriting as part of that process. And so it's not like there's standard policy terms. These are all individual contracts in the bond responds to those. It's actually one of our competitive advantages and the service that we provide to our customers is engaging in that process. But it's fair for you to think that on some of this business, the longer they are -- or the larger they are, they might be longer. But for our portfolio broadly, we've got lots of different sizes of contractors and types of projects in there. So while there is some movement on some of the larger, it doesn't move the overall needle very much.

And that concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the conference back over to Abbe for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We appreciate your time. And as usual, if there's any follow-up, please get in touch with Investor Relations. Have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first quarter results teleconference for Travelers. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on April 16, 2026.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abbe Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers' discussion of our first quarter 2026 results. We released our press release, financial supplement and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All of these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section.

Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO; Dan Frey, CFO; and our 3 segment presidents, Greg Toczydlowski of Business Insurance; Jeff Klenk of Bond & Specialty Insurance; and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. We will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take your questions.

Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements.

Also, in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release, financial supplement and other materials available in the Investors section on our website.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abbe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to report an excellent start to 2026, the strong underwriting performance across all 3 segments, and a strong result from our investment portfolio. We also continued to deliver on key strategic initiatives during the quarter.

For the quarter, we earned core income of $1.7 billion or $7.71 per diluted share generating core return on equity of 19.7%. Over the trailing 4 quarters, we generated a core return on equity of 22.7%, driven by excellent underlying fundamentals. Underwriting income of $1.2 billion pretax benefited from strong levels of underlying underwriting income and favorable prior year development. Each of our 3 segments generated attractive underlying and reported margins.

Turning to investments. Our high-quality investment portfolio continued to perform well. After-tax net investment income increased by 9% to $833 million, driven by strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio. Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return more than $2.2 billion of excess capital to shareholders during the quarter, including approximately $2 billion of share repurchases. Even after that return of capital and having made important investments in the business, adjusted book value per share was 16% higher than a year ago.

In recognition of our strong financial position and confidence in the outlook for our business, I'm pleased to share that our Board of Directors declared a 14% increase in our quarterly cash dividend to $1.25 per diluted share, marking 22 consecutive years of dividend increases with a compound annual growth rate of 8% over that period.

Turning to the top line. Through disciplined marketplace execution across all 3 segments, we generated net written premiums of $10.3 billion in the quarter. In Business Insurance, we grew net written premiums to $5.8 billion. Excluding the property line, we grew domestic net written premiums in the segment by 6%. The declining premium volume in property continues to be a large account dynamic. Property premiums were higher in our small commercial business and about flat in our middle market business. Renewal premium change in business insurance was 5.8%. Retention increased a point from recent quarters to a very strong 86% and was higher or stable in every line, reflecting deliberate execution on our part and a generally high level of stability in the market. Renewal premium change in our core middle market business was about unchanged sequentially, also with retention higher at 89%.

In terms of the product lines, RPC in auto, CMP and Umbrella remained in the double digits. RPC and GL workers' comp was stable and RPC in the property line was positive. New business in this segment was a record $775 million, a reflection of our strong value proposition. In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we grew net written premiums by 7% to $1.1 billion. In our high-quality management liability business, renewal premium change ticked up sequentially with excellent retention of 87%.

In our industry-leading surety business, we grew net written premiums by 14%. In Personal Insurance, we generated net written premiums of $3.5 billion with solid retention and positive renewal premium change in both auto and homeowners. We'll hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff and Michael about our segment results. The results we released this morning are part of a larger story. They reflect a set of advantages that we have developed and that have compounded over a long period of time. Over the course of many years, we've managed through a wide variety of challenging conditions, the 2008 financial crisis, dramatic changes in interest rates, a major inflection in liability loss cost trends, global pandemic, severe natural catastrophes and periods of heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainty.

We didn't predict the full scope of any of those events. But by carefully balancing risk and reward on both sides of the balance sheet, we were positioned to manage successfully through all of them. We've consistently delivered growth in book value per share and earnings per share and industry-leading returns averaging more than 1,000 basis points above the 10-year treasury over the last 10 years and with industrial volatility. We've also built a strong capital position as we've ever had. That track record isn't a coincidence. It reflects a set of structural advantages that hold up regardless of the environment, starting with the breadth of the franchise.

We're a market leader across 9 major lines of insurance, serving personal and commercial customers across the country and diversified across distribution partners, industry class and customer size. That balance, which represents a bigger advantage and people sometimes appreciate has resulted in our consolidated loss ratio being less volatile in the loss ratio of our least volatile segment. In an uncertain world, that kind of structural hedge is a meaningful source of stability. Where we operate also matters. More than 95% of our premiums come from North America. At a time of considerable geopolitical complexity, that concentration is a strategic advantage. And the domestic market offers substantial room for growth.

With our broad product capability, our leading market position and the execution you've seen from us over the years, we're well positioned to continue gaining share as we have in our commercial businesses over the past 5 years. Equally important is our ability to navigate the loss environment. We have the data, the analytics and the discipline to see changes in loss activity early and to reflect what we see in our reserves, our risk selection, our pricing and our claim strategy. That capability is foundational because until you have an accurate view of the loss environment, the many downstream decisions are working from the wrong inputs.

Our early identification of the acceleration in social inflation is a good example. We adjusted before the market did. And since then, we've grown the business and significantly improved margins. Our scale is also a significant and growing advantage. Our profitability and cash flow support our ability to invest more than $1.5 billion annually in technology, including in our ambitious AI strategy.

Our size gives us the data to power AI and the resources to deploy it, creating a virtuous cycle of better insights, better decisions and better outcomes. Our financial strength also enables us to absorb the increasing severity of weather losses, and all of these benefits position us as a preferred counterparty in the reinsurance market. Beyond that, our product breadth, risk control, claim expertise and other capabilities that benefit from scale, make us more relevant to our distribution partners deepening those relationships and our access to quality business.

Over time, companies that can leverage scale effectively will have a meaningful edge in consolidating industry premium. As for our investment portfolio, the principles that guide us are the same ones that has served us well for decades. We've consistently managed for risk-adjusted returns, not headline yield. More than 90% of our portfolio is in high-quality fixed income with an average credit rating of AA-. The issue of the day, private credit is a nonissue for us. We manage interest rate risk by holding the vast majority of our fixed income securities to maturity and carefully coordinating the duration of our assets and liabilities.

Our investing discipline has produced default rates that were a fraction of industry averages through every stress event in the past 2 decades. We can't gracefully reposition a portfolio in the middle of the dislocation. The time to build that resilience is before you need it. In short, whether we're talking about underwriting or investing, the advantages we've built are designed to deliver across environments, and they have.

Before I wrap up, I'd like to share that a number of my colleagues and I have just returned from our Travelers leadership conference. A multiday event, we host each year for the principals and senior leaders of our most significant distribution partners. As we've shared before, the vision for our innovation agenda includes enhancing our value proposition as an indefensible partner to our agents and brokers. We continue to make significant investments to ensure that we realize that vision through best-in-class products, services and experiences.

What we heard consistently is that our deep specialization across a wide range of modernized, simplified and tailored products, along with a broad and consistent appetite and extraordinary field organization, the ability to deliver exceptional experiences and our industry-leading claim capabilities are major differentiators in the market.

To sum it up, we're off to an excellent start for 2026 and we're highly confident the advantages that have driven our success will extend our strong record of outperformance.

And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.

Thank you, Alan. Travelers delivered $1.7 billion of core income in the first quarter, resulting in a quarterly core return on equity of 19.7% and a trailing 12-month core return on equity of 22.7%. First quarter earnings were driven by yet another very strong quarter of underlying underwriting income, which at $1.2 billion after tax, marked our seventh consecutive quarter of more than $1 billion.

Net investment income of more than $800 million after tax and net favorable prior year reserve development of $325 million after tax, also contributed to the strong bottom line result. After-tax cat losses were just over $600 million. The all-in combined ratio of 88.6% was again excellent. The underlying underwriting gain reflected $10.6 billion of earned premium and an underlying combined ratio of 85.3%.

Within the underlying combined ratio, the first quarter expense ratio came in at 29%. That's what we expected given the timing of expenses in Q1, and we still expect the full year expense ratio to be in line with our prior guidance of right around 28.5%. The previously announced sale of most of our Canadian operations closed as expected on January 2, and I wanted to take a couple of minutes to summarize the impact of that sale on our first quarter results.

Let's start with premium volume. The year-over-year comparison with Canada's business included in 2025, but not included in 2026, reduced the first quarter growth rate for consolidated net written premium and net earned premium by about 2 points each. The impact of both Business Insurance and Bond & Specialty was about 1 point while the impact in Personal Insurance was about 4 points. The impacts on the growth rate of both written and earned premium will be similar for the remaining quarters of this year.

To help with modeling the year-over-year impact for the rest of the year, we provided the quarter-by-quarter dollar impacts on Slide 19 of the webcast presentation. Within net income for the quarter is a gain on sale consistent with our expectations when we originally announced the transaction last May. That gain does not impact core income.

And finally, within the equity section of the balance sheet, you see a reduction in accumulated other comprehensive loss, which is primarily because the previously unrealized FX loss related to the sold Canadian entities became a realized loss upon sale. The move from unrealized to realized had no impact on total equity or on book value per share.

Turning back to the quarterly results. Catastrophe losses for the quarter totaled $761 million pretax with the largest events being the winter storm that impacted much of the country in January and a large tornado hail event in March, both of which you can see in the table of significant cat losses in the MD&A section of our 10-Q.

We reported net favorable prior year reserve development of $413 million pretax in the first quarter with all 3 segments contributing. In Business Insurance, net favorable development of $162 million pretax was driven by commercial property and workers' comp. In Bond & Specialty, net favorable PYD of $65 million pretax was driven by better-than-expected results in Surety.

Personal Insurance recorded net favorable PYD of $186 million pretax with both auto and home contributing. After-tax net investment income increased 9% from the prior year quarter to $833 million. Fixed income NII was higher than in the prior year quarter and in line with our expectations, benefiting from both higher yields and a higher level of invested assets. New money yields at the end of Q1 were about 70 basis points higher than the yield embedded in the portfolio.

Our outlook for fixed income NII by quarter, including earnings from short-term securities, is consistent with the guidance we provided on our fourth quarter earnings call, expecting roughly $810 million after tax in the second quarter, growing to approximately $840 million in the third quarter and then to around $870 million in the fourth quarter.

Net investment income from our alternative investment portfolio was also positive in the quarter, although down from a year ago. Given recent movement in the equity markets, this is a good time to remind you that results for our private equities, hedge funds and real estate partnerships are generally reported to us on a 1-quarter lag. And while not perfectly correlated, our non-fixed income returns tend to directionally follow the broader equity markets. In other words, the impact of the decline in financial markets that occurred in the first quarter will be reflected in our second quarter results.

Turning to capital management. Operating cash flows for the quarter of $2.2 billion were again very strong as we generated more than $2 billion in operating cash flow for the fourth consecutive quarter. As interest rates increased during the quarter, our net unrealized investment loss increased from $1.5 billion after tax at year-end to $2.4 billion after tax at March 31. Adjusted book value per share, which excludes unrealized investment gains and losses, was $161.60 at quarter end, up 16% from a year ago. Adjusted book value per share also increased 2% from year-end despite the very strong level of share repurchases during Q1.

Share repurchases this quarter included $1.8 billion of open market repurchases in line with the guidance we shared last quarter. And as a reminder, $100 million of that $1.8 billion came from the closing of the Canadian business sale in January. We had an additional $185 million of buybacks in connection with employee share-based compensation plans, and we still have approximately $5.2 billion remaining under prior Board authorizations for share repurchases.

Dividends were $238 million in the quarter. And as Alan mentioned earlier, our Board authorized a 14% increase in the quarterly dividend to $1.25 per share. In summary, our first quarter results once again demonstrate significant and durable underwriting earnings power and attractive margins across our well-diversified book of business, along with steadily increasing NII from our growing investment portfolio.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Greg for a discussion of business insurance.

Thanks, Dan. Business Insurance had a strong start to 2026, delivering another quarter of excellent financial results and successful execution in the marketplace. Segment income of $839 million was a first quarter record benefiting from strong underlying underwriting results and net investment income as well as favorable prior year reserve development.

For the 14th consecutive quarter, we delivered an underlying combined ratio below 90%. That sustained underwriting success reflects the strength of our risk selection, granular pricing segmentation and field execution.

Turning to the top line. We generated net written premiums of $5.8 billion. Domestic net written premiums were up 4% over the prior year quarter as we grew our leading middle market and select businesses by 5% and 3%, respectively. National Property premium declined as we maintained our disciplined underwriting standards.

Turning to production. We achieved renewal premium change of 5.8% for the quarter. Excluding the property line, RPC was nearly 8% and in line with the fourth quarter. Renewal premium change was positive in all lines and higher sequentially in the umbrella and auto lines. Retention increased to 86%, up sequentially from the fourth quarter, a reflection of our continued focus on retaining our high-quality book of business and generally stable market conditions.

Strong new business of $775 million was a quarterly record. These production results benefit from the investments we've made in product and underwriting precision. Our new commercial auto product, TCAP, which contains industry-leading segmentation is now live in 47 states. We also recently enhanced our property pricing models, refining catastrophe and non-cat segmentation. Our advanced analytics, market-facing tools and sales enablement capabilities also played key roles in our success, reflecting competitive advantages, these investments continue to build.

We're pleased with these production results in the excellent execution by our field organization. As for the individual businesses, in select, renewal premium change was strong at 8.8%, while retention increased 1 point sequentially to 82%. As expected, we are seeing the benefit of having largely completed our targeted E&P risk return optimization effort. New business of $157 million was strong and in line with last year's record. These results underscore our continued investments in product, underwriting and agent experience. BOP 2.0 is now fully deployed nationwide, completing a multiyear initiative that has transformed our small commercial offering. The recent rollouts of the product in California and New York were meaningful milestones. In the industry-leading segmentation embedded in the product is contributing to profitable growth.

We continue to enhance Travis, our digital quoting platform, which processes over 1 million transactions annually. Travis is a reflection of our ongoing commitment to delivering an industry-leading experience for our distribution partners. In middle market, renewal premium change remained attractive at 6.6% while retention improved 2 points from the fourth quarter to a very strong 89%. Price increases remain broad-based as we achieved higher prices on about 3/4 of our middle market accounts.

New business of $468 million was up 7% compared to the prior year quarter, reaching a new quarterly high. Once again, another great quarter for Business Insurance. We are energized by both the impact of the new capabilities contributing to our strong performance and by the additional capabilities we are currently building that will drive our continued success throughout the remainder of 2026 and into the future.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased to report that Bond & Specialty started the year with another strong quarter on both the top and bottom lines. We generated segment income of $254 million, an excellent combined ratio of 83.3% and had a strong underlying combined ratio of 88.9%.

Turning to the top line. We grew net written premiums by a very strong 7% in the quarter to $1.1 billion. In our high-quality domestic management liability business, renewal premium change was slightly higher sequentially, while retention remained strong at 87%. We're encouraged by our continued progress in achieving improved pricing through our purposeful and segmented initiatives while continuing to deliver strong retention.

Turning to our market-leading surety business. We're very pleased that we increased net written premiums by 14% from the prior year quarter. Bond premium growth came from both long-term accounts, many of which are relationships spanning decades as well as high-quality new accounts recently added to our industry-leading portfolio. These new surety relationships reflect years of effort spent by our outstanding field team earning trust as well as the strategic investments we've made over time to deliver value beyond the bond itself.

Our portfolio of premier contractors is well positioned to continue to benefit from higher and broad-based infrastructure spending. So on Specialty Insurance delivered strong results in the first quarter of 2026, driven by our consistent underwriting and risk management diligence, excellent execution by our field organization in delivering our leading products and value-added services and by continuing to leverage our market-leading competitive advantages.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. In Personal Insurance, we delivered segment income of $704 million for the first quarter of 2026. Strong underlying underwriting income and favorable prior year development, both contributed to this excellent bottom line result. The combined ratio of 82.9% was a terrific result in the quarter. The underlying combined ratio of 78.3% improved by 1.6 points compared to the first quarter of 2025, reflecting strong profitability in both Automobile and Homeowners and Other.

Net written premiums for the segment were $3.5 billion. As a reminder, we completed the sale of our Canada Personal Lines business on January 2, 2026. The decrease in domestic net written premiums of [ 5% ] year-over-year reflects the impact of both auto and home actions we've taken over the past year to improve property pricing terms and conditions and to reduce exposure in high catastrophe risk geographies. The decrease also reflects higher ceded premium related to the expanded coverage we purchased as part of the enterprise catastrophe reinsurance program, which renewed on January 1.

Turning to automobile. Bottom line results continue to be very strong. The first quarter combined ratio was 82.9%, reflecting a very strong underlying combined ratio of 88.3% and a 6.3 point benefit from favorable prior year development. As a reminder, the first quarter is historically our seasonally lowest combined ratio quarter in auto. In homeowners and other, first quarter combined ratio was an excellent 83%. The underlying combined ratio of 69.7% improved by approximately 3 points compared to the prior year quarter, primarily related to the continued benefit of earned pricing. As another reminder, the second quarter historically has been the seasonally highest quarter for homeowners weather-related losses.

Turning to production. In automobile, retention of 82% was relatively consistent with recent periods, and real premium change continued to moderate, reflective of our strong profitability. We're pleased to note that both auto new business premium and the number of new business policies written increased compared to the prior year quarter.

In homeowners and other, retention improved to 85%. Renewal premium change in owners moderated, reflecting our successful efforts to align replacement costs with insured values. We expect renewal premium change to further moderate into the mid-single digits, reflecting improved profitability. We were encouraged to see new business premium higher year-over-year, as we broadened our disciplined efforts to deploy property capacity. These production results reflect progress toward our objective of delivering profitable growth over time.

We're executing a range of initiatives to generate new business growth in both auto and property, including continuing to enhance product and pricing segmentation, unwinding eligibility restrictions, lifting agent binding limitations and increasing new agency appointments. We're focused on providing total account solutions that together with continued investment in digitization and ease of doing business, make us an [indiscernible] partner for our agents and an undeniable choice for customers.

To sum it up, we're operating from a position of strength. The underlying profitability in our Personal Lines business is excellent. Our multiyear efforts to improve returns and manage volatility in the property portfolio are largely behind us and the early signs of growth momentum in both auto and home are encouraging.

And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Abbe.

Thanks, Michael. Thank you. We are ready to open up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

So for my first question, Alan and Dan, you talked about your investment in technology every year for years now. And I'm curious how it is affecting the culture of the company. And I'm thinking about this from 2 perspectives. First of all, a number of your peers have talked about the potential for headcount reduction. And then at the SBU or line of business level, their risks, I suppose, of deploying new technology, both on growth and margin and maybe sometimes that might outweigh the benefits. So some perspective on those 2 points would be helpful.

And I love that question. And I'll take you back to -- I think it was 2017 when we came out and we said, innovation is going to be a strategy for Travelers. And what we've done in the intervening years really is hone innovation skills. And we're referring to the last essentially 10 years is innovation 1.0 positioning us for innovation 2.0. But when you talk about the culture, that's a culture that, fortunately, we've developed and honed over a decade.

And so that's everything from how do you pick the right initiatives, how do you assess performance along the way? How do you measure results, how do you prepare an organization to manage change? How do you communicate to an organization that's in the middle of change. And so that has been a constant for us. And I don't -- I just don't think you can wake up on Monday morning and say, "Okay, we're going to be innovative today". It's a skill set, and we've got a lot of hard one know-how in doing it. And I think that shaped our culture, which is prepared for it.

Okay. I guess related to just -- I'm looking at the personal lines results, again, Michael, just balancing profitability with possibly adjusted pricing to drive new business and growth. Just curious about how you're looking at that equation.

Sure, Greg. Thanks for the question. And that is absolutely what we're trying to accomplish, right, balance growth with returns and generate profitable growth over time. Certainly, given the strong profit position, we've taken a number of actions across pricing eligibility and distribution management to drive growth. And importantly, I think we're doing that. I mentioned it from a position of strength. The same combined ratio and underlying combined ratio in Personal Insurance is the lowest first quarter segment combined ratio in the last 10 years. So that gives us some flexibility to look at pricing segmentation that gives us the opportunity to look at base rate levels in certain states to ensure that pricing is consistent with loss costs.

And then, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're executing a range of initiatives across distribution management, expanding eligibility, relaxing limitations to support that growth. And as I mentioned, we're encouraged by the momentum we're starting to see.

Our next question is from David Motemaden with Evercore.

I had a question just on the RRC within the Select business. I was a little surprised that the deceleration there. I was hoping you could unpack that a little bit and sort of what lines were driving that deceleration?

David, if you reference in the RPC, first of all, let me point out, that's a real strong number for Select just at under 9%, and you can see that drove a real strong retention number also. Rate came in at 4% and down from the fourth quarter, but that really is a reflection of how we feel about the portfolio and the rate adequacy and the very deliberate execution of our field organization.

David, I'd add to that, when you're looking at that pricing metric, any pricing metric, and I would say this for Select or, frankly, anywhere else, you really have to look at it as a package of what's the pricing, where are the returns and where is the retention. And when you look at that trio together and you look at Select, it's an excellent outcome.

Got it. And then maybe just for my follow-up. I thought the underlying loss ratio in BI that was definitely better than I was looking for. Could you just talk through the moving pieces there? I think last year, you had talked about increasing IBNR on liability lines. You saw maybe an update there. And then also, you guys had talked about some light non-cat property losses, I think, in the first couple of quarters last years and -- last year, and there were some questions if that is durable or not. So I was wondering if you have any updated thoughts there that you might be reflecting in loss picks?

Yes, David, it's Dan. I'll take that. So look, overall, I feel really terrific about the underlying profitability in Business Insurance. And as Greg called out in his prepared remarks, now that's been sustained for quite a while. So I think we're in a really sweet spot for the point Alan was just making about retention, pricing and returns.

Nothing really unusual in the quarter, sort of the normal suspects that you would expect a little bit of mix impact but nothing that we would call out as being particularly unusual, including non-cat weather or anything else. We also talked about our comment last year on the casualty lines and putting a little bit of what we call, I think, an uncertainty provision in both 2024 and 2025.

I think we said at the end of the 2025 year-end call, but I'll repeat it here. We did again carry that into the 2026 loss pick. So -- so the losses have not performed poorly. We like the margins in this line. But again, it's a pretty long tail line. There's still a lot of uncertainty. There's still a lot of attorney rep. We're going to have a healthy respect for that uncertainty. And so we did include that provision again in the 2026 loss picks.

Your next question is from Rob Cox with Goldman Sachs.

Just a question for you around AI exclusions from policy terms. We're hearing brokers talk about increasing inbounds around AI-related exclusions from policy terms. So I'm just curious how Travelers is thinking about underwriting exclusions for AI-related risks and if you're seeing this play out in the market at all?

Rob, this is Greg. Clearly, we're looking at our policy language all the time when there's new perils or dynamics in the marketplace. And that's evolving right now, and we haven't had any material changes, but it's something we're watching very closely.

Okay. Great. And then maybe I just wanted to check in on tort reform. I know we've talked in the past, Florida is kind of viewed as a success story there. There's a number of other states who have recently passed some fairly comprehensive actions. I'm just curious if -- do you think that these other states could have similar success as Florida and if Travelers would plan to proactively change strategy in those states with regards to underwriting and pricing? Or would you wait to see an improvement before changing strategy?

Rob, we've been very encouraged by what we saw in Florida, and we've seen other encouraging actions in some of the states, as you've mentioned, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and so forth. So it's been terrific to see and I think in part attributable to a really strong ground game that we and the rest of the industry have put on, just state-by-state, making sure that we're pounding the pavement together with other industries just making the case for the impact of litigation abuse on affordability.

And so we're really pleased to see early gains, and we hope to continue the momentum. We will -- it's hard to answer your question on how we're going to execute on a -- with a broad brush, but we will look at the dynamics in each state. We'll look at the actions that states take and either at the outset or over time, that will impact how we think about the opportunity there and how we execute. But we're hopeful that this is the beginning of some momentum.

Your next question comes from Andrew Anderson with Jefferies.

Within BI, as some of these lines continue to see firm pricing other than property, how do you think about the relative attractiveness of workers' comp from either a growth or a margin perspective?

The workers' comp business is a fantastic business for us, and it continues to be -- continues to perform very well. You can look at the calendar year returns. And we are more than open for business and workers' comp.

Got it. And within Surety growth accelerated again, how would you kind of frame the demand conditions relative to credit quality?

Yes. This is Jeff Clink responding, Andrew. I would tell you that our growth in the quarter for surety was really broad-based. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, it was new and existing customers. It was from several of the different segments within our surety business. We are really proud of the high credit quality of our book of business. We continue to look at that as we take new customers into that portfolio. And we feel really good that our portfolio will continue to benefit from this broad-based infrastructure spending that's out there as we look ahead. Thanks for the question.

Your next question comes from Josh Shanker with Bank of America.

I was curious about the expense ratio. It's a little higher than it's in the past on both the acquisition costs and the other expense ratio. Can you talk about the drivers and how we should think about that as the year progresses?

Sure, Josh. It's Dan. So we're not at all surprised with the expense ratio. If you look at our results over the last 5 or 6 years, if you look at the quarters within any given full year, it's not at all unusual to see the expense ratio vary by 1 point or more from quarter-to-quarter. 2025 really didn't, but '25 was more of an outlier and just sort of happen stance.

So you mentioned compensation commissions. So things like at what point do you evaluate the level of accrual that you think you're going to need for profit sharing or contingent commission. And so in the first quarter last year, we were sitting here coming out of one of the largest cat events in the history of the industry with California wildfires and saying, look, at this rate, we probably don't need a whole lot of extra accrual for contingent commissions and profit sharing. That's a different situation this year given the profitability of the book in the first quarter. But as I said in my prepared remarks, first quarter came out pretty much where we expected it to be when we gave the guidance last year that we expected 28.5% for this year's full year.

And on personal lines, is there a difference in the complexion of a business that's churning out of your portfolio versus business that you're winning currently?

Thanks, Josh. It's Michael. I would say, absolutely, the business that's churning out portfolio is not as of high quality as the business that's coming in. When we look at the profile of the business lost versus the profile of the business, added new, the profile of the business we're adding new is superior to the profile of the business that we're losing.

And what are the qualitative features that make that business better? Is it bundled? Is it higher value homes? Is it more cars per home? Or what is the difference between those 2 cohorts?

I mean, the elements that we look at when we look at profile, include all those things, credit quality, limit bundling number of vehicles, age of vehicle, age of home, really pretty much across the board, the portfolio -- the profile characteristics of the business we're adding is better than the profile of the characteristics of the business we're losing.

So can we say that you're churning the business you're losing with some intentionality, that's a business you don't want any more?

I would say we're very happy with the trade-off between what we're writing new and what we're losing. I mean, again, remember, in Personal Insurance, the business is mostly systematized. So there is certainly an element of business we are non-renewing or declining to offer renewal for based on risk quality, risk characteristics, our estimate of what the loss ratio relativity on that business is. But really, I think what you're seeing is the successful outcome of a pricing and segmentation strategy that's tuned to attract the business that we want.

Your next question comes from Yaron Kinar with Mizuho.

I had 2 questions on Business Insurance. The first one, it seems like renewal pricing change is below loss trend for the first time in a while, at least based on the last long-term loss trend that the company provided a few years ago. And assuming that persists, how does that change the company's approach to writing and retaining business. As an example, I think the last time we saw RPC in this range retention rates were a bit lower than where they are today.

So Yaron, I'm not going to respond to whether it's in fact expanding or shrinking on a written basis. But what I will say is we're thrilled with the book of business we have, and we're -- we're very happy about the business we're putting on the books. And so the way we think about the execution isn't looking at retention as sort of a headline number. It's executing at a very granular account-by-account basis. So when you're looking at the business we want to retain, you want to keep your quality business, you want to get the right price on it and through a lot of hustle and franchise value write new business. And so we are -- the retention and the fact that it ticked up given the quality of the book and the returns in the business, it's fantastic.

Okay. Got it. And then my follow-up, again, NBI, more focus on select accounts. I'm just trying to think about the impact of AI here, where, on the one hand, I think it probably offers an opportunity to increase TAM, you can drive scale and efficiency benefits there. But at the same time, it could also mean that we see more of a shift of small commercial to larger brokers with more data and analytics capabilities, maybe greater negotiating power. So I'm just curious to hear how you think about those dynamics, whether am I thinking about this is correct. How do you see the business develop over the coming years with the advent of AI?

I honestly think it's a little too early to know how that's going to happen. We acquired -- we've acquired 3 digital agencies brokers over the years, Simply Business Insurance and InsuraMatch expecting the digitization of small commercial or move up in size and it really hasn't. And we think about simply business, for example, the small commercial, it writes is, I would describe it as micro. And for whatever reason, we just haven't had the take up there the way we would have expected 8 or 10 years ago. So I think before we see how this business is going to transition from one size of distributor to another, you're going to have to see customers adopt that way, adopt digital distribution for research and purchasing. We just haven't seen it.

And one thing I would throw out in addition, we're really excited about the GenAI within the independent agent channel and particularly Select and in middle market. And in Select, we've executed some GenAI that helps us process the business, endorsements and changes and just remove the friction and allow it to be much smoother for our independent agent channel. So I don't think it has all applicability of just changing distribution channels. We think it can be a great facilitator and having us be more efficient in our existing distribution channels.

And your -- just to go back to your question, to the extent small commercial does gravitate to the larger brokers, it's probably good for -- I mean, it's probably a good thing for us. We've got those relationships and that's probably a plus for Travelers.

Your next question is from Elyse Greenspan from Wells Fargo.

We can go to the next and if Elyse jumps back and we'll take her later.

Okay. One moment. Okay. Your next question is from Tracy Benguigui with Wolfe Research.

A follow-up on the AI and Commercial Lines distribution. I appreciate your comments on Simply Business and the lower tick up rate. But if I could take that in a different angle, rather than bookers being disintermediated, I'm wondering, over time, can commission structures change due to the advancement of AI.

It's pretty early, I think, in the evolution of AI and the distribution of insurance to probably get into that Tracy and it's probably a broader conversation maybe for a different time, different day.

Okay. I also have a big picture casualty reserving. Are claim patterns normalizing post COVID catch-up period? And if so, does that inform your loss development factor selection?

Tracy, it's Dan. So compared to what we saw in COVID, I would say COVID was probably as disrupted payout patterns as we saw. So normalize relative to that, yes. But the trend in payout patterns in the casualty lines, particularly the long tail liability lines has still been increased frequency of attorney reps, general lengthening of the tail. So the things that we talked about in the middle of 2024 when we made some adjustments to our loss picks for accident years '21 through '23 and then started to factor in that uncertainty provision, I talked about in a question earlier today is still relevant because we have not seen attorney rep rate slowdown. We have not seen increases of slowdown. We have not seen payout patterns return to their pre-COVID -- pre-COVID patterns, it's an extended payout pattern that as, if anything, continues to slightly extend. .

Your next question is from Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo.

I'm sorry about that earlier. My first question, I wanted to ask just about about M&A and just capital, Alan, just given that things are starting to soften just from a market and premium perspective are continuing to soften. I was hoping to just get your current views on just M&A, things that you might consider and how that just fits into your capital priorities right now.

So Elyse, I'll give you the same answer that I think I've given you for 10 years consistently on that, which is we're always interested in M&A of all potentially shapes and sizes, and we're very active in looking at things. I think our shareholders should demand that we're active in looking at things. And whether that's the larger transactions or whether we're considering bolt-ons or whether we're considering acquiring capabilities, that's all within our thought process and within our regular activity. I don't -- we don't need to do anything at all to continue to be successful. We've got all the tools and capabilities that we need to be successful. But if we find the right opportunity that meets our objectives, and I've shared many times, our -- I mean obviously, we're going to assess the transaction in 1 million different dimensions, but we're looking for transactions that either improve our return profile, lower volatility or provide us with some of the strategic capability. And we're active looking for those and when we see them and can get them done at the right terms and conditions, we'll do it.

And then my follow-up on personal lines, as we start to think about gas prices being elevated, just given what's going on overseas and I guess the offset could be potential that there's potentially supply chain issues, right, which would impact severity gas prices, obviously, potentially helpful to frequency. Can you guys just -- just hoping to get some color just on the outlook on just for margins within personal lines given some of the things going on in the market right now?

Sure, Elyse. It's Michael. I would say the gas price dynamic really depends on duration short to even medium-term increases in gas prices don't materially change commuting patterns and driving levels. So it does have to be a sustained elevation in gas prices to really impact miles driven. And to be clear, if gas prices stay high for an extended period of time that puts downward pressure on miles driven and it's actually a benefit to frequency. That's the most kind of straightforward dynamic that we could see.

But again, gas prices would need to stay high for an extended period of time to drive that. From a supply chain standpoint, I mean, it's a fast-moving, fast-changing situation. There's a lot of different things that could happen. There are scenarios where elevated costs actually put sort of downward pressure on consumer purchases and actually reduce used car prices because there's not as much demand. As just one example of the type of scenario we could see, but at this point, it would be speculative to really go beyond that and sort of pick a path.

Your next question is from Mike Zaremski with BMO.

A question on the home insurance side. Mike, I believe you said, Michael, that pricing would start to move to the mid-single digits. And if I look at -- if we look at Travelers' historical loss trends in home, it looks like it's well into the double digits. So are you signaling that that the loss cost trend is better after kind of the changes you've made or you're letting margins deteriorate a bit to accelerate growth or a little bit of both? Because especially if you look at the cat load increased guide over the last few years, it's pretty much all emanated from being a bigger part of the equation.

Sure, Mike. This is Michael. Sort of taking those pieces and putting them together, what I would say is the guidance for property pricing moving down towards mid-single digits really just reflects the fact that we have rate adequacy broadly in virtually every state across the country as we sit here today, and we're pleased with the profitability of the portfolio.

And I think importantly, that's been driven by pricing but also by changes in appetite, terms and conditions and business mix, including state distribution. And so what you saw between fourth quarter of last year and first quarter of this year was really that we had caught up on insurance to value. We had gotten coverage limits where they needed to be on property policies. And so we've gone to a lower inflation factor on those policy -- property policies renewing in 2026. That really explains most of the quarter-to-quarter drop in RPC.

What I'm signaling in the go forward is that rate will also start to moderate in response to that improved profitability. And underneath that certainly is an assumption based on what we've been seeing that the elevated inflation that I think you're referring to in your question, has returned to a more normal level, and so that's aligned with that pricing expectation.

That's helpful. And my follow-up is pivoting to Commercial Lines loss cost trend. And if we look at your commentary about loss cost trend being mid-single digits plus in the past. If you look at kind of your reserve releases and especially over the last year or more, it kind of implies that loss trend has been a bit below the historical stated trend. Would you agree with that? Or is loss trend maybe improving slightly versus your historical view?

Yes, Mike, it's Dan. I think -- if you look at Business Insurance, in particular, a large part of the favorable reserve development we've seen over the last several years in general has been comp related. And we've said on comp each time that it's come up, there's been favorable -- favorability in both frequency and in severity, particularly in medical cost trend severity. That doesn't really bleed over into the way we think about loss trend in commercial auto or commercial property or the general liability lines as an example. So I don't think that we've seen a sea change in the way we think about loss trend to the positive. There's still a lot of pressure on the liability lines, which is why we continue to talk about things like double-digit pricing in umbrella. Fair question, but I don't think we've seen any big changes there.

And Mike I'd add to that, that one of the reasons that we've gotten away from talking about loss trend is because it's a pretty narrow concept of frequency and severity. It's a very blunt instrument to think about what's happening across billions of dollars of premium, each line has its own dynamic, and there are other things that impact margins. There's base year changes, there's exposure changes, mix changes, change in our loss -- our large loss assumptions, other adjustments that we make for one reason or another, there's a lot of estimation in that number. So we try to get away from it. But holistically speaking, what I'd say is the loss picks we have, like what we think is going on with loss trend and on the whole, it behaved about as we expected. .

We have time for one more question, and that question comes from Pablo Singzon with JPMorgan.

So first, just a quick modeling question. You talked about the impact of the Canada sale and earned and written premiums. I think you had mentioned 2 points. Should there be a similar proportionate impact on the dollar run rate acquisition and G&A expenses?

I think the way we think about it, Pablo, is just think about combined ratio in general. And so there's a little bit of a mix difference between the way Canada performed relative to the other lines, but not so significant that we think we would call it out and tell you, you need to adjust the run rate loss ratio. So you asked the same question you asked about whether it's acquisition cost or G&A or loss ratio or claims and claim adjustment expense sort of up and down the income statement, we don't think it's going to significantly change the profile of the profitability related to those dollars.

Understood. And then the second one, just a follow-up to Rob's question on AI and not entirely related to the quarter. So Travelers is one of the largest hybrid riders in the U.S. And I guess the question is, how are you thinking about your exposures there on risk management given recent developments of the AI?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Pablo. It's Jeff. So absolutely, it is an underwriting consideration. We're thinking about artificial intelligence and with some of the more recent announcements in the last few days about the strength of the LLM models and what that could mean. It's not just on the negative side. It's also got the potential to be on the positive side from an investment in resilience and capability to actually address the threat. And so we're heavily invested. We've continued to invest in our risk control capabilities to address the cyber risk issue.

And I think that ultimately, we're going to have to make sure we're staying on top of in partnership with broader government entities as we already are. And I think the investments we've made in our cyber risk control team for the benefit of our customers, the really good news for them is that as this technology continues to expand and change, we're going to be even in a better position to help them identify and remediate vulnerabilities as they come about.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back over to Ms. Goldstein for any closing remarks.

Thanks so much. Appreciate you tuning in. We know we lost some questions in queue. So as always, please feel free to follow up with Investor Relations and appreciate your time. Have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter Results Teleconference for Travelers. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on January 21, 2026.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abbe Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers' discussion of our fourth quarter 2025 results. We released our press release, financial supplement and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section.

Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO; Dan Frey, CFO; and our 3 segment Presidents, Greg Toczydlowski of Business Insurance, Jeff Klenk of Bond & Specialty Insurance and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take your questions.

Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under Forward-Looking Statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements.

Also in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release, financial supplement and other materials available in the Investors section on our website.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abbe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We're pleased to report excellent fourth quarter and full year results, with strong and broad-based performance across both underwriting and investments. For both periods, the bottom line results were driven by very strong underlying underwriting income. Particularly given the written margins remain attractive, this is a durable dynamic.

For the quarter, we earned core income of $2.5 billion or $11.13 per diluted share, generating core return on equity of 29.6%. Underwriting income of $2.2 billion pretax increased 21% compared to the prior year quarter, benefiting from higher underlying underwriting income, higher favorable prior year reserve development and a lower level of catastrophe losses. The underlying result was driven by strong net earned premiums and excellent margins. The underlying combined ratio improved nearly 2 points to 82.2%. Underwriting results were strong in all 3 segments.

Our high-quality investment portfolio also continued to perform well, generating after-tax net investment income of $867 million for the quarter, up 10%, driven by strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio.

Our terrific underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return $1.9 billion of capital to shareholders during the quarter, including $1.7 billion of share repurchases. Importantly, at the same time, we continue to make significant strategic investments in our business. Even after this deployment of capital, adjusted book value per share was up 14% compared to a year ago.

Turning to the top line. Through disciplined marketplace execution across all 3 segments, we grew net written premiums to $10.9 billion in the quarter. In Business Insurance, we grew net written premiums to $5.5 billion. Excluding the property line, we grew domestic net written premiums in the segment by 4%.

As I shared last quarter, the declining property premium is a large account dynamic. We'll continue to be disciplined in terms of risk selection, pricing and terms and conditions.

Renewal premium change in Business Insurance was 6.1%. Renewal premium change in auto, CMP and umbrella remained in the double digits. Excluding the property line, renewal premium change came in strong at just over 8%, including workers' comp, which continues to be low single digits positive. Given the attractive returns, we were pleased that retention in the segment remained strong at 85%.

In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we grew net written premiums to $1.1 billion with excellent retention of 87% and positive renewal premium change in our high-quality management liability business. In our industry-leading surety business, we grew net written premiums from a very strong level in the prior year quarter.

In Personal Insurance, net written premiums of $4.2 billion reflected continued strong renewal premium change in homeowners and higher new business in auto. You'll hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff and Michael about our segment results.

Before I turn the call over to Dan, I'd like to take a step back and talk about what's driving this performance and what's ahead. About 10 years ago, we embarked on an innovation strategy designed to position our business to grow at industry-leading returns with low volatility.

As you can see on Slide 18 of our webcast presentation, over the past decade, we've grown our top line at a compound annual rate of 7% while improving our underlying profitability by almost 8 points. Notwithstanding a significant increase in our technology spending, that improvement in underlying profitability includes a 3-point or 10% improvement in our expense ratio. As a consequence of all that, compared to 10 years ago, our underlying underwriting income is more than 4x what it had been, our cash flow from operations has more than doubled and our investment portfolio has grown by 50% to more than $100 billion.

As you can see on Slide 19, over that same period, core return on equity has averaged more than 1,000 basis points over the 10-year treasury at industry low volatility, and we've grown earnings per share on average by 12%. In short, the execution of our strategy has been exceptional. We think about that chapter as Innovation 1.0.

Our success with Innovation 1.0 is the result of having done 3 difficult things very well, identifying the initiatives that really matter and passing on the merely good ideas that don't, executing effectively and capturing the value of what we built.

Over the decade, we developed the competitive advantage of an innovation skill set. Now we're bringing all that hard one know-how to Innovation 2.0 at Travelers, powered by AI and not too far off quantum computing.

The P&C industry is well positioned to benefit from AI across the entire value chain. This generation of AI can understand and execute on the complex stakeholder interactions, well-defined processes, data-intensive workflows and massive amounts of unstructured data that characterize our industry. It gains compound over many, many interactions. In that context, Travelers is particularly well positioned.

As an industry leader, we bring differentiating domain expertise. Because AI amplifies existing strength, leaders in the domain are best positioned to use it to drive improvement. In addition, we have decades of high-quality data from millions of transactions and interactions and the scale to invest at significant levels as AI and technology continue to segment the market.

We have thousands of engineers, data scientists and analysts building AI and other sophisticated technology solutions. Dozens of scale generative AI tools are already in production. Millions of transactions are now automated. More than 20,000 of our colleagues use AI tools on a regular basis, and agentic AI isn't a future aspiration, it's embedded in our business operations today.

Last week, we and Anthropic announced a partnership to empower 10,000 of our engineers, data scientists, analysts and product owners with personalized context-aware and integrated AI assistance. This initiative will enhance and accelerate the development of software, analytics and predictive models.

In extensive testing, we achieved significantly improved engineering output and meaningful productivity gains. We expect that this will result in faster and more cost-effective delivery of new capabilities across Travelers, everything from product development to new business prospecting, to underwriting speed and quality, the agent and customer service and more, benefiting our business, our customers and our distribution partners.

In our claim organization, more than half of all claims are now eligible for straight-through processing, with customers adopting straight-through processing about 2/3 of the time. Another 15% of all claims are processed with advanced digital tools. All of those percentages are growing.

To accommodate customers who still prefer to call in to report a claim, just last week, we launched a natural language generative AI voice agent that takes first notice of loss by phone. Early customer adoption is exceeding our expectation. The results are tangible.

In our claim organization, investments we've made, including an automation, straight-through processing and analytics, refine indemnity payouts and drive operational efficiencies. It's worth pointing out that the efficiency gains in our claim organization come through loss adjustment expense, benefiting the loss ratio.

As just one example, our claim call center population is down by 1/3. And this year, we'll be consolidating 4 claim call centers down to 2. And of course, we're deploying AI broadly across the business. Other use cases enhance underwriting decision quality and efficiency and improve the experience for customers, agents, brokers and employees.

You'll hear some examples from Greg, Jeff and Michael. We're still early in this transformation, which means the benefits, more effective underwriting, improved operating leverage and profitable growth will continue to build.

To sum it up, our results this year and over time reflect the power of our earnings engine, fueled by the disciplined execution of our strategy. For the full year, core income was up 26% to $6.3 billion or $27.59 per diluted share, generating core return on equity of 19.4%. And during the year, we grew adjusted book value per share by 14% after returning $4.2 billion of excess capital to shareholders and investing more than $1.5 billion in cutting-edge AI and other technology initiatives.

Our operational and financial success in the face of another year of elevated catastrophe losses for the industry supports our ability to be there for our customers. In 2025, we handled 1.5 million claims. That's about one every 20 seconds and paid out more than $23 billion in claim payments. We also met our objective of closing 90% of claims arising out of catastrophes within 30 days. 2026 and in future years, we'll be there to help our customers and communities recover and to enable individuals and businesses to thrive.

Looking ahead, we're also very well positioned to continue generating substantial shareholder value. The durability of our strong underlying business performance provides a powerful foundation for continued strong bottom line results, leading returns and strong cash flows. Operating from this position of strength, we remain highly confident in the outlook for Travelers in 2026 and beyond.

And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.

Thank you, Alan. Core income for the fourth quarter was $2.5 billion and core return on equity was 29.6%, as we once again delivered excellent financial results on a consolidated basis and in all 3 segments. The full year underwriting results were also excellent on both an underlying and as-reported basis, and net investment income was once again higher than a year ago.

The strong fourth quarter finish brings full year core income to $6.3 billion and full year core ROE to 19.4%. In Q4, we generated higher levels of written and earned premiums compared to a year ago while delivering excellent combined ratios on both the reported and underlying basis.

At 82.2%, the underlying combined ratio marked its fifth consecutive quarter below 85%. The combination of higher premiums and the improved underlying combined ratio led to a 15% increase in after-tax underlying underwriting income. That brings the full year after-tax underlying underwriting results to $5.5 billion, up 23% from the prior year. The growth in underlying underwriting income in recent years is worth an extra minute of commentary.

In 2022, we reported a very strong $2.1 billion after tax. Through the successful and disciplined execution of our strategy, we grew that figure to $3.2 billion in 2023 and to $4.5 billion in 2024 and now to $5.5 billion for 2025. Those earnings are what drives strong cash flow from operations, which, after averaging about $4 billion for the 10 years from 2011 through 2020, surpassed $9 billion in 2024 and reached $10.6 billion in 2025.

Expense ratio for the fourth quarter was 28.4%, bringing the full year expense ratio to 28.5% as expected. We continue to expect the expense ratio for 2026 to be right around 28.5%. Catastrophe losses in the quarter were $95 million pretax.

Turning to prior year reserve development. We had total net favorable development of $321 million pretax in the quarter, with all 3 segments contributing.

In Business Insurance, net favorable PYD of $205 million was driven by favorability in workers' comp. In Bond & Specialty, net favorable PYD of $30 million was driven by better-than-expected results in Fidelity and Surety. Personal Insurance had $86 million of net favorable PYD with favorability in both auto and home.

After-tax net investment income of $867 million increased by 10% from the prior year quarter. Fixed maturity NII was again the driver of the increase, reflecting both the benefit of higher invested assets and higher average yields.

Driven by the strong cash flows I referenced earlier, during 2025, we grew our investment portfolio by approximately $7.5 billion to $106 billion. As of December 31, new money rates were about 70 basis points above the yield embedded in the portfolio.

In terms of our outlook for fixed income NII for 2026, including earnings from short-term securities, we expect approximately $3.3 billion after tax, beginning with about $800 million in the first quarter and growing to about $870 million in the fourth quarter. As with underwriting income, the growth in investment income over the past several years has been significant. Our 2026 outlook represents nearly twice as much fixed income NII as we delivered in 2021 just 5 years ago.

Page 22 of the webcast presentation provides information about our January 1 catastrophe reinsurance renewal, and we're very pleased with the changes for 2026. Our long-standing cat XoL treaty continues to provide coverage for both single cat events and the aggregation of losses from multiple cat events. The per occurrence loss deductible is unchanged at $100 million. And for 2026, we dropped the attachment point to $3 billion compared to the $4 billion attachment point we had in 2025.

We believe an all perils cat aggregate is the most efficient way to protect the balance sheet. And the combination of our industry outperformance, refined reinsurance structures and more favorable reinsurance pricing have allowed us to meaningfully improve our coverage with only a modest increase to our total ceded premium costs. We also renewed the enhanced casualty reinsurance program first introduced for 2025. We were once again able to purchase working layer coverage on a roughly margin-neutral basis.

On Page 23 of the webcast presentation, we have again provided both a summary of the seasonality of our cat losses over the prior decade and a view of our cat plan by quarter for 2026. As you can see, the 2026 cat plan in terms of combined ratio points is higher than both the 5- and 10-year averages.

As a reminder for your modeling in terms of seasonality, as you can see from the data, the second quarter has historically been our largest cat quarter. Also of interest for 2026, we continue to value our relationship with Fidelis and are very pleased to have once again renewed our 20% quota share with them. The renewal includes the same loss ratio cap we've had in place since the quota share began in 2023.

Interest rates decreased during the quarter, and as a result, our net unrealized investment loss decreased from $2 billion after tax at September 30 to $1.5 billion after tax at December 31. Adjusted book value per share, which excludes net unrealized investment gains and losses, was $158.01 at year-end, up 14% from a year ago.

Turning to capital management. We returned $1.9 billion of capital to our shareholders this quarter, comprising share repurchases of $1.65 billion and dividends of $244 million. In our prepared remarks last quarter, we indicated that we expected to execute roughly $1.6 billion of share repurchases in the first quarter of 2026, including the use of about $700 million from the sale of our Canadian operations, which did close as planned on January 2.

Even with the increased level of share repurchases we just executed in Q4, given the strong finish to the 2025 year, we now expect repurchases of around $1.8 billion in Q1. Of course, the actual amount and timing of repurchases will depend on a number of factors, including cat events and other quarterly earnings impacts as well as other factors we disclosed in our SEC filings.

I'd like to make one other comment on capital management to help with your models. Given the growth we've generated over the past several years and the outlook for continued growth, we're now more likely to issue debt every year, assuming we're comfortable with market conditions. Our recent history has been to issue debt every other year. Annual debt issuance allows us to maintain a more consistent debt-to-capital ratio.

Recapping our results for 2025, we're very pleased to have delivered net and core income of $6.3 billion, core return on equity of 19.4%. We ended the year with our all-time high in adjusted book value per share and with our largest investment portfolio ever. In short, we're extremely well positioned for 2026 and beyond.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Greg for a discussion of Business Insurance.

Thanks, Dan. Business Insurance had another very strong quarter, rounding out another terrific year in terms of financial results, execution in the marketplace and progress on our strategic initiatives.

Segment income for the quarter was nearly $1.3 billion and up more than $100 million from the prior year quarter. Improvement from the prior year was driven by higher net investment income, higher favorable prior year reserve development and lower catastrophes.

The all-in combined ratio of 84.4% was a great result and about 1 point better than the prior year quarter. We're once again particularly pleased with our exceptional underlying combined ratio of 87%. The underlying loss ratio was the second best quarterly result ever, trailing only last year's fourth quarter record. The expense ratio remained excellent at 29.3%.

Turning to the top line. Net written premiums reached an all-time fourth quarter high of more than $5.5 billion. We grew our leading select and middle market businesses by 4% and 3%, respectively. These 2 markets make up almost 3/4 of our net written premiums for Business Insurance in the quarter.

We saw a decline in national property premiums, reflecting our disciplined execution in terms of risk selection, pricing and terms and conditions. Excluding the property line, domestic net written premiums were up 4%. As always, our focus is on writing business that meets our risk profile and underwriting standards and where we can get an appropriate price with terms that reflect the exposures perils.

As for production across the segment, pricing remained attractive with renewal premium change of just over 6%. Excluding the property line, RPC was strong at 8%. Renewal premium change was positive in all lines, including property and double digits in CMP, umbrella and auto. Retention remained excellent at 85% and new business of $675 million was up 6% from the prior year quarter.

We're pleased with these production results and our field's execution of our proven segmentation strategy. Across the book, pricing and retention results this quarter reflect excellent execution, aligning price, terms and conditions with environmental trends for each line.

As for the individual businesses, in Select, renewal premium change and renewal rate change both remained strong for the quarter and about flat with third quarter levels. Retention was up 2 points from the fourth quarter of last year as we continue to wind down our CMP risk return optimization efforts. Lastly, new business was up 6% from the fourth quarter of last year to a healthy $139 million.

In our core middle market business, renewal premium change remained attractive at 6.6%. Price increases remain broad-based as we achieved higher prices on about 3/4 of our middle market accounts. And at the same time, the granular execution was excellent with meaningful spread from our best-performing accounts to our lower-performing accounts.

To a large degree, the sequential decline in RPC was impacted by the property line, where RPC remains positive, healthy and reflective of attractive returns. We're pleased that middle market retention remained exceptional at 87% and new business of $395 million was up 11% to an all-time fourth quarter high.

As we close out 2025, let me provide a little color on full year results before turning the call over to Jeff. We're very pleased to report segment income of nearly $3.7 billion, an underlying combined ratio of 88% and top line of $22.7 billion. This was the third year in a row where we delivered an underlying combined ratio of less than 90%.

As for production, renewal premium change and retention both remained historically high, while new business premiums approaching $3 billion reached an all-time best. These sustained exceptional results are a direct reflection of our strong value proposition as well as the successful execution of our thoughtful and deliberate strategies.

Beyond our execution excellence, we're pleased with the contributions we're getting from our ongoing strategic initiatives. The decision support tools we're putting in the hands of our underwriters at the point of sale, including models that drive risk characteristics, refine technical pricing and summarize historical model loss experience results in better risk selection, pricing and terms and conditions.

In addition, we're encouraged by the impact we're seeing from our product and user experience initiatives, including how well they've been received in the market. Our new BOP product is now fully rolled out, and our new auto product is live in 46 states. Both products contain industry-leading segmentation, which contributes to profitable growth. We also continue to enhance the insights around our submissions based on quality and appetite that allow our underwriters to focus on those new business opportunities that we most want to add to the portfolio.

We're pleased with our progress with gen AI. We're building and executing a robust portfolio of gen AI initiatives that will enable enhanced risk assessment and selection, ultimately improving loss experience as well as drive gains in productivity and efficiency and improve our industry-leading experience for our agents and brokers.

As just one example, we've recently rolled out gen AI agents to efficiently mine both internal and external data sources to better understand and synthesize the risk characteristics and ensure appropriate business classification. This capability both accelerates the underwriting process and results in improved risk classification and segmented pricing.

To sum up, we feel terrific about our performance and financial results in 2025. We're excited about what we're investing in for the future, and we have the best people in the business. And they're not only executing with excellence in the market today, but they're also helping to shape the transformation of our industry. In short, we're well positioned for continued profitable growth.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. Bond & Specialty ended the year with another strong quarter on both the top and bottom lines.

In the fourth quarter, we generated segment income of $236 million and an excellent combined ratio of 83%. A strong underlying combined ratio of 85.7% was a little more than 1 point better than the prior year quarter.

Turning to the top line. We grew net written premiums by 4% in the quarter to $1.1 billion. In our high-quality domestic management liability business, renewal premium change was 2.8%, while retention remained strong at 87%. We're very pleased with the progress we've achieved to improve pricing through our purposeful and segmented initiatives while continuing to deliver strong retention.

As we expected, new business was lower than the fourth quarter of 2024. As a reminder, this is the final quarter of year-over-year new business impact from our Corvus acquisition, with most Corvus production now reported as renewal premium.

Turning to our market-leading surety business. Net written premiums increased from the very strong prior year quarter, reflecting strong demand for our products and unparalleled value-added services. So we're pleased to have once again delivered strong results in Bond & Specialty this quarter.

Reflecting on the full year, we're also very pleased with the performance of our business in 2025. In our Management Liability business, we successfully navigated ongoing soft market conditions, and we're among the first carriers to drive higher pricing to improve product returns where needed. Despite market headwinds, we drove profitable account and premium growth by leveraging our investments in advanced analytics, including the automated delivery of next-generation sophisticated pricing models.

Our AI investments to automate submission intake for new business reduced our time to ingest submissions from hours to just minutes, and we recently extended automation capabilities to renewal workflows. We've also made important investments in sales effectiveness and enhancements to our product offerings.

In capitalizing on our Corvus acquisition, we've successfully extended cyber risk services to customers across our portfolio. This includes always-on threat monitoring with same-day alerts, continuous dark web surveillance, 24/7 access to a tailored policyholder dashboard and personalized security consultations from our in-house cyber experts. As we've expected, these capabilities are helping our customers to more effectively manage cyber risks and are mitigating our exposure to evolving cyber vulnerabilities.

In our surety business, we drove solid growth by capitalizing on our industry-leading expertise and premier value-added service offerings. We've entered into new and expanded distribution arrangements domestically and internationally that position us for continued growth. We've more closely aligned and integrated our outstanding Canadian surety operation, which contributes to our position as the leading surety in North America.

And in our commercial surety flow business, we've leveraged AI to enhance distribution submission and fulfillment experiences, improving efficiency and fueling growth. All of these investments and initiatives and the terrific execution by our outstanding team drove another strong year of profitable growth in Bond & Specialty, and we're excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Thanks, Jeff. I'm very pleased to share that Personal Insurance generated segment income of more than $1 billion in the quarter and a combined ratio of 74%. Both results reflect the strong underlying fundamentals of our business.

For the full year, Personal Insurance generated over $2 billion of segment income and a combined ratio of 89.5%. These results improved compared to the prior year, notwithstanding significant losses from the California wildfires, reflecting the strength of our diversified book of business and our disciplined approach to selecting pricing and managing risk.

Net written premiums in the fourth quarter were comparable to the prior year, reflecting strong renewal premium change in homeowners and other and higher auto new business premiums. Full year net written premium increased 2% to a record $17.4 billion.

In auto, the fourth quarter combined ratio was 89.4%, reflecting a strong underlying combined ratio and favorable net prior year development. The underlying combined ratio of 92.2% improved just over 4 points compared to the prior year quarter, driven by continued frequency -- continued favorable frequency across coverages with sustained moderation in severity, partially offset by the impact of continued moderation in earned pricing. This quarter's underlying combined ratio included a 3-point benefit related to the re-estimation of prior quarters in the current year.

The full year auto combined ratio of 85.7% represents improvement of over 9 points compared to the prior year as we experienced favorability in both frequency and severity.

In Homeowners and Other, the fourth quarter combined ratio of 60.3% improved by 7.5 points compared to the prior year quarter, primarily as a result of improvement in the underlying combined ratio and lower catastrophe losses. The underlying combined ratio of 59.9% improved by 5.5 points compared to the prior year quarter, reflecting the impact of our actions to achieve target returns. The year-over-year favorability was primarily related to the benefit of property earned pricing as well as favorability in non-catastrophe weather and non-weather losses.

Stepping back, the 2025 full year property combined ratio of 93% was a notable improvement compared to the prior year. This reflects our actions to manage exposures in high catastrophe risk geographies, along with favorable non-catastrophe weather losses.

Turning to production. Our results reflect continued disciplined execution to position our diversified portfolio to deliver long-term profitable growth. In domestic auto, retention of 82% increased slightly from recent quarters. Renewal premium change of 2.2% continued to moderate as expected and will continue to do so in 2026, reflecting our sustained profitability and our focus on generating growth. Auto new business premium was up year-over-year as new business momentum continued in states less impacted by our property actions.

In domestic Homeowners and Other, retention of 84% remained relatively consistent with recent quarters. Renewal premium change remained strong at 16.7% as we concluded our efforts to align replacement costs with insured values.

We continue to expect RPC to drop into the single digits beginning in early 2026, reflecting improved profitability and values that have now largely aligned with replacement costs.

Quarterly new business premium and policies in force declined compared to the prior year. These production results reflect the deliberate choices we've made to improve profitability and manage volatility in property.

Over the past few years, we've executed a granular strategy to reposition our portfolio to optimize our risk return profile. The results have been meaningful. We reduced property policies in force by 10%, with most of that decrease coming from high cat geographies, reflecting disciplined risk selection and concentrated actions to manage volatility and reduce local market aggregations of exposure. While these actions impacted auto policies in force, the impact was muted as we grew auto in many of the markets less affected by our property actions, demonstrating our ability to sustain a competitive position where portfolio economics remain favorable. Overall, the net impact of our actions is shifting the portfolio back toward a better balance between auto and property.

Looking ahead to 2026, as we wind down many of our actions in property, we're focused on maintaining this progress by deploying property capacity in support of writing package business.

The strength of our 2025 results reflects years of disciplined execution and strategic investment. Since year-end 2020, net written premiums grew $6 billion to $17.4 billion, while we generated an average combined ratio of 98%. Over that same period, our domestic auto book grew both in terms of PIF and premium. And in our homeowners portfolio, our actions to address profitability, geographic distribution and terms and conditions have meaningfully improved risk-adjusted returns.

In addition, we continue to invest in and deploy strategic capabilities. As just one example, we're leveraging artificial intelligence to make our renewal underwriting process more effective and efficient. We start with a proprietary AI-enabled predictive model that scores every account in the property portfolio. Based on this score, accounts with the highest probable risk of loss are presented to underwriters for review. From there, our renewal underwriting platform leverages generative AI to consolidate data into summaries of relevant actionable information for our underwriters to evaluate, with early results showing more than a 30% reduction in average handle time. The net result is that our underwriters focus their efforts on decisions most likely to improve profitability and do so more efficiently.

To sum up, thanks to the continued diligent efforts of our team and with support from our distribution partners, Personal Insurance continues to deliver on a long track record of profitably growing our business over time.

Now I'll turn the call back over to Abbe.

Thanks, Michael, and we are ready to open up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

And as you said in your comments, you did have a great year, so congratulations. I wanted to -- thank you for the commentary around the technology. I've been asking you about this off and on like others have for a couple of years now. In Dan's guidance for the expense ratio, I think he said it's going to be flat in '26, 28.5% versus what it was in '25 versus the same in '24. So I guess what I'm trying to reconcile is the emphasis on growing the strategic investments, you're harvesting efficiencies with these technology investments. Just wondering when the structural shift in the expense ratio might materialize.

And maybe I was looking at the responsible artificial intelligence framework section of your website. Maybe you could talk about some of the regulatory and other considerations that might delay some of the expected benefits from your technology spend.

Greg, thanks for the question. I appreciate it. In terms of the expense, I mean, we give you sort of a year outlook of where we'd like it to be, and that's not something that happens to us. That's something we manage. And we talk a lot about trying to optimize operating leverage. So in other words, we want the gains from the efficiencies that we're generating. And that just gives us a lot of flexibility in the way we run the business. We can let it fall to the bottom line if we want through lower expense ratio. We can continue to invest it in other capabilities. Just gives us the flexibility to manage the business.

And as I shared in my remarks, the extent that some of these productivity and efficiency benefits are in the claim organization, those come through loss adjustment expense in the loss ratio. Again, we've got the flexibility there to think about that as an operating leverage component. But just in terms of where those benefits are or where they might arise in the future.

In terms of the regulatory environment, we -- it's -- from our perspective, it's constructive. We try to make sure that we're using the technology in ways that are thoughtful and careful. And frankly, we, as a company and we, through our trade association are on a regular basis, working with policymakers to make sure that we're achieving smart public policy and regulations as it comes to the development and implementation of technology.

I guess related on the regulatory front, there are increased example -- more examples of regulators becoming more focused on the profitability of the insurance business and particularly the personal lines business. And I'm just curious if you have a view on any regulatory pushback you might be getting on the profit levels in your business? And if you think there's anything bigger issues at play that's going to spread throughout the country as it relates to that?

Yes. Greg, we certainly understand the affordability issue and I think it's an important one for all of us to be focused on, and we are focused on it. And let me just put the profitability of our Personal Insurance business into some perspective. We had a good year in '25. We had a good year in 2024. But the 2 years prior to that, our combined ratio was over 100%. And if you look at the last 5 years, it was 98%, I think. So that would be below our target returns.

And so this really is a business that you need to look at and manage over a period of time. And I think when you think about Personal Insurance results over a period of time, I mean, certainly, in our case, you wouldn't say that we're over-earning. So we are trying to get the right price on the risk and earn a fair return for helping customers manage their risk.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Tunis with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Alan, in your prepared remarks, I think you mentioned that in Business Insurance, renewal premium change ex property was a little over 8%. I think that number was 9% last quarter. Just curious how much of that 1 point deceleration is attributable to rate versus exposure?

Yes. So we're looking for the exact breakout, Ryan. It's a little bit of both.

Yes. I mean, Ryan, if you look at the middle market webcast, you can see exposure was down. You can do the math between rate and RPC, it's not perfect math. So to Alan's point, a little bit of an exposure and a little bit of rate.

Got it. And then I guess just on the property side, clearly it was a bit of a challenging year in the large account space just from a trading standpoint. Just curious how you guys are thinking about overall rate adequacy in National Property headed into 2026.

Yes. Ryan, it's a challenging year. I mean the pricing dynamic is what the pricing dynamic is. But to a very large degree, that's reflective of the profitability of that business. I mean that business has been achieving rate gains over a very long period of time and have gotten to a point where the profitability was strong. So we don't really look at a macro level and look at it and say it was challenging and appropriate. It's not -- you can certainly find examples of accounts and we'll scratch our head and say, "Gee, we're surprised that got priced that way" or -- and honestly, more than price, we're surprised sometimes with the terms and conditions that we see given away in the marketplace that we're not willing to do. But sort of writ large, we look at it and we say it's not so crazy when you think about where the returns are.

Your next question comes from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore.

Dan, just had a follow-up just on the capital return. So hear you loud and clear on the $1.8 billion that's expected in the first quarter. But just given what sounds like a change in terms of the -- just how you guys are managing the debt load and what looks like $1 billion of excess at the holding company now before the Canada proceeds and pretty healthy statutory capital levels. Any sort of thought in terms of how we can think about the buybacks throughout the rest of this year, outside of 1Q into '27, just given the current growth environment?

David, so I'd say not really. I mean we can't really sit here at the very beginning of the year and give much guidance on what we think buybacks are going to look like in the second, third and fourth quarters of this year. There's no change in our capital management strategy, and we made these comments last quarter when we alerted you to the fact that we did expect higher levels of buybacks in at least Q4 and Q1 because we had, as you recognize, reached a point where we're probably carrying a little more capital on the balance sheet than we needed to. But no change in the overall capital management strategy and the rest of the year is going to be impacted by all the usual things that would impact buybacks. What do cat losses look like? What does overall profitability look like? How do we feel about the growth environment? And we're going to responsibly manage the capital, right? We're not looking to hoard capital. We're looking to hold the right amount. And when we have excess, it's not ours, and we're going to give it back to the shareholders.

The only thing I would add to that, David, is our first objective for every dollar of capital that we generate is to invest it back into the business.

Got it. That makes sense. And then just as my follow-up, just looking at Slide 23 and the 7.8% expectation for catastrophe losses in 2026. If I just sort of do rough math on the 2025 premium levels, that implies a little bit above, I think, $3.4 billion, $3.5 billion, which is above where you guys have the retention at your XoL -- your aggregate XoL. So could you help me understand a little better the moving pieces there? And then just relatedly, just the cost of that, how much of a drag that might be on BI premium growth in 2026?

Sure, David. Thanks for the question. So I guess I'll start with the second part of it and say we don't expect it to be much of a drag. In my prepared remarks, we talked about improvements in pricing in the reinsurance environment and a couple of other things we're doing around the edges that we don't think the year-over-year impact of ceded premium is going to be that big a deal in '26. Really importantly, though, what you were getting to in terms of cat load on a percentage point basis and what that might translate into dollars, the thing you got to remember when you think about the attachment point of the treaty is the first $100 million of every event is ours. So you can't just say if we thought we were going to have $3.X billion of cat losses next quarter, anything over $3 billion goes to the treaty. First $100 million of every event is ours.

We said with this treaty historically, this is really we're buying tail protection for the balance sheet. That's still true. Clearly, with a $3 billion retention compared to a $4 billion retention, we're a lot closer in on the tail of possibly being able to hit that book. But if we looked at -- if you look, for example, at if we had that treaty in 2025, we would not have attached that treaty.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO.

My question is around all the great color you gave on technology initiatives. Would you be able to share what you may be roughly expect your organic headcount growth or shrinkage to be on a percentage basis this year versus maybe last year or so?

Mike, we gave you an example of narrow view of that in our claim organization in our call centers. We're not going to get into projecting headcount beyond that. But what I would say is premium per employee is up, thanks to some productivity and efficiency initiatives, and we expect premium per employee to continue to go up.

Okay. Got it. That's helpful. Switching gears for my follow-up to commercial lines. I think we can tease it out based on the comments in the prepared remarks. So maybe you could just tell us in casualty, commercial, maybe nonworkers' comp, what was the change in pricing kind of sequentially? Or what's the trend line looking there?

Yes, Mike, that would predominantly be the GL line and the umbrella. And in my prepared comments, I shared with you, umbrella had double digit in terms of renewal premium change. What I didn't include was GL. GL think has been running in the mid-single digits in terms of renewal premium change. Those would be the 2 components outside of the comp.

Your next question comes from the line of Katie Sakys with Autonomous Research.

Alan, you mentioned in your prepared remarks that the strength seen in underlying underwriting this quarter is a durable dynamic. I guess, with pricing momentum seeming to continue to slow down here, can you map out for us what's driving your confidence that those underlying results hold in 2026?

Katie, so Dan shared and I shared the trajectory of underlying underwriting income in our prepared remarks, and you can see it in the slides and the webcast. We are a larger and more profitable company today than we have been historically. And thanks to investments that we've made in products, services, experience, capabilities and so on, we are very confident in our ability to continue writing premium at substantial levels. And we're very happy with the business that we're putting on the books.

So when you combine those premium levels with reasonably strong profitability, you get high levels of underlying underwriting income. And if you look at the trajectory, you get a sense of what it's done over the last several years and we're confident it will continue to be a strong foundation for strong results in the years to come.

And then as a follow-up, I think last year in the fourth quarter, the Business Insurance underlying loss results included some additional IBNR for casualty lines. I guess with the net favorable reserve development results this year, that probably seems to be holding in fairly well. But could you give us any additional color there? And let us know if there was any similar additions to IBNR this quarter?

Katie, it's Dan. So we did say, as you recall from last year, that we were including in the accident year loss pick for 2024, what we call sort of a load for uncertainty related to the casualty lines. I'm pretty sure we said we were doing that again in 2025, and we did do that again in 2025. And just to get the question out of the way, as we head into 2026, our planned loss ratio for 2026 once again includes an uncertainty provision in the casualty space.

I would say the casualty loss has generally performed about as we expected, not really better than we had expected. The Business Insurance workers' comp favorability has really been driven by workers' comp. But long tail line still in the casualty space, a little bit of uncertainty. So we're going to stay prudent and stick with that load again in '26.

Your next question comes from the line of Meyer Shields with KBW.

I think it was probably for Dan. I know you talked about not having much of an overall margin impact from lowering the catastrophe reinsurance attachment point. Should there be any impact on a seasonal basis? In other words, is there any pressure on first quarter combined ratio components?

Yes. I don't think so, Meyer, again, because when we look at our reinsurance program in the aggregate in terms of what we're going to pay out for ceded premium, given the pricing dynamic in the reinsurance space and again, some other changes we made around the margins on the reinsurance program, we don't think it's going to have much of an impact.

Okay. Perfect. And just a question for Michael. When you look forward to 2026 and beyond, are you comfortable growing the more cat prone state policy counts in line with the overall book? Or are we still constraining growth?

Yes. Thanks, Meyer. I think my point in my prepared remarks about deploying property capacity to support package growth, but maintaining the progress that we've made implies that certainly at most, we would grow cat prone states in line with the rest of the portfolio, but we do still have some spots where we'll be constrained. So I'd expect in aggregate, the property PIF growth will continue to trail auto as it has been, but both -- the growth trajectories of both lines should improve.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Scott with Barclays.

First one is on just capital deployment, maybe a little bit of a follow-up of the question earlier. How are you viewing the prospects for M&A relative to organic growth at this point? I mean the profitability seems really attractive, but the growth is obviously a bit lower. So I'm just trying to gauge if the organic growth isn't quite as attractive to you. Could M&A be a way that you go?

Alex, I'm going to give you the same answer I've given probably for 10 years. So I'm sorry for -- probably not going to be the satisfying answer you're looking for. But the answer to that question for us is we're always looking for M&A opportunities. And we've got the capital, and we've got the expertise to diligence the deals and find the deals and execute the deals. And we are always looking for attractive inorganic opportunities. And -- but I would have answered that question the same way at any point in the last decade.

Okay. Understood. I guess second one for you on tariffs. And just all of a sudden, it seems like maybe a wider range of outcomes again. How does that affect the way that you go about pricing maybe across all your businesses, but I'd be particularly interested in personal auto.

A couple of quarters ago, when we first started talking about tariffs, we shared our view that we thought that the impact was going to be relatively mild for us. And if you go back and look at the transcripts, and we shared a fair amount of commentary about how we got there. And at the time, for lines that are potentially impacted, we did provide a little bit in the loss pick for that. What we've seen so far hasn't even been the relatively modest amount that we expected. Now as the world changes and as the tariffs are out there longer, certainly, that dynamic could change, but we feel like the provisions that we've made in the loss picks for potentially impacted lines are there to cover it.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Meredith with UBS.

First one for Michael. I'm just curious, Michael, the personal auto insurance space is getting increasingly more competitive, some new entrants in the agency space. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those competitive dynamics. And what is going to enable travelers to actually maybe recoup some of the market share you've lost over the last couple of years in personal auto, given the competitive dynamics in that market?

Yes. Thanks, Brian. I would start with the marketplace is always competitive. And certainly, I think a lot of the news that you see is around competition in the IA space. The first thing I'd say about that is I think it's a great validation of our strategy to be largely an independent agent carrier for personal lines and the value of choice and advice in this type of a marketplace.

The second thing I would say is we've competed successfully in the independent agent channel for years. We remain confident in our ability to compete successfully in that channel. And I think it really comes down to a handful of competitive advantages in the space. Certainly, the strength and the durability of our relationships with independent agents, our investments in digitization and ease of doing business.

And then lastly, and again, I've been talking about this for the last several quarters, the value of our package value proposition for both agents and customers and our ability to deliver balance sheet protection for consumers is another key advantage that we have in that space. And again, we're confident in our ability to compete going forward.

Yes, Brian, it's Dan. I'll just add one more comment in there on the auto space in particular. So last couple of years, we've seen policy count down. But if you looked at the business now compared to what it was, say, 5 years ago, we're up one of only a very small number of carriers that's actually got a higher PIF count now than we did 5 years ago. And our view always again on growth is how you think about growth over time, right? We're not really looking to influence a growth number in the next quarter or even necessarily the next year. What's the right balance of returns, and are you sure that you're growing over time.

Great. That's helpful. And then, Alan, I'm just curious, I always welcome your thoughts on the tort environment and casualty trend. And what you see here going forward? Anything positive that's developing here that maybe curves that kind of loss trend on tort inflation?

Yes, Brian, I mean, it continues to be a very challenging environment, and I wish I could say that we saw improvement. It continues to be a pretty challenging environment. What may be a little bit of a bright light is we do see more states reacting to a difficult tort environment. And certainly, the impact of tort costs is impacting affordability for businesses and consumers. And I think we're seeing that in some states. And so that's a potential positive. The other thing we are seeing more of is disclosure requirements when it comes to third-party litigation financing, and that's also a very good thing. So we are continuing to put our shoulder into it and there's more work to do.

That's all the time that we have for questions. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Abbe Goldstein for closing comments.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. I know we left several analysts in the queue. But as always, please feel free to follow up with Investor Relations. Thanks, everyone, and have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the third quarter results teleconference for Travelers. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on October 16, 2025. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Abbe Goldstein, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Goldstein, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to Travelers' discussion of our third quarter 2025 results. We released our press release, financial supplement and webcast presentation earlier this morning. All of these materials can be found on our website at travelers.com under the Investors section.

Speaking today will be Alan Schnitzer, Chairman and CEO; Dan Frey, CFO; and our 3 segment presidents: Greg Toczydlowski of Business Insurance Jeff Klenk Bound & Specialty Insurance; and Michael Klein of Personal Insurance. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. They will refer to the webcast presentation as they go through prepared remarks, and then we will take questions.

Before I turn the call over to Alan, I'd like to draw your attention to the explanatory note included at the end of the webcast presentation. Our presentation today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties and is not a guarantee of future performance.

Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. These factors described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements.

Also in our remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations are included in our recent earnings press release, financial supplement and other materials available in the Investors section on our website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Alan Schnitzer.

Thank you, Abbe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to report excellent third quarter results. We have core income of $1.9 billion or $8.14 per diluted share. Core return on equity for the quarter was 22.6%, bringing our core return on equity for the trailing 12 months to 18.7%. Very strong underwriting results and higher investment income drove the bottom line.

Underwriting income of $1.4 billion pretax more than doubled compared to the prior year quarter, benefiting from both the lower level of catastrophe losses and higher underlying underwriting income. The underlying result was driven by higher net earned premiums and an underlying combined ratio that improved 1.7 points to an exceptional 83.9%. Underwriting income was higher in all 3 segments.

Our high-quality investment portfolio also continued to perform well, generating after-tax net investment income of $850 million for the quarter, up 15% driven by strong and reliable returns from our growing fixed income portfolio. Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return almost $900 million of capital to shareholders during the quarter, including $628 million of share repurchases.

At the same time, we continue to make strategic investments in our business. Even after this deployment of capital, adjusted book value per share was up 15% compared to a year ago. With strong results over the past year in a particularly light cat quarter, we have a higher-than-usual level of excess capital and liquidity.

Consequently, we anticipate a higher level of share repurchases over the next couple of quarters. Dan will have more to say about that in a minute. Turning to the top line, we grew net written premiums to $11.5 billion in the quarter. In Business Insurance, we grew net written premiums by 3% to $5.7 billion, led by 4% growth in our domestic business. Excluding the property line, we grew domestic net written premiums in the segment by more than 6%.

The declining premium volume in property continues to be a large account dynamic. In fact, we grew property in both middle market and small commercial. We've seen this dynamic in the large property market before, and we won't compromise our underwriting discipline. Over time, particularly as catastrophic events inevitably unfold, the value of that discipline and the cost of those who abandon it will become unmistakable.

Renewal premium and change in business insurance was 7.1%, driven by continued historically high RPC in our middle market and select businesses. Excluding the property line, renewal premium change in the segment was a very strong 9%, and renewal rate change was a very strong 6.7% Greg will share additional detail by line.

Retention in this segment was 85%. Given the high quality of the book, we were very pleased with that result. In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we grew net written premiums to $1.1 billion with higher renewal premium change and continued strong retention of 87% in our high-quality management liability business. Net written premiums in our market-leading surety business remains strong.

In Personal Insurance, net written premiums were $4.7 billion, with strong renewal premium change in our homeowners business. You'll hear more shortly from Greg, Jeff and Michael about our segment results. As we head toward the end of the year, our planning for 2026 is well underway. As always, that process involves assessing the environment ahead.

There are uncertainties out there. Economic, political, geopolitical not to mention the loss environment. We are very confident that we're built and very well positioned for whatever lies ahead. We're operating from a position of considerable strength. Profitability is strong, reflecting our leading underwriting expertise and the operating leverage we've built through a sustained focus on productivity and efficiency.

Our competitive advantages have never been stronger or more relevant. Strong underwriting is the flywheel that sets everything in motion. Our premium growth at attractive margins has generated strong cash flow, which enables us to make strategic investments in our business, return excess capital to shareholders and grow our investment portfolio. Since 2016, we have successfully invested $13 billion in technology returned more than $20 billion of excess capital to our shareholders and grow our investment portfolio by nearly 50% to more than $100 million.

Scale matters increasingly so. We have the scale to win in an environment where technology and AI will continue to segment the marketplace. We have a track record of identifying the right strategic priorities and driving value from them. You can see that in the 300 basis point reduction we've achieved in our expense ratio since 2016, even while we were significantly increasing our overall technology spend.

Importantly, our size gives us the data to power AI, creating a virtuous cycle, better insights, better decisions, better outcomes, more resources to invest. For example, our long-time focus on organizing and curating data has given us access to more than 65 billion clean data points from decades of history across multiple business lines. We leverage that to sharpen our underwriting and shape our claims strategies.

With the vast majority of our business in North America, we hold a leading position in the largest and most stable insurance market in the world. An advantage that insulates us from much of the risk arising from the economic instability and geopolitical uncertainty around the globe. Our fortress balance sheet and exceptional cash flow provide us with the financial strength to invest consistently in the business regardless of the external conditions.

Our financial strength also enables us to manage comfortably through large loss events like the January California wildfires. When it comes to the loss environment from weather volatility to the impact of social inflation on casualty lines, no one is better positioned. Diversification provides powerful protection. In fact, our business mix produces a consolidated loss ratio that's actually less volatile than the loss ratio of our leased volatile segment.

That's the power of a balanced and diversified portfolio. Equally important is our demonstrated ability to confront the loss environment head on. We have the data, the analytics and the discipline to establish reserves and loss picks appropriately and generally ahead of the market. That matters because until you have an accurate view of the loss environment, your risk selection, underwriting and claim strategies are all operating with the wrong inputs.

Since our early identification of the acceleration of social inflation in 2019, we've grown the business and delivered significantly improved margins. Getting an accurate and timely view of the loss environment isn't just about the balance sheet. It's foundational to running the business effectively. Our internally managed investment portfolio is another source of strength.

Our disciplined focus on achieving appropriate risk-adjusted returns has served us exceptionally well through various markets, especially during periods of market turmoil. More than 90% of our portfolio is in fixed income with an average credit rating of AA. We're highly selective. We don't reach for yield. We hold the vast majority of our fixed income securities to maturity, and we carefully coordinate the duration of our assets and liabilities.

The track record speaks for itself. Our default rates during the most challenging environments over the past 2 decades were a fraction of industry averages. This consistency comes from a world-class investment team with extraordinary tenure and a shared long-term perspective. In short, the franchise we've built, the capabilities we've developed and our depth of expertise created advantages that are durable across operating environments.

Before I wrap up, I'll share that we're just back from one of the industry's premier conferences, but we have the opportunity to meet with dozens of our key agents and brokers who collectively represent a substantial amount of our business. We left as convinced as ever that our position with the independent distribution channel is an unmatched strategic advantage.

We heard clearly that our strategic investments are resonating and that looking ahead, we're focused on the right priorities to extend that advantage. I want to acknowledge and thank all of our distribution partners. I also want to reiterate our unwavering commitment to being an indispensable partner for them, and the undeniable choice for their customers.

To sum it up, we're very well positioned and very confident about the road ahead. And with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Dan.

Thank you, Alan. In the third quarter, we once again delivered excellent financial results on a consolidated basis and in each of our 3 segments. Core income for the quarter of $1.9 billion resulted in core return on equity of 22.6%, reflecting both excellent underwriting results and strong investment income.

We generated higher levels of written premium and earned premium, while delivering excellent combined ratios on both a reported and underlying basis. At 83.9% the underlying combined ratio marked its fourth consecutive quarter below 85. The combination of higher premiums and the excellent underlying combined ratio led to an 18% increase in after-tax underlying underwriting income, which surpassed $1 billion for the fifth consecutive quarter.

The expense ratio for the third quarter was 28.6% bringing the year-to-date expense ratio to 28.5%. We continue to expect an expense ratio of around 28.5% for the full year 2025 and expect to manage to that level again in 2026.

Catastrophe losses in the quarter were fairly benign at $402 million pretax consisting mainly of tornado hail events in the Central United States. Turning to prior year reserve development. We had total net favorable development of $22 million pretax. In Business Insurance, the annual asbestos review resulted in a charge of $277 million.

Excluding asbestos, Business Insurance had net favorable PYD of $152 million driven by continued favorability in workers' comp. In Bond & Specialty, net favorable PYD was $43 million pretax with favorability in Fidelity and Surety Personal Insurance had net favorable PYD of $104 million pretax driven by favorability in auto.

After-tax net investment income of $850 million increased by 15% from the prior year quarter. Fixed maturity NII was again the driver of the increase reflecting both the benefit of higher invested assets and higher average yields. Returns in the non-fixed income portfolio were also up from the prior year quarter. During the quarter, we grew our investment portfolio by approximately $4 billion.

Our outlook for fixed income NII, including earnings from short-term securities has increased from the outlook we provided a quarter ago, and we now expect approximately $810 million after tax in the fourth quarter. For 2026, we expect more than $3.3 billion with quarterly figures starting at around $810 million in Q1 and growing to around $885 million in Q4.

New money rates as of September 30 are roughly 70 to 75 basis points above the yield embedded in the portfolio. Turning to capital management. Operating cash flows for the quarter were a new record at $4.2 billion, and we ended the quarter with holding company liquidity of approximately $2.8 billion.

Interest rates decreased during the quarter, and as a result, our net unrealized investment loss decreased from $3 billion after tax at June 30 to $2 billion after tax at September 30. Adjusted book value per share, which excludes net unrealized investment gains and losses, was $150.55 at quarter end, up 8% from year-end and up 15% from a year ago. Also of note for Q3, we issued $1.25 billion of debt back in July with $500 million of 10-year notes and $750 million of 30-year notes.

This was simply ordinary course capital management, maintaining a debt-to-capital ratio in our target range as we continue to grow the business. Sticking with the theme of capital management, we returned $878 million of our capital to shareholders this quarter, comprising share repurchases of $628 million and dividends of $250 million.

As Alan shared, our very strong earnings over the past year have provided us with an elevated level of capital and liquidity well in excess of what we had planned to use for investment and to support continued growth. As a result, we expect to increase the level of share repurchases in the fourth quarter to roughly $1.3 billion.

Also keep in mind that we previously shared our plan to deploy about $700 million from the sale of our Canadian operations expected to close in early 2026 for additional share repurchases as well. So if we look across the 3 quarter period from Q3 2025 through Q1 2026, our repurchases in Q3, combined with our current outlook for the next 2 quarters, has us repurchasing a total of somewhere around $3.5 billion worth of our stock.

Using the average share price over the past 30 days for purchases during the next 2 quarters, that would result in a reduction of our outstanding share count of about 5% in the 9-month period. Of course, the actual amount and timing of repurchases will depend on a number of factors, including the timing of the closing of the transaction in Canada, actual quarterly earnings and other factors we disclosed in our SEC filings.

Recapping our results. Q3 was another quarter of excellent underwriting profitability on both an underlying and as-reported basis and another quarter of rising net investment income. These strong fundamentals delivered core return on equity of 22.6% for the quarter and 18.7% on a trailing 12-month basis and position us very well to continue delivering strong results in the future.

And now for a discussion of results in Business Insurance, I'll turn the call over to Greg.

Thanks, Dan. Business Insurance had a very strong quarter, delivering a record third quarter segment income of $907 million and an all-in combined ratio of 92.9%. The quarter reflected relatively benign catastrophes and the continued strong contribution from our exceptional underlying underwriting results. This quarter's underlying combined ratio of 88.3% and marked the 12th consecutive quarter where we've produced an underlying combined ratio below 90%.

We're pleased that our ongoing strategic investments have contributed to this sustained level of profitability. In particular, through meaningful advancements in data and analytics, we continue to advance our underwriting tools. One specific highlight is the development and utilization of sophisticated models that derive risk characteristics, refined technical pricing and summarize historical and modeled loss experience, all of which is provided to our underwriters at the point of sale.

Moving to the top line. Our net written premiums increased to an all-time third quarter high of $5.7 billion. We grew our leading middle market and select businesses by 7% and 4%, respectively. These 2 markets make up 70% of the net written premiums in business insurance. We saw a decline in net written premiums in National Property and other, which, as you heard from Alan, reflects our disciplined execution in terms of risk selection, pricing and terms and conditions.

As for production across the segment, pricing remained attractive with renewal premium change just over 7%. We Renewal premium change remained strong in select and middle market. From a line of business perspective, renewal premium change was positive in all lines, double digits in umbrella, CMP and auto and up from the second quarter or stable in all lines other than property.

As you heard from Alan, excluding the property line, renewal premium change in the segment was 9%. The Retention remained excellent at 85%, and new business of $673 million was about flat to a very strong prior year level. We're very pleased with these production results and particularly our field execution of our proven segmentation strategy. Across the book, Pricing and retention results this quarter reflect excellent execution, aligning price, terms and conditions with environmental trends for each line.

As for the individual businesses, in Select, renewal premium change of 10.8% was about flat with the second quarter. Retention ticked up as expected as we near completion of our targeted CMP risk-return optimization efforts. And lastly, for Select, we generated new business of $134 million, up 3% over the prior year.

As we've mentioned previously, we've made meaningful strategic investments in this market in both product and user experience. Our new BOP and auto products have been well received in the market. And we're pleased that the industry-leading segmentation contained in both products is contributing to profitable growth. We're also very pleased with the success of Travis our digital experience platform for our distribution partners.

As we continue our strategic rollout, Travis is already producing over 1 million transactions annually. In our core middle market business, renewal premium change of 8.3% was also about flat sequentially from the second quarter. Price increases remain broad-based as we achieved higher prices on more than 3/4 of our middle market accounts. And at the same time, the granular execution was excellent with meaningful spread from our best performing accounts to our lower-performing accounts.

We're pleased that retention of 88% remained exceptional given the level of price increases we achieved. And finally, new business of $391 million was our highest ever third quarter result and up 7% over the prior year. We're pleased with the new business risk selecting and strength of pricing and overall with the combination of strong returns and customer growth in middle market.

On a strategic note for Middle Market, we continue to enhance our industry-leading underwriting workstation. With models that assess new business opportunities for risk characteristics with the propensity to produce the highest level of lifetime profitability. This information helps our field organization focus on the highest priority opportunities, resulting in a greater likelihood of success in winning more accounts that contribute to strong margins.

To sum up, Business Insurance had another terrific quarter. We're pleased with our execution in driving strong financial and production results while continuing to invest in the business for long-term profitable growth.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thanks, Greg. Bond & Specialty delivered very strong third quarter results. We generated segment income of $250 million an outstanding combined ratio of 81.6%, nearly 1 point better than the prior year quarter. The strong underlying combined ratio of 85.8% drove very attractive returns in the segment. Turning to the top line. We grew net written premiums in the quarter to $1.1 billion.

In our high-quality domestic management liability business, renewal premium change improved to 3.7% and while retention remained strong at 87%. These results reflect our intentional and segmented initiatives to improve pricing in certain lines with a focus on employment practices liability, cyber, and public company D&O.

We're pleased with the strong underlying pricing segmentation achieved by our outstanding field organization on both renewal and new business. enabled by our advanced analytics and sophisticated pricing models. New business was lower than the third quarter of 2024 as we expected as [ Corvus ] production was reflected as new business in the prior year quarter, and is now mostly reflected as renewal premiums.

Comparisons to prior year new business levels will be similarly impacted for the remainder of the year. Outside of the Corvus impact, we're pleased with early returns on multiple tech and operational investments we've made to drive account growth. For example, in our private and nonprofit business, we're leveraging predictive analytics and AI to enhance our customer segmentation and sales effectiveness.

We're pleased that these initiatives drove a 40% increase in new lines of business sold to existing customers as compared to the prior year quarter. Turning to our market-leading surety business. where production can be lumpy based on the timing of bonded construction projects. Net written premiums remained strong relative to the record high quarter in the prior year.

This reflects our customers' continued confidence in our industry-leading surety expertise and value-added service offerings as well as benefits from digital investments we've made to enhance distribution experiences in our small commercial surety business. So we're pleased to have once again delivered strong results this quarter, driven by our continued underwriting and risk management diligence, excellent execution by our field organization and the benefits of our market-leading competitive advantages.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. In Personal Insurance, we delivered third quarter segment income of $807 million an excellent result that reflects the continued impact of our disciplined approach to selecting, pricing and managing risk. The combined ratio of 81.3% improved 11 points relative to the prior year quarter. Driven primarily by lower catastrophe losses and a lower underlying combined ratio.

The underlying combined ratio of 77.7% was 5 points better compared to the prior year quarter driven by continued improvement in both homeowners and other and auto. Net written premiums of $4.7 billion in the third quarter reflect our continued focus on improving profitability in homeowners while seeking growth in auto as we execute our strategy to deliver appropriate risk-adjusted returns across the portfolio.

The ceded premium impact of the enhanced personal insurance excess of loss reinsurance program we announced last quarter, reduced net written premium growth in the quarter by 1 point as the full year's worth of ceded premium was booked in the third quarter. In auto, the third quarter combined ratio was very strong at 84.9%. And reflecting lower catastrophe losses, a strong underlying combined ratio and favorable net prior year development.

The underlying combined ratio of 88.3% improved by 2.9 points compared to the prior year quarter. The improvement was driven by favorable loss experience in bodily injury and to a lesser extent, vehicle coverages. Similar to last year's third quarter results, this quarter's underlying combined ratio included a 2-point benefit related to the reestimation of prior quarters in the current year.

The year-to-date underlying combined ratio was also 88.3% and reflecting sustained profitability in an auto book that is larger than it was 5 years ago, both in terms of premium dollars and policy count. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter of 2025. It's important to remember that the fourth quarter auto underlying loss ratio has historically been 6 to 7 points above the average for the first 3 quarters because of winter weather and holiday driving.

In Homeowners and Other, the third quarter combined ratio of 78% improved by 13.5 points compared to the prior year quarter, primarily because of lower catastrophe losses and improvement in the underlying combined ratio. Net prior year development was favorable, but lower compared to the prior year. The underlying combined ratio of 68% improved by almost 6.5 points compared to the prior year quarter.

The year-over-year favorability in homeowners was primarily related to the benefit of earned pricing as well as favorable non-catastrophe weather. Overall, these outstanding results reflect favorable weather conditions throughout the third quarter along with our actions to manage exposures in high catastrophe risk geographies to help optimize risk and reward.

Turning to production. We're making progress in positioning our diversified portfolio to deliver long-term profitable growth. While our production results don't quite show it yet, we're confident that the actions we're taking will build momentum towards this objective. In domestic auto, retention of 82% remained consistent with recent quarters.

Renewal premium change of 3.9% continued to moderate and will continue to decline in the fourth quarter, reflective of improved profitability and our focus on generating growth. Auto new business premium was up year-over-year for the fourth consecutive quarter as new business momentum continued in states less impacted by our property actions.

In Homeowners and Other, retention of 84% remained relatively consistent with recent quarters. Renewal premium change remained strong at 18% as we continue to align replacement costs with insured values. We expect RPC to remain elevated in the fourth quarter and then drop into single digits beginning in early 2026 as values will have largely aligned with replacement costs.

We continued to execute actions to reduce exposure and manage volatility in high-risk catastrophe geographies in the quarter, causing further declines in property new business premium policies in force. Most of our property actions will be completed by the end of the year, at which point the downward pressure on both property and auto growth should begin to moderate.

As we conclude this year and ahead into 2026, we're focused on building momentum toward generating profitable growth. To that end, we have a range of actions currently or soon to be in market, including the following: adjusting pricing appetite, terms and conditions to better reflect improved profitability in both auto and home, removing temporary binding restrictions and winding down some of our property non-renewal actions in certain geographies.

And appointing new agents and partnering with existing agents to consolidate books of business, continuing to modernize our specialty products and platforms and investing in artificial intelligence and digitization to deliver better experiences for our agents and customers. These messages resonate as we share them in the marketplace, reinforcing our commitment to being the undeniable choice for consumers and an indispensable partner for our agents.

To sum up, we delivered terrific segment income as our team continued to invest in capabilities and deliver value to customers and agents. These results position us well to build on a long track record of profitably growing our business over time. Now I'll turn the call back over to Abbe.

Thanks, Michael. And with that, we're ready to open up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question today comes from the line of Gregory Peters from Raymond James.

Well, you're producing great kind of surprising the stock is down as much as it is on the open I think probably a reflection of the top line. And I know you spoke in detail about the different headwinds that you're facing whether it's in business insurance, the property, Corvus and Biomet specialty or the underwriting actions in personal insurance that have affected your top line when you go beyond the balance of this year and you start thinking at 26%, 27%, what does the Travelers business model look like in terms of top line growth on a consolidated basis? And how are you thinking about that?

It's Alan. Thanks for [indiscernible] So we're not going to get out like on the top line, as you can imagine. But clearly, we understand that in order to meet our objective of delivering industry-leading return on equity over time, we need to grow over time. So it's a priority for us.

And if you look back over the last couple of years, we've been very successful with that. In our -- as you noted by segment, we've talked about what's driving the results this quarter. But I guess what I would say is -- we are very confident that we've got the right value proposition. We're investing in the right capabilities to make sure we're positioned to grow this business.

So we feel very good about the execution in the quarter. We feel very good about what we've accomplished in recent periods, and we feel very good about the outlook.

Okay. The other -- I seem to ask this like every other quarter on the technology front, but you keep bringing it up -- you talked about the digital initiatives you have going on in business insurance. Talk about some of the stuff going on in Personal Insurance. I think one of your peers came out earlier in the third quarter and talked about the potential of artificial intelligence to deliver human resource savings and headcount reductions over time.

Maybe up to 20%. I'm just curious if we can just go back to -- I know you've got a best use case on technology and AI, but go back to how you're thinking about this in a 3- to 5-year period in terms of what it might mean to your expense ratio?

Yes. So Greg, I'll tell you, we are very bullish on AI, and we're leaning into it. We're spending more than $1.5 billion a year on technology. A lot of that is focused on we expect significant benefits from it. And I think we've got a long track record, as I said in my prepared remarks, of identifying the right strategic initiatives and then driving value from them.

We're not going to tell you what our plan is for the expense ratio beyond next year. But I'll also tell you that more than our focus is on the expense ratio, it's on creating operating leverage, and that's what gives us the flexibility to deploy those gains however want to deploy them.

And so maybe it will be efficiency, maybe there'll be productivity, but we are very bullish about the opportunity for the investments that we have underway. We're very bullish about the data we have to fuel the and think that it will make a big difference in the years to come.

Our next question comes from the line of David Motemaden from Evercore.

I had a question. You gave the and rate ex property. I was wondering that's a new disclosure. Wondering if you can just talk about what that was last quarter versus this quarter? And then maybe zooming in specifically in Business Insurance what do you guys see in property pricing outside of national property this quarter.

Yes, Greg, do you want to take that?

Yes, certainly. Well, on the first one, David, it is a metric that we're not going to give every quarter. We're not going to go back and give that. We offered it up this quarter just to give you some color and let you know how much property the leverage it had on the pricing for this particular quarter.

As we've shared with you, the large property has definitely been a market where typically leads in terms of when softening may happen, and it certainly has been the case over the last couple of quarters in the select and middle market to directly answer your question, we continue to get positive price increases there.

But it's certainly -- we're stealing some deceleration, but again, certainly still seeing positive increases.

Got it. And then maybe this is just sort of related to your answer there. But on business insurance premium growth by market. So it was good to see the tick up in select year-over-year in national accounts sort of we know the story there, but I'm surprised we saw the deceleration in growth in middle market.

I was hoping you could just impact that unpack that a little bit. Is that just sort of the property dynamics you just mentioned?

Yes. And if you're looking at overall quarter of middle market, I think you're reading that, Ron, the quarter alone was up for middle market, 7% relative to year-to-date of.

Got it. Yes. No, I was just looking at -- because I know 1Q had the reinsurance dynamic. So I was just comparing it to 2Q, the 10 decelerating to 7 -- that's what I was looking at there, but I appreciate the answer.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski from BMO.

Great. My first question is on the loss cost trend line. I know it's not easy putting a broad brush, but if we look at kind of your reserve release trend line, the loss ratio trend line, you're also adding IBNR. But a lot of good things going on. Curious if your view on loss cost inflation has changed at all or directionally? Is it -- I feel like you've only raised it over recent years over long periods of time. Is it flattening out?

Mike, it's Dan. So another quarter of net favorable PYD despite the asbestos charge. I don't really think you can put a trend on PYD. And really what matters for us is in aggregate across the enterprise, is it favorable or unfavorable. And we've got now a very long track record of generally having that favorable -- as it relates to loss trend, we haven't explicitly commented on loss trend for a while because we think it's just too narrow a way to look at the business in terms of what's pure rate versus what's some blended number of loss trend, but it hasn't moved dramatically in recent period.

Alan's talked about that in prior quarters. We do take a look at it every quarter. Some lines do move up a little bit, some lines do move down a little bit over time, but it's been pretty stable for a while now.

And Mike there was nothing in the quarter that particularly surprised us when it comes to loss activity.

Okay. Great. And my follow-up honing in on the home segment, maybe you need to comment on auto 2 since there's a lot of bundle in there. But if we -- if you look at the RPC trends, they remain very high, I'm assuming that there's terms and conditions, changes that you're incorporating in kind of those double-digit our PC increases. But the last few years haven't been great for you all in the industry.

Consensus kind of has you guys pegged at a 95% combined ratio for the foreseeable future in home. Maybe you can kind of remind us what -- do we expect RPC to eventually fall? Are those terms and condition changes going to help? Is 95% the right combined ratio that you guys are targeting given how profitable auto is.

Sure. Thanks, Mike. It's Michael. So just to unpack the RPC part of your question for starters, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, RPC remains elevated. And again, this is -- it's rate and exposure, right? So RPC remains elevated largely because we're raising insured limits to keep up with rising replacement costs and my point about RPC dropping to single digits in 2026 is we'll have largely caught up in getting replacement costs in line with insured values.

And so the change in RPC as we head into 2026 will really be those -- the premium impact from increasing coverage A, the dwelling limits on property coming back to more normal levels. Yes, baked into RPC is also a reflection of a number of the other actions we're taking on the book, I think increasing deductibles, particularly across the Midwest.

I think different strategies around targeted limits on how big a coverage we're going to write in some hail prone geographies. Other things like that are all rolled into that figure. And again, I think it's just reflective of the actions that we're taking to improve the profitability of that book. As respect to target combined ratio, we're not going to really disclose the target combined ratio by line.

We are certainly encouraged by the progress we've made, particularly in improving the underlying combined ratio in property. It's down period-to-period, quarter-over-quarter for something like the last 10 or 11 quarters in a row. So that is demonstrative of the progress that we're making there. And again, continue to be pleased with our progress there.

Your next question comes from the line of Meyer Shields from KBW.

Great. I don't know if this is a question for Alan or Greg. But is there any way of disentangling the -- how much of the property premium decline in BI is from non-renewed business as opposed to accepting lower rates because you still had adequacy?

Yes. Meyer, I don't think we're going to unpack that, certainly not right here right now. I don't think we're going to get into that level of detail. And I Honestly, we don't have that little of data at our fingertips right now.

Okay. Fair enough. I also want to talk a little bit Michael talked about, I guess, book rolls in Personal Lines. Does that involve any changes to agency commissions or what other tools are you using to encourage that?

Sure, Meyer. Thanks for the question. Yes. So typically, and again, book rolls, consolidations in the personal line space are pretty much standard operating procedure. We had stepped away from them. The reason I mentioned it is because we had stepped away from them as we were working to improve profitability.

And I think it's an important point to recognize that we're back actively engaged in the marketplace in those conversations with agents looking for situations where their book of business may be disrupted for 1 reason or another. It is fairly typical in a book consolidation scenario to offer enhanced commission on that book roll for the first term as that business comes over.

Your next question comes from the line of Tracy Benguigui from Wolfe Research.

My first question is for Mike. I'm curious what you're seeing that's driving favorable loss experience in bodily injury and to a lesser extent, vehicle coverages?

Sure, Tracy. Thanks for the question. I mean, it really is a combination of favorable frequency in both bodily injury and physical damage losses as well as continued moderation in severity. Again, really across coverages.

Got it. And a follow-up on Dan's comment about elevated level of capital driven by your earnings that's well in excess of your investment needed to support growth. As you know, capital is a big focus for me. And I've really not seen so much excess capital for the entire sector.

So is it fair to assume that your excess capital position surpasses the buyback targets you shared -- and could we expect concurrent deployment of capital in the technology side and/or M&A?

Yes. Tracy, it's Dan. So I think I understand the question. So I guess I'd start by saying, look, there's no change at all to what has been now our long-standing capital management philosophy, which is we've got a business that's generating terrific margins. We generate a lot of capital. We generate more than we need just to support the growth of the business. First objective for that excess capital is going to be to find a way to deploy it and generate a return.

And so we'll make all the technology investments that we think we can and should make always be open to -- open any opportunity to generate returns on an excess capital. Once we've exhausted all those opportunities, then it's not our capital, is to shareholders, and we're going to give it back through dividends and buybacks.

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Cox from Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to go back to the removal of the growth restrictions. It looks like a couple of parts of the business, CMP within Select and then also in homeowners, can you give us a sense of how much business is being unlocked for growth here? And if easing those restrictions can result in a noticeable uplift in growth.

Robert, this is Greg. I'll start off and then Michael can talk about the PI. We've been talking about the select mix optimization for some time now. And as we begin to finalize some of those actions. You saw a slight tick up in our retention. We're not really going to quantify what that means for overall growth -- but that was the reason that we pointed out the slight tick up in retention.

Yes. And Robert, Michael following up here on the personal line side. I think the important point to note in terms of the impact on growth in personal insurance as we relax those property restrictions as our goal is to leverage that property capacity to write package business.

And so if you my suggestion, if you want to sort of dimensionalize it is just look back historically at retention and new business levels in property and in auto, you can see that retention remains depressed right now, given the actions we're taking, again, the property actions depress retention in both lines.

And you can see, particularly in property, the new business levels are pretty significantly depressed relative to what they've run historically. And so those levers, I think, would give you a way to kind of dimensionalize it.

Okay. Great. And then I just wanted to follow up on the business insurance underlying loss ratio. When you think about the margin improvements during this year, are we seeing improved picks in casualty at all? Or is the improvement year-to-date largely been a shift lower in some of the shorter tail exposures?

Rob, it's Dan. Look, I think if you look at the improvement you're talking about business insurance specifically, right?

Yes.

Yes, I think the single biggest factor we'd say in terms of that sort of 50 basis point improvement on a year-to-date basis has been the continued benefit of earned price. So in the casualty lines, especially, and we've talked about this a couple of times, we're continuing to include some provision for a level of uncertainty in those lines that we think is going to serve us well in the long term as opposed to taking those pigs down.

The improvement in the loss ratio. You have other things that impact every quarter to mix will change a little bit. But headline number the main driver of the improvement year-over-year has been the continued benefit of earned price.

Your next question comes from the line of Elyse Greenspan from Wells Fargo.

I guess I want to stick there with business insurance. So if we look, I guess, just specifically at the underlying loss ratio that was stable year-over-year in the Q3, so I'm not sure if there were certain pushes and pulls that you want to point out specific to the third quarter or if maybe this quarter rate earned rate got close to trend, and that's kind of what we're seeing in the numbers.

And just how do we think from here, just given slowing pricing, which I know is mostly driven by property, how do we think about just the underlying loss ratio in BI should we think about that starting to deteriorate as rate gets closer to trend?

Yes. Elyse, let's just start with where the margins are in business insurance. I mean they are pretty spectacular margins. And I don't think we're going to parse out that level of detail, and we're certainly not going to get into what the outlook for margins is, but I'll tell you, at these margins, we really like the margins and we really like the business that we're putting on the books at these margins.

Okay. And then I guess -- my second question would be, I guess, maybe shifting to personal auto. Have you guys seen any impact of tariffs at all in the quarter, whether it was September relative to July and August. And how are you guys currently thinking about a potential impact of tariffs on the margins in that business?

Sure, Elyse. It's Michael. Thanks for the question. I would say we haven't seen a ton of impact to date from tariffs but our results for the third quarter do include a small impact from tariffs. That said, it's well below the single-digit severity numbers that we discussed a couple of quarters ago.

There certainly is the potential for that impact to grow. The longer tariffs remain in effect. As you know, it's a very fluid situation. tariff changes weekly, daily, fairly frequently. So predicting is challenging, but we are keeping a very close eye on it. To your point, there are some external indices that show some moderate increases Others look largely unaffected.

So we're going to continue to closely monitor it, but there is a little bit of a provision in the third quarter results for tariff increases, but it's not yet at the level that we had potentially forecast.

And just to be clear, Michael, correct me if I'm wrong, we've got a provision in there because we expected that we might see it. We're not really seeing it in any meaningful way.

Yes, it's not significant. Again, we're seeing it on the margins. And so we booked a provision for it, but again, well below the mid-single-digit level that we had described before.

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Newsome from Piper Sandler.

Yesterday, Progressive gave us a little unpleasant news about the quarter charge. Just curious if that is something that you've looked at yourself? And also curious about the accounting related to these kinds of things. I know that orders not unique, there are other states that have restrictions on profitability. I'm just curious about how you account for that as well.

Sure, Paul, it's Michael. I'll start with sort of the response on the overall situation, maybe Dan can chime in on accounting. The Florida excess profit provision and the statute isn't actually a new thing. It's sort of standard operating procedure in Florida. It's actually fairly infrequent that people have to return premiums given the statute.

What I would say about our business in Florida is we're pleased with our auto business in Florida but we don't expect to need to make a return of premium to policyholders in Florida due to excess profits for the '23 to '25 accident year period or which we would make the filing in 2026.

The only thing I would say is, given the size of our business in Florida, think of our Florida auto business, less than 10% of our PI auto business, think of the Florida PI auto business, 1.5% of Travelers overall premium. I mean it's just not going to be a significant issue for the organization, even if we were to need to make a return of premium, which we don't anticipate.

Then Paul, it's Dan. With regard to the accounting, I guess I'm going to not give a definitive answer. And 1 of the reasons I won't give a definitive answer is if you go back to COVID when we and some of our peer companies returned premium because frequency and losses declined so rapidly, so quickly. Not every company accounted for that the same way so we had a view of how that should be accounting for. That's what we reflected in our results.

Other peer companies had a slightly different view of how that should be accounted for and reflected differently in their results by which I mean some companies took that as an expense. Some companies took that as a return to premium. And as Michael said, since we've not had to deal with the Florida excess profit issue, we haven't done a real deep dive on how we think it would come to the P&L.

But most importantly, I think as Michael said, if we ever had it, we wouldn't expect it to be much of an impact on our consolidated results in any event.

Great. That's super helpful. That's all I had. I appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Shanker from Bank of America.

I was trying to understand a little bit about your retention -- effective retention numbers that you give in the back of the supplement about auto and home. Your retention bottomed, I guess, about 3 quarters ago, and it's ticked up, but you're still losing more cars or more policies than you were before. Is that a projected retention based on where you're pricing the business today? Or have you already seen retention bottom and it's improving here?

Josh, it's Dan. So retention is a way that we try to give you color relative to what's the change in net written premium. So a couple of things we know definitively. We know definitively at any point in time how many policies are enforced. We give you that number. We know definitively at any point in time how much premium made into the ledger, we give you that number.

Production statistics like retention, renewal premium change new business are all in the disclosure, say, they're all subject to actuarial estimate of what do we think the ultimate retention is going to be because you could start on day 1 of a policy and look like you'd retained all of them, but we know that there's some period of those, they're going to cancel early in the term and either go somewhere else or drop their insurance.

So it's very challenging to do, I think, what you're trying to do at a very specific level and go -- as B equals C. The production statistics are really color around what's happening with the top line. And I'm sorry, I can't give you a more helpful answer than that.

If I look back at 3Q '24 is that a more -- because now you have all that data, is that a more accurate representation of what you know to have happened over the past year?

Production statistics do get updated. So if you went back and true in Business Insurance, true in Personal Insurance, if you looked at historical quarters, you could almost do a triangle of what was retention as originally reported because it's an estimate we true those up as time goes on.

And can you confidently say and I'll leave it at this, that retention has improved from where it was a year ago? Or it's still not certain?

I think we're pretty confident in saying that retention has improved from where it was a year ago.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Scott from Barclays.

First one I have is on commercial auto and general liability. Just noticing those are sort of the lines were net written premium is growing more. And I was just interested in if that's more a reflection of the rate is obviously different there than maybe some of the other lines where there's pressure.

But is there anything about the commercial auto product launch and some of the things you're doing that are actually causing you to lean into those businesses a little more?

Alex, this is Greg. Just to get the second part of your question, we did roll out a new automobile product across all business insurance that includes select and middle market that would roll up into the aggregate commercial auto numbers. So we do think that that's our most sophisticated product in auto that we brought into the marketplace.

So that helps us from a segmentation point of view. But we've been very thoughtful around our growth in commercial auto. The thrust of what you're seeing there in the premium delta really is based on renewal premium change. And that's why I gave you some of that color in my prepared comments at a product line level.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful. And over Personal Lines, I mean, Yes, but you've been pretty clear on -- and that should help on the growth front. Is there anything from just a marketing spend kind of standpoint and thinking through the expense ratio we should be aware of as you think through ramping up growth?

Sure, Alex. It's Michael. I would say that on the margins, we have increased our marketing spend in Personal Insurance largely in support of our direct-to-consumer business, but it's a very different ball game for us than marketing spend. other places. Our direct-to-consumer business is less than 10% of our overall business.

So we are on the margin increasing marketing spend there to drive more growth, but it doesn't have a dramatic impact on the overall financial results of the business.

And we have time for one more question, and that question comes from the line of Ryan Tunis from Cantor.

I just had a question, just one on Business Insurance, just on incurred losses. But I do think like in national property we don't trend losses like we do -- or property for that matter. We don't trend losses like we do with other stuff, but certainly are still attritional losses on that line. I guess I'm just curious if those attritional losses have run better or worse or in line with your expectations so far this year?

Ryan, it's Dan. On the quarterly results are really strong. the weather was generally leaning towards favorable, including in business insurance. If you're wondering about whether it's so significant that we would say this isn't really a clean jump-off point for business insurance and you make some big adjustment, we would say no, sort of inside of the normal realm of variability from quarter-to-quarter, but leaning towards the favorable.

And we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Abbe Goldstein for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. And as always, please follow up with Investor Relations if you have any other questions. Have a good day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.