Arch Capital at Bank of America Conference: Strategic Insights Unveiled

On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Arch Capital Group Ltd (NASDAQ:ACGL) took center stage at the Bank of America 30th Annual Financials CEO Conference 2025. The discussion highlighted Arch’s strategic prowess in cycle management, diversification, and a unique corporate culture. While the company showcased its growth and robust capital allocation strategies, challenges in the property CAT market and E&S property sector were also acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• Arch Capital’s compounded book value per share has grown by 15.5% annually since 2001.
• The company has expanded its equity to $23 billion and an investment portfolio to $45 billion.
• Arch’s acquisition of MidCorp from Allianz aims to broaden its property-led mid-market offerings.
• The company emphasizes a culture of collaboration, business ownership, and vigilance.
• Challenges persist in the E&S property market due to increased capacity and price pressures.

Financial Results

• Arch Capital has returned $8 billion to shareholders since 2007.
• The company does not include income from alternative investments in operating earnings, ensuring consistent financial reporting.
• Growth in book value per share remains a critical metric for Arch’s investment strategy success.

Operational Updates

• Arch’s cycle management strategy focuses on diversification, avoiding concentration in any single business line.
• The company operates globally with three distinct segments, including a significant presence in the U.S. mortgage insurance market.
• The recent acquisition of MidCorp enhances Arch’s capabilities in the mid-market segment, particularly in property-led offerings.

Future Outlook

• Despite recent price decreases, Arch maintains a positive outlook on the property CAT market and intends to keep its capital deployment steady unless drastic changes occur.
• The E&S property market faces challenges with significant price reductions due to increased capacity from MGAs and reinsurance providers.
• Arch’s mortgage insurance segment continues to differentiate itself through international diversification and CRT programs.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Nicolas Papadopoulo emphasized the importance of capital allocation to underwriting units based on performance.
• Arch’s culture is built on shared values of collaboration, business ownership, urgency, and vigilance.
• The entertainment business acquired through MidCorp focuses on live entertainment and production insurance.

In conclusion, Arch Capital’s strategic insights at the Bank of America Conference underline its commitment to long-term value creation. For a detailed understanding, refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - Bank of America 30th Annual Financials CEO Conference 2025:

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: All right.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I don’t know.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what’s so exciting, but maybe they’re giving something away. I don’t know.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: A mutual gift.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: All right. We should get started, I guess. Everyone find a seat. Okay, we’ll see if you’re joining us right now. Are we live? Okay, we’re live. Thank you for joining us at the Bank of America Global Financial Services Conference. If you’re listening in here, this is the Arch Capital Group session. It is really, it’s a treat to have Arch Capital Group presenting, obviously a U.S.-listed company, which is an exception here at the conference. We have Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, and François Morin, CFO, to talk about what’s going on at Arch here. Thank you all for attending. Let’s get started. For people who are unfamiliar with the Arch story, I just want to say a few little background.

Arch was one of the so-called class of 2001 startups that was formed out of the hard market that was by the 1997 to 2001 underwriting crisis and the fall of the World Trade Center, a large $20 billion loss in a single day. Since that time, the end of 2001, Arch’s compounded book value per share at a 15.5% CAGR, which I’m pretty sure is the best of any insurance company in any market. I mean, because someone might show me a 23-year CAGR that’s better than Arch’s, I don’t think it exists. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t think it’s true. The company from a standing start of nothing, the company has grown its equity to $23 billion, its investment portfolio to $45 billion, and it’s also returned $8 billion of capital to shareholders over that same period of time, starting in 2007.

The growth has been almost entirely organic. Intangibles are barely anything. Even though Arch has done a few deals at very choice prices, it’s also worth mentioning that the success is not part of the past. The ROEs today are better than the long-term ROEs, meaning that what you’re delivering now is in excess of the past record. It’s a pretty good time for Arch. The question is, how did you do it and why is it going to continue? You know, I don’t know how you want to take it, but Nicolas and François, you might have some thoughts on that matter.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes, I think the story of Arch is, you know, it’s a company that was created around a few principles. One of the key principles is cycle management, being diversified. Having the ability, when you cycle management, to look for not being like in one line of business, but having the ability to write across lines of business. It’s a company that’s really a specialty, a global specialty insurer and reinsurer. I think in the journey of the last 25 years, we added a mortgage insurer in the United States. I think the principles that we have today, I think they’re very similar to the original principles that we had back then. The company was created by, I started to work at Arch 25 years ago when the company was recapitalized back in 2001.

The gentleman that at the time hired me, Paul Ingray, who believed and brought with him this culture and this strategy of cycle management. At the time, he teamed up a little bit later with Dino Ciordano, which brought, with Bob Clements, the insurance side of the business. Being able to provide a sustainable value proposition to our insured and distribution partner, being specialized and being able to, in the specialty business, have limited competition. I think that has been really the philosophy that has been behind Arch. We’ve been a very strong steward of capital all along. I think the thing that makes us different maybe from others, we talked about it this morning with some of our investors. It’s really, we allocate capital to underwriting units at the end of the year.

A lot of people give underwriters a budget and they say, "Listen, deploy the capital to the best of our ability." I think the way we manage capital is we tell people, "We have a lot of oversight from management, but ultimately we have a culture of a business owner. People have business plans to execute. Ultimately, we never tell them they have a budget to meet." I think the success of Arch has been to be able to be agile enough to, we’ve been the holding company to deal with the excess capital in another form than deploying it in the business where the returns were not attractive. I think culture is a big deal. I think we have a culture that’s really a culture of collaboration where, you know, I think you work at Arch. That’s my case.

I think I’ve worked at Arch for 25 years because I value working with others. I think we have a lot of smart people, but I think as a group, we are a lot smarter than we are as any individual. If you have a very bright person that comes to work for Arch and wants to do it on his own, he probably won’t work. I don’t know if I capture.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You said it all. That’s well done. Again, cycle management is one thing I think that many companies talk about. I would say where we may be a bit different is on the diversification part where we have three distinct segments. We think of ourselves as capital allocators, right? We think of ourselves as, okay, where’s the best opportunity to deploy the capital? We’ve gone through a very good period the last, call it, three to five years in the P&C space in general. That was different before that when the market was definitely softer, more competitive. Mortgage insurance became for us really the most attractive opportunity at that time, call it, in the 2016 to 2020 years. There’s a time, not everything stays static.

Things change over time, and it’s our role to react to those market conditions and not be afraid to pull back if the market just isn’t, doesn’t meet our expectations in terms of returns and vice versa. When the market is more than it meets a lot of our, there’s a lot of green lights flashing, we’re more than happy to really step on the accelerator and be very aggressive in those lines of business.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yeah, I think the secret sauce is a combination of the leadership of Arch and the people that lead the various units having a combining, I think, a macro view of where the market is and the attractiveness of the overall market or different class of business within that market and the micro view, our underwriter having all the information that they need to make decisions, you know, once at a time. I think if you let your underwriter underwrite deals based on their own profitability, you end up in one place.

If you have a macro view, and you say this market based on the profitability and the sum of the part that makes the market, I would like to be at that level, being able to reconcile the two is, I think, something that has forced us to be a lot more aggressive when the market is favorable and maybe a lot more conservative when the market is not as favorable. I think we have this feedback loop where we try to match what people do every day with where we want them to be, I think.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You mentioned Bob Clement and Dino and Paul. Obviously you’re running the company now and you have Maamoun and David as your lieutenants. I can think about 10 or 12 other people who I know who I think were there at the company before the first day of freemium even being written.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Sometimes a certain group of people just come together and gel and make something magnificent happen. I think it’s a wonderful thing, but there’s also some concern that, like a fine wine, once it’s over, it’s over in some ways. What’s going on in the culture that says that even after that initial founding momentum that really has delivered on this has gone, the Arch culture is still intact? How has building it for a next generation of non-founder leaders sort of transpired over time?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: We have 7,000 employees. Even today, I would say more than half of employees have probably joined Arch in the last five years. I think my role, the way I see my role as CEO, is strategy and culture. The culture, it’s not in my view linked to individuals. People like Paul Ingray, Dinos, Bob Clements, Marc Grandisson, others, what they bring is interpretation of the strategy. They have impact on the culture, but the culture in itself exists. The culture that we share is the culture of collaboration, business owners where people have a lot of leeway to execute on their plan, the culture of urgency, the culture of vigilance. We spend a lot of time teaching, and not only me, but across the organization, the leaders of today, they teach and live that culture every day. We spend a decent amount of time reinforcing the culture.

Paul Ingray is no longer here. Bob Clements is there. Dinos, unfortunately, passed away. The culture exists. It’s not, in my view, linked to any one individual. It’s the Arch culture. That’s how I see it.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: One thing that you didn’t include, which I think is an important part, is the comp structure.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Certainly, it makes sense at the early part of Arch establishing a long-term comp structure that everyone got tied up for a long period of time so that you would make the right decisions for shareholders over the long run. There would be no short-term type of decisions that had an adverse effect over the longer term for the firm. It had a few effects. One is that it’s very hard to hire people away from Arch because they have a long tail on their compensation on the way coming to them. Two, it also creates a culture around long-term decision-making. I looked at the 10-K from 2001 and I counted 76 employees. We’re now at 7,600 employees. Does that long-term comp structure work in a small organization differently than it can work in a large organization?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think I love our comp structure. The reason I still work for Arch is at times where reinsurance was doing well, not all part of reinsurance was doing well. Insurance may have done okay. I knew that I would get paid for what I do for the company, not an average across the company. That still exists. I think today the comp structure that you described probably applies to the key decision maker in the company, people that control the silicon business. I think the majority of our employees are on the discretionary plan. That fluctuates with the performance of the company, but not to the extent that the original comp structure would. I think it’s still because it’s on for every of our decision makers, and we have, I don’t know how many people are on the planet.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: About 600. About 10% of our, yeah, call it 10% of our employees are in that comp structure.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: 10%—those are the people that really make things happen at Arch. They all have the same mindset that they’re going to be paid for what they do. Pay for performance is key. I think it’s still working and still a key fundamental difference, maybe with people looking at what have you written this year. Are you taking advantage of that market? Great job. I gave you 1.5. In our culture, if you’ve done a great job, you’re going to get paid two times. There’s no 1.5. If you’ve done a bad job, you’re probably going to be paid 0.5 or 0 as opposed to being paid 0.8. I think it’s aligned, really. I live that culture. I was a recipient of that culture. There were times where we thought of changing it, and a lot of us fought against it. I think it’s still there today.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You know, and just on this comp and culture thing. Look, I’ve never underwritten anything in my entire life. Those that can’t do teach. Yeah. When I think about, like, I imagine I would like to be a property CAT underwriter for the last two and a half years. That sounds like a really good job. I really wouldn’t want to be a property CAT underwriter from 2017 through 2022. If I could pick my timing, it would be really good, and then everything would be great. How does the comp structure work with something like that when the market is so hard that it’s shooting fish in a barrel versus periods of time? I mean, Arch couldn’t pull back. The truth is the PMLs have not radically changed. You’ve gone from, I think, like, you’re at 7.5% right now. You were at the bottom, I think, 3.9%.

That’s twice as much. Back in 2008, you were at 24%. It was a different story.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Two questions that you asked, Josh. The comp structure, you can talk about it. I have to say, Arch is open short-term. The market’s very cyclical.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah, I mean, we have caps. Effectively, we manage. It’s not all like, I mean, yes, you eat what you kill, but up to a point. There’s carry-forward mechanisms. There’s ways to soften the compensation for our employees over time. Let’s be honest, when the hurricane, even in a really good market for property CAT, if there’s an active CAT season.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: You lose money that year.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You’re going to lose money. You know, it’s hopefully not going to happen every year. We can, that’s how we try to even things out over time with some mechanisms of carry-forwards.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: It’s moving. There is a moving specific, you know, you don’t get paid on one-year result of CAT because it’s random. You get paid over a five or six-year period. I think there is this moving mechanism. I think the PML question that you, so, and ultimately, you know, I’ll give you my example. I started on the property side. At the time, casualty was the flavor of the day. I think it was not the flavor of the day. It was the decision that we made in terms of relative opportunities. There was, after September 11, the definite opportunity on the property. It came with a lot of volatility. At the time, the casualty market was in shambles. Prices were multiplied by two or three times.

We thought the casualty, based on the pricing we were getting, was a lot safer for us to deploy capital, you know, a lot of capital in that rolling the dice on the property. We decided to go that way. I was on the property underwriting deal, but I felt a little, you know, my colleagues at the time on the casualty, the David of the world, the Maamoun and Marc at the time, they’re having more fun than I had. I was having fun, but, you know, the casualty market peaked and then Catherine Apthorpe. Then everybody had a billion-dollar loss and Arch had a $200 million loss. Suddenly we were in the property market and we had a lot of fun for a number of years. My view, during all those years, the unit got paid.

There was some variation, but pretty much everybody got paid the same multiple because we are a team. It’s not like the property guys get paid when the wind doesn’t blow and the casualty guys get paid. It’s everybody, we’re a team. I think people see others doing the job. They’re doing their part, which is to cut back. Some people are doing their part, which is to maximize the opportunity, but we all work as a team. I think that’s a little bit of the culture of the company. I think we don’t win alone. We win as part of delivering to our shareholder the return that makes sense.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You may have said two questions. I’m trying to segue into a different sort of thing. You know, I feel like everybody wants to talk about the property CAT market. I mean, maybe it’s ironic. Arch has a whole lot more than property CAT, but it seems to be what’s on everybody’s mind right now. You know, the amount of capital you’re deploying in property CAT, it’s not a crazy amount of capital. Pricing is really good. People came back from Monte Carlo. Depending on what you went in thinking, you came out thinking the same thing, but with stronger conviction on what you already thought. I don’t think anyone changed their mind on anything. Where are we? What’s happening? How good is the market compared to where it’s been?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think as it’s been, even the market peaked, you know, two years ago, and I think since that we probably lost, you know, maybe double-digit rates. I think it, yeah, the returns, you know, I remember back at the end of 2022 when we really invested a lot of capital in the CAT business, very few people did it. Price was skyrocketing. We’ve come back double-digit down from that point. I think the business, as far as we are, we see it’s still very attractive. We’re trying to maintain what we have. In terms of the PML, I mean, you know, we talked about it earlier. I think Florida is a weird zone because, you know, there’s not a lot of people, there’s not a lot of purchase above the 100 years because, you know, companies don’t have the money to buy as much as nationwide companies.

I think, you know, if you look at our PML, which is our peak zone in Florida, they’re probably, you know, a bit deflated because there’s, you know, we, you know, if everybody would buy up to the 250 years, our PML may be double-digit, maybe, you know, a bit higher. I think it’s also an imperfect view of how we see CAT. We’ve deployed more CAT, which I think is better for us, more on the diversified basis across a number of zones. I think our book is much bigger than, you know, it doubled compared to what it was before. I think it’s a much bigger book, but we think it’s still very attractive.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: If pricing were down 10% at January 1, let’s say, does that mean Arch would deploy less capital as a proportion of its balance sheet, or it’s still, whether it’s 10% or 10%, we’re not at the point where we have to make those decisions.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think the latter, because I think we have this concept of what we call an S-curve, where you stay on as long as the thing is really attractive. When you start to be borderline, that’s when you cut back. I think I would expect us to be in.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Still very attractive.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: It’s a bottom line. I mean, we’re only, again, let’s remember 2023 might have been the best market ever. I mean, according, depending on what, you know, who you talk to, but some people, you know, best market in their career. We’re down from that, but we’re not at a point, and we’re far from a point where we think we have to really cut back on our exposure. The hurricane season is far from over, although some people are already declaring victory or some people are declaring failure because some people want the wind to blow. You get a lot of different ideas going out there. We did have a massive wildfire this year. That’s strange when we weren’t expecting. We haven’t seen an earthquake in a very long time. There was a tsunami warning, you know, just about a month ago.

How is Arch thinking about those weird risks? Are you exposed to them the same way that you are the things we, hurricane risk? Is the industry correctly discounting the risk of things that have happened so rarely they’ve forgotten they happened?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I mean, in a way, yeah, it’s difficult to price for what hasn’t happened. I think that’s why we need margin of safety. That’s why, when you look at the pricing of catastrophe or even the pricing of CAT business, you can never, it’s true of every line of business, you never torture actions and casualty. You need a margin of safety. You never want to be in a line of business in a significant trade that is priced to perfection. What you know, there is always, we don’t know the cost of the good we manufacture. That’s the insurance company. In our business, there is volatility. There’s a lot of unknowns. I think you have to always factor in your pricing some margin of safety to be able to support those.

You don’t always get it right, but over time, I think if you apply the philosophy, across the line of business and across the book, I think you can sustain an event like the California wildfire. It’s much bigger than what people anticipated.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: I mean, you know, I think Arch has said fair to people, maybe yourself sometimes, that the hard market is an elevator and the soft market is an escalator.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: If you were listening to a lot of broker conference calls in Q2, it felt like to them that the soft market was an elevator. They would argue that E&S property pricing is down 30%, 40%. It’s staggering numbers. Arch does write excess and surplus property. The way you’re talking about the CAT markets, yeah, it’s going down, but it’s going down in an orderly way, just like you would expect. Is there something different happening in the primary markets on property that’s causing us to decouple from what you would otherwise expect on coastal property risks?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yeah, I think the way the markets react is supply and demand. I think what you’ve seen in the E&S property, and again, the thing that you hear is there’s always an account that’s down 40%. If you look at the majority of our accounts on the E&S property, I would say we are down double digits. We don’t like to be down double digits. We like to be down single digits. The truth is across our portfolio, the business we renewed and our premium is probably down a bit more than 10%. I think it’s down. Sometimes you can’t confuse the headlines, the one-off with what’s happening on the values account. What happened in the E&S property is like post-in, after it was three or four years of catastrophe where people didn’t make any money. In was the loss that broke the back of the camel.

Ultimately, people said, we can’t write that business anymore. No support on the reinsurance on quota share. What it forced people, and especially MGAs, is to reduce the capacity they had to offer from a couple of MGAs, $200 million to $10 million. That in itself created an event where price more than doubled over a period of 18 months. Unfortunately, 2023 passed, no significant losses. Attachment points raised, deductible raised, no significant losses. A year after, in 2024, the fear of missing out came back. I think it came back through the carrier ourselves by willing to expand a little bit the limit. I think the guilty players were the MGAs, where they were able, a lot of reinsurance capacity came and created, allowed MGAs that were reduced to $10 million or $50 million capacity to go to $50 million.

When that happened, in a $200 million program where everybody fought the year before to have $10 million, when the first guy comes in and takes $50 million, everybody scrambles. I think that’s what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the rapid return of large limits into that market that created the dislocation that we’re seeing today. I think it happened first in 2024. I think it continued in 2025. I think those capacity continued to increase. I think it put definitely a lot of pressure on the price.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: I would add to that, 100% agree with, you know, what Nicolas Papadopoulo said. To your point about the elevator, I think that that’s somewhat of an isolated market. It’s not, I wouldn’t want to generalize it for all lines of business because we still believe strongly that when the market goes softer, it’s more in the escalator way. It takes time. It’s not, you know, overnight. There’s people chip away at it here and there. You know, 5% reduction here, another 5% the next year. This example on E&S property to me is, and again, we talk about the hairy coastal CAT-exposed business, is a little bit of a unique kind of animal given the dynamics of the MGAs and capacity. You need big limits, et cetera. That’s just a nuance here on what it is.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: It’s a good point. That’s what’s resonating because it’s one of the maybe very few lines of business where MGAs have been dominant in the past. I think we’ve seen carriers outsourcing their CAT underwriting to those MGAs. I think it’s a corner of the market where MGAs have clearly played an important role. I don’t think it’s true. Maybe cyber is the other one, but less so, I think. That’s why the dynamic is that way.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: On your cycle management comments, you spoke about adding mortgage insurance in 2014, 2015, and then in a big way in 2016, of course. You can look at Radian or MGIC or Essent. The investors still don’t like that business. What do you think that the markets are getting wrong about that business? You don’t have to talk about Arch’s business necessarily, but do you think that the markets are wrong in how they’re treating your competitors in terms of their thoughts on valuation and whatnot? I don’t think people don’t like it. That was, call it, five years ago. People have gotten a lot more comfortable with what we do, what our competitors do. The challenge for the monolines is, again, what else can you do, right? You’re somewhat limited in being a monoline, you know, homogeneous product in one country. What’s the growth potential?

No question that the industry has remained extremely disciplined, which is a great thing for all of us. Beyond how do you return capital, dividends, share buybacks, et cetera, at the end of the day, it’s still a small market, right? You got six players in it. We’re maybe the exception being part of a multiline group where we think that is a tremendous way for us to flex in and out with our capital deployment, capital allocation. The challenge still remains for monoline companies: what else can we do? To me, that would be the main reason why investors may or just don’t value the asset. This may be, properly, I’d say there’s a discount just based on prospects for either growth or new opportunities to generate earnings.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: It’s a small market. It’s very, I mean, it’s very technical in my view. It’s very complicated. It really didn’t perform well in the financial crisis. People remember that most of those companies could have gone out of business. I think it’s, yeah, it’s hard to invest, in my view, to invest the time to really understand the, you know, you guys did a lot of teaching to understand the fundamental of the business. That’s also an area that’s, as far as we see, pretty flat these days in terms of premium growth.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: In doing the teaching, you kind of let the cat out of the bag in some ways. I think that UGC also deserves some of the credit with the actually good business that you bought. You guys had some ideas. One of the major innovations, of course, is going away from FICO score-based credit card scoring for pricing income to multivariate pricing models that put things that weren’t asked before. You found, decided to offload the tail risk to the bond market in a great way. You taught everyone how to do it. Now you look at your competitors and they’re also doing those things. The Arch’s way was the right way. In being imitated, I realized that you have the advantage of being multiline. Not everything is a nail for you. Have your competitors caught up to you?

Is there an Arch advantage in how they’re approaching the business that you haven’t given away the secret? I see it as a little bit like Progressive, right? I think we were at the forefront of it. I would like to think that we still like it. We still have an advantage, but the gap is narrowed for sure. I think where we still have an advantage that remains, I mean, we hold on to is that we’re not only in the U.S., right? We’re international. We do the CRT program. We’re in Australia. We’re in Europe. I think our mortgage segment is much broader than just private. Am I in the U.S.? That remains a competitive advantage because, again, given the state of the U.S. housing market, it is what it is for all six of us.

We can play and we can fish from different ponds and, you know, play the game a bit differently.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think the team, our teams have done a remarkable job playing the diversification part. We are in the U.S. Our book in the U.S. has shrunk, but the difference has been normally made up by some of the writings in Australia, in Europe, and in the CRT. I think we are overall flat where otherwise, if we were only in the U.S., our top line would be down. I think it’s a.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: I think the takeaway from the UGC acquisition, you bought a good business at a great price in a buyer’s market. Yeah, and it’s paid a lot of dividends. You haven’t done much M&A, but you did buy MidCorp, yes, from Allianz. I think there’s some, there’s still some misunderstanding about exactly where that fits in. Arch is a business that has licenses to write insurance both on an admitted and non-admitted basis. What did the acquisition of MidCorp give Arch that Arch couldn’t have built on its own?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yeah, so I think, you know, if you, on the insurance side, the way Arch got positioned historically was more on the large accounts. We had large accounts and we had a few specialties, a few program divisions, but the core of the business that we wrote was really liability, I think, professional, you know, casualty, large accounts. We wrote D&O large accounts. We wrote general liability large accounts, construction large accounts. A bunch of large accounts and a bit of, you know, some smaller business, but we never really had a mid-market offering. I think the way we got set up, it was to face the larger broker, the Marsh and the Willis. We had experts in D&O facing broker, experts in D&O. We had experts in GL facing and workers’ comp facing expert brokers in GL and workers’ comp.

The mid-market business, it’s more of a package component to it. I think you’d be able to, and we didn’t have that. We’ve been, you know, in the last, you know, probably five years, we had decided to go down, you know, from the large account to the upper middle market. We had made inroads in that market. I think we’ve done well on the construction side. We got a decent offering on the middle market construction basis. On the property-led mid-market, I think Arch historically has never been outside of the E&S side of the business, which is CAT exposed property, you know, franchise. I think, you know, and we had tried to create one, but it was really not working. With what we bought with MidCorp, it is really a property-led mid-market offering. You know, think of manufacturing, hospital, hospitality.

To be able to do this, I think you need large capacity on the property side, which we didn’t have, which came along with the portfolio. You need risk management that we really didn’t have on the property side. We have an HPR group that underwrites highly protected risks. We got a network of agencies that we do business with that is actually difficult. You said they would say second tier, but second level of not the big guys, the second tier level that, you know, takes years to form. I think we really got a franchise that’s really complementary to what we wanted to achieve. We also bought like reinsurance programs that support those $500 million to $1 billion limits that we put on certain risks.

It’s a real franchise that we bought that’s really complementary to, to, and will allow really fast forward us probably 10 years in what we could have been organically. That’s what we like about it.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: In 2020, you bought a plurality stake in Coface.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: I think that, you know, it’s kind of like mortgage oligopoly business. You said we would love to be part of, we don’t have a lot of competition. It has a taint on it that people don’t like this business. It’s a credit business, so people didn’t like it. Our say, we’re smart. We’re going to make this business better. I think actually of those three things, the big surprise was that Arch starts and actually these Cofos guys actually knew what they were doing. No, no. It’s like we like how they’re operating it. It was a business that you didn’t need to fix. Maybe UGC, of course, come out of the credit cards, but they also turned out to be much better than everybody else. Is MidCorp a business that needs to be fixed, or does it come with the capability to solve its own problems?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think that a lot of the remediation on the part of the business that we like, which is the middle market package business, property-led, is they are in a good state. I think we can help them with their risk appetite, cross-selling more workers’ comp. We can help them cross-selling maybe some private D&O, some employment liability. We can. I think where we can help them is in the data analytics and helping them target better customers, having a better value proposition that resonates with clients. The fundamental of the business for like a quarter of the book, I would exclude the program business, which I think we don’t like as much. I think it is there. A lot of the work had been done.

I think there’s more we can do, in my view, to make the brand more formidable and to make the value proposition resonate further and on a broader basis with the agent network. My view today is that we bought something that has real value.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: In the press release on MidCorp, I think it’s the Allianz’s MidCorp and entertainment business.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: You’re talking about property-led. The entertainment is interesting. Of course, one of your competitors had a very large sports entertainment book that they put into runoff after a massive reserve charge they took in the fourth quarter of last year. Is Arch’s timing, is this a similar sort of business? Is Arch’s timing somehow lucked out that there’s a major competitor who’s been taken out of the market at the very time that you’ve acquired this unique business?

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yeah, this is a very different business.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: The entertainment business, again, to us, it came with the acquisition, but it truly is to us a specialty line, very much like the one that the other specialty lines like to do. Entertainment for us in this case is purely, call it Hollywood.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Yes.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: It’s live entertainment, it’s production, it’s TV shows, it’s movies. It has nothing to do with sports or entertainment in that way. It’s truly kind of when you turn on your Netflix favorite shows.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Production.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Insurance to, again, to make that happen is what it’s all about. A lot of it’s through a large MGA that has, you know, relevant expertise in that space. That’s how the business comes to us, so it’s a little bit of a different animal compared to what you might have thought.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Sorry, are you not the underwriter in that business? Are you the capital provider?

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: It’s coming through an MGA. The MGA does the underwriting according to the guidelines, you know, just like any.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: I think we have, it’s sort of a partnership. Some of the underwriting is outsourced, but we also have direct connection with all the major studios because, you know, the limit that they buy is big. I think we actually meet with all the clients. It’s a little bit of a, we’re tied to the hip with the MGA. They do certain things. We do a lot of the risk management. We do some of it. We do ourselves. I think it’s a, really, it’s more of a partnership with MGA than it is a true MGA relationship where we outsource all the underwriting to the, and I think the thing that was attractive to us in that line of business is that, you know, post-COVID, studios stopped being able to work. There was a lot of losses in that business.

I think the pricing coming off COVID was very strong. I think it was the timing of getting on that book was very, very good for us.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: One last question, different track. You know, we follow operating earnings for exchange and losses, but almost consistently, income is higher than its operating incomes, which is different from most every other company. A lot of companies put mark-to-market gains on illiquid investments into their operating numbers, and Arch does not. A couple of years ago, Arch said we could be doing more with our investment portfolio than we’ve done in the past. Given Arch’s sort of quiet success in investing that you haven’t really touted, is that even going to widen further as time goes on as you take more opportunity to use that book? Is that differential widened in the future compared to what? It might. Just for everybody’s benefit, we do not include income from alternative or private investments in our operating earnings.

It’s still a very good source of book value per share growth, which is ultimately maybe the most important metric to us. No question that given the environment we have and our size, we have increased our allocation to alternative investments. Could the gap widen even more? It might. We think there’s value for us to be consistent in how we report the numbers. We’re very transparent about where everything goes. We’re not changing our tune every so often. We’ve been consistent in that way. Ultimately, if it shows up in book value per share growth, I think people will see that. I think that’s a good place for us to be. Wonderful. Thank you for your time. Thanks for being here. Thank you for the audience and anyone listening online.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Awesome.

Josh, Bank of America Analyst, Bank of America: Thank you.

Nicolas Papadopoulo, CEO, Arch Capital Group: Thank you.

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