Chubb Earnings Call Insights: Rates, Professional Liability, and Workers Comp

On Thursday, Chubb Corp (NYSE:CB) reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

Rates:

Michael Zaremski – Credit Suisse: First CCI insurance pricing appears to modestly decelerated for the nine the eight should we is there a read through there would you say 2Q was likely the peak for pricing outside of a large industry loss, and switching gears that to professional and personal lines if you could also comment on the rate environments and your outlooks there.

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Paul J. Krump – EVP, The Chubb Corporation and President, Commercial and Specialty Lines: I think it’s fair to say that in the U.S., CCI renewal rate increase has been in a tight range for the last few quarters, running between 8% and 9%. The slight downtick from second quarter to the third quarter is really attributable more to business mix differences between the quarters and any change in the marketplace condition. For example, in Q3 we had fewer large commercial real estate property accounts available to be renewed than we had in Q2, and that really is what drove the change. With respect to where rates are going forward, obviously no one knows for sure. We will reset the macro factors, which are contributing to the push rates for the entire PNC industry, the lead for rate increases haven’t changed below reinvestment yields the years of soft market pricing. We don’t see that changing anytime soon. I think that we were fortunate we had a very benign cat quarter as an industry, but no one here at least in New Jersey is extrapolating that into the future. We’re going to continue to push for rates very hard. As respects specialty you asked about, we continue to see nice momentum there. We continue to work on the book of business, not only from a rate perspective, but also from a re-profiling. Once again this past quarter, we saw in our one star account, which happen to be the tier with the least amount or the most rate need we had over 35 points of rate in that tier, we only had 65% retention, whereby in the four and five star accounts, the best accounts, we still took positive rate in the low single digits, and had nearly 90% retention. So, we’re doing a good job of re-profiling that book and it needs to be re-profiled.

John D. Finnegan – Chairman, President and CEO: I’d just say generally, we don’t have final October numbers. I’m not going to make any predictions, but what we can say is anecdotal, we have not heard anything in the marketplace that would suggest that a significant change had occurred in the rate environment. In terms of CPI, we are filing for additional rate increases, so that momentum continues.

Michael Zaremski – Credit Suisse: Lastly, in regards to the increased 4Q guidance, the math I’m doing points to an expectation for improved margins on an ex-cats, ex-prior year development basis, would you agree with that and if so, could you comment on what’s driving that?

John D. Finnegan – Chairman, President and CEO: No, there’d be no way you could interpolate what ex-cat accident year would be because there is no breakout of favorable development versus accident year. I mean, what we can say is, we don’t know split them up. If you looked at our combined ratio guidance for the fourth quarter, you’d see that, first of all, we have 2 points of cats, so that’s versus 0.6 points in the third quarter. So, that adversely affects us on a quarterly comparison. Then, we’re basically on ex-cat basis on a combined ratio looking at a combined ratio in line with our first half experience, which is a couple of points higher than we had in the third quarter.

Professional Liability and Workers Comp:

Joshua Stirling – Sanford Bernstein: So, on Professional Liability, it sounds like you are making pretty substantial progress. I wondered if you can just talk (indiscernible), but I wondered if you could give us some color as to what you are seeing in terms of new claims reports and severities on the open claims and basically give us an update on the issues you identified last year that led you to raise your loss picks and sort of sound the alarm bell? Also, I would love to more broadly get your sense of what kind of guidance you are giving to your brokers and ultimately sort of on the community around 1/1 renewals on D&O and how much rate – maybe not so much you think that the market will bear because that’s speculative, but how much rate would Chubb like to take?

Dino E. Robusto – EVP, The Chubb Corporation and President, Personal Lines and Claims: I will start with a little bit of insight on the claim activity on the Professional Liability; give you a little general overview. In terms of Personal Liability (newer rise) count increased about 6% in the quarter and about 3% for the nine months of 2012 and these increases are largely attributable to EPL, which was up about 23% for the quarter and 18% for the nine months. Now, the increase in EPL claim count has been a multiyear trend, principally reflecting the ongoing employment practices, administrative charges. Other than EPL, Professional Liability newer rise counts are actually down 11%, both for the quarter and for the first nine months. Just in terms of severity for Professional Liability, we obviously look at the area a little bit differently than we do say auto or homeowners where you have a large number of existing claim. Here what we are looking at are leading indicators such as security class actions, filings and on that front, based on new filings for the industry in the first nine months, it appears that traditional security class actions activity on an annualized basis is at a comparable level to last year, which is up from the historical lows we saw a couple of years ago and given that the security class action activity, has historically been the driver of our public and financial institution D&O, this is clearly a trend we watch carefully. On the EPL that I reference that was up on account you look at it from a severity standpoint. The length of time to find the job has increased. Damages asserted primarily back defense costs have increased. However it’s important to know that the majority of the filings we are seeing that is driving increased count are lower severity cases. That’s just little bit of detail on the personal liability trend. Paul?

Paul J. Krump – EVP, The Chubb Corporation and President, Commercial and Specialty Lines: I’ll try to add some color there about it was really what we are thinking about is with respect to ’11 renewals were we talking to and what are we talking to our field people about. I think we have alluded to this in the past that we think first about a product line and the dynamics that we talked about before some of the issues around D&O and EPL and prime certainly still with us. As we go in, but then what we really do Josh, is we make it very granular we look at it by geography by ASIC type we put through our tiering proprietary models. And we take it down to an individual policy level. We look at that account we ask ourselves what is the starting point for the rate how does that compare to like kind and quality within our book. How well is that individual account than running and we set a target rate increase or might even be flat, depending how well it’s performing, as we go into the season so we do have overall targets it’s really very granular when take it out to talk to our field staff and with the agents. Then when we talk to the agents, we make certain that we talk to them about a lot of their accounts that are coming up, so that they don’t misread any signal-on and a particular account as meaning that it impacts their entire book of business. So, I hope that gives you some flavor of what we are doing.

John D. Finnegan – Chairman, President and CEO: Generally, we’re booking (100), so we need a good deal of rate increases going into 2012.

Joshua Stirling – Sanford Bernstein: The final question I ask would be on workers comp, which you’ve had a couple of quarters in a row now of pretty substantial growth and I think there has been some explanations before that. I would love to just get a sense of are you guys expanding your appetite here or perhaps historically been a place you’ve been focused?

Paul J. Krump – EVP, The Chubb Corporation and President, Commercial and Specialty Lines: No. I can definitely tell you we are not expanding our appetite for workers comp, a big part of the growth is driven by rate. Another piece of the growth came in workers compensation from audit premiums and exposure growth. The overall book saw a little bit of a decline in exposure, but workers comp had a bit of exposure in audit growth in it. I told you in my prepared remarks about the rate increases, workers compensation was in the low double-digits. So that gives you a sense of it. As far as new business goes, it was up slightly, but our in-force count, Josh, is only up 1% in workers compensation. So, we’re sticking to our knitting and we’re trying to see some opportunities there, but really its being rate driven which is exactly what we want to see.

A Closer Look: Chubb Earnings Cheat Sheet>>