Hartford at KBW Insurance Conference: SME Focus and AI Investments

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Hartford Financial Services Group (NYSE:HIG) presented at the KBW Insurance Conference 2025, emphasizing its strategic focus on small to midsize enterprises (SME) and technological advancements. While the company showcased its competitive edge in the SME market and robust financial performance, it also acknowledged challenges such as adapting to tariff impacts and evolving mortality trends.

Key Takeaways

• Hartford’s strategic focus on SMEs leverages deep agent relationships and technology.
• Significant investments in AI and data analytics aim to enhance underwriting and claims processing.
• The company plans to grow its personal lines business from $4 billion to $7 billion over the next five years.
• Executives remain optimistic about Hartford’s market position and disciplined underwriting.
• Share repurchase activities are consistently executed, reflecting strong cash flow management.

Financial Results

• Small Business Performance:

- The underlying combined ratio consistently remains below 90, indicating efficiency and accuracy.

• Global Specialty:

- Maintains a strong position with a mid-80s combined ratio, offering robust margins and growth potential.

• Workers’ Compensation and Commercial Auto:

- Medical severity trends are stable under 5%.

- Commercial auto, with a $1.2 billion book, performs well under a 100 combined ratio.

• General Liability:

- Primary GL, umbrella, and excess capabilities see rate increases of 9%-10%, with excess lines at 16%.

• Personal Lines:

- Aims to expand from $4 billion to $7 billion in premiums over five years.

Operational Updates

• SME and Technology:

- 75% of small business quotes are processed automatically, enhancing speed and efficiency.

- AI integration in claims and underwriting is underway, with AWS Connect expected by early 2026.

• Claims Processing:

- AI-driven medical records summarization is being implemented to support human talent.

• Personal Lines Expansion:

- Re-entering the independent agency market, initially in Illinois and Arizona, with plans to reach 30 states by 2026.

Future Outlook

• AI Investments:

- Hartford plans to deepen AI investments in claims, underwriting, and operations.

• Personal Lines Growth:

- Targeting significant growth in personal lines, aiming for $7 billion in premiums.

• Tariff Impact and Mortality Trends:

- Tariff impacts are expected to be modest, with recalibrated mortality trends to remain competitive through 2026.

Q&A Highlights

• Share Repurchases:

- Consistent execution of share repurchase plans aligns with cash flow increases.

• Employee Benefits:

- Disability products offer three-year rate guarantees, with life components extending up to seven years.

• Hartford Funds:

- Focus on performance and brand representation through partnerships with Wellington and Schroeder.

The Hartford’s strategic initiatives and robust financial performance underscore its commitment to growth and innovation. For a detailed account, please refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - KBW Insurance Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay. Good morning. We are going to get started. I’m very pleased to welcome Chris Swift, CEO and Beth Costello, CFO of The Hartford. I imagine that most people are familiar with The Hartford, but I wanted to start off with an overview question.

When you look at the businesses that constitute The Hartford, how do you see it as distinctive from key competitors in the marketplace?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Great. Well, it’s great to be back with you there. Always appreciate the invitation to be with you. I think we’ve been talking about it, you know, for a little bit now. I I think the Hartford’s great, you know, strategic competitive advantages is our small to midsize enterprise, you know, focus.

And, you know, we can put revenues around that or employees around it. But, you know, from a PNC side, you know, that that small SME orientation, I think, is is very strong and very powerful for us, particularly because it’s it’s consistent. People want, you know, basically a 100% risk transfer products in those markets. You know, we have agents and brokers, you know, that serve that market, and managing agents and agency force is different, than just managing a broker relationship. So we have a lot of years of experience there.

So that I think is simply our advantage. But then you overlay a specialty orientation with our specialty business, which is about 3 and a half billion dollars of written premium. You overlay then our employee benefits business which tends to skew larger and that’s the real opportunity for us then to be on the smaller side paired up you know, with our property casualty organization. And then a restored and growing personal lines business, I think you put all those pieces together and you get high returns, stability, good growth and we’ve distribution partners that will continue to want to do business with us long term.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: I’m going to follow-up that one point that I make frequently when discussing The Hartford is that I think the consistency of its results reflects technological capabilities that are underappreciated by the marketplace. I think to succeed in small business where you’ve got a large group of largely homogeneous risks obviously with some variation. Data and analytics are a key component of that. Was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the actual investments that you’ve made and you’re making right now to sustain that, I’ll call it, competitive advantage in terms of the consistency and strength of results?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Sure. Maybe the context of that question, Ymer, is what we just talked about our profile, that SME orientation, particularly in our small business franchise, which is almost a $6,000,000,000 business on a run rate basis today. I mean, we’ve consistently invested in that business for many, many, many years, many decades. And you could look at our platform, we call it Icon, where most of our agents go, you could look at what we’ve done with some of our other platforms. It’s just sort of that continual mindset at least over the last fifteen years, I think has been very powerful and it’s compounding our capabilities.

But specifically to your question, I would just remind everyone that we worked on things I think, in a good sequence, in the right sequence from a foundational side. And we had a lot of old platforms out there, whether it be claim systems, administration systems, benefit systems that were just sort of old and tired. I would say over the last ten years, twelve years specifically, I mean we’ve methodologically gone through the organization and sort of freshened up and gone to sort of modern platforms. And I’ll give you more examples that I think I’ve shared with this group before where when I came to The Hartford I think we had seven or eight claim systems and now we have one with Widewire. We had old administration systems that were different between business units.

Now we have Guidewire that’s really our commercial platform across the board. Personal lines, the same way. Recently, we’ve invested over 300,000,000 a personal lines platform sponsored by Duck Creek to really modernize our Prevail product and offerings through AARP and now we’re going to go back into the independent agent channel in a more meaningful way. So that was sort of like foundational type of activities that we needed to do. It’s not very sexy, but it really gave us, I think, the data advantages that we’re seeing today.

And that’s sort of the last phase that we’ve been in, data analytics, data science, using our data particularly in small commercial where 75% of all new business goes through our machinery, you could say AI machinery, without a human touch. And we’re going to continue to do that in various aspects of our specialty business and then if you think in claims, the claims side had been data rich that allows us once we’ve organized our data better there to do some of the AI stuff we’re doing. And I would say as it relates specifically I think to our technological advantages going forward is they’re still, they’re still they need to play out. Right? I mean, we have a big invest agenda over the next five years that we’ll oversee.

But I think the foundational elements are there, the data science and data analytics are there. I think if you think in terms of really using AI to augment human talent, to better the customer experience, to have agents be able to do business with us in a more timely fashion that it’s less costly for them to interact with us, that makes margin, I think that’s what we’re poised to do. And the three big areas you know, that we’re poised to to and are making, you know, bigger investments is claims, underwriting, and operations. And I’ll go in reverse order. In operations, we’re rolling out AWS Connect, you know, which is the next version of a call center technology, but really deeply embedded with AI to understand customer sentiment, to help with faster turnarounds, help more directly with self-service.

A big investment that we should finish early twenty twenty six with the full rollout. Another example in the claims area, we’re doing medical records summarization with AI where we’re able to read a thousand page medical record, summarize it basically in a couple hours to, again, augment our human talent that is still managing claims. I use that word twice now intentionally because I don’t see AI replacing people, I see it enhancing capabilities and the human touch, and obviously improving productivity so that we need fewer people in the future, but it is still an augmentation approach. And in the underwriting side, there’s some top secret stuff going on, so I’m not going talk about it.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay. Do you want to talk about the top secret stuff?

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: No, I don’t, but I want to add to something that Chris talked about with our small business results because a lot of times we get questions on you can talk about use of technology and AI but what’s the proof point that it actually is benefiting you? Chris commented that 75% of quotes that come into small business go straight through on the glass. That you could do that, but what really is the proof is, okay, what are your results? And when you look at the results in our small business with an underlying combined ratio consistently below 90, that shows that, yes, we’re doing it fast, but we’re doing it accurately and you need to have both of those. And we’re looking to build upon those capabilities in other areas of our business, but that’s a proof point that I just wanted to share.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: No, that’s perfect. And for me as a non technological person, knowing how these things play out is tremendously helpful. So thank you for that. I want spend a little bit of time on the business segment, starting off with your position and I was hoping you could talk about the advantages and disadvantages about being a leader in small commercial on the one hand data, on the other hand and I’m hoping you’ll address this, is there a reluctance among your agents to put even more business with one of the companies that’s already one of the biggest on their shelves?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yeah, I think the simple answer there is there’s only advantages.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: I don’t feel any disadvantages in our small business capabilities. As I said, we’re on our way to almost 6,000,000,000 of premium. We still have about 4% market share. I still think there’s major opportunities in other E and S capabilities. We’ve built out our binding capabilities, but I think we can do more with E and S on a direct you know, written basis, you know, through our machinery.

So, yeah, I still think that is the fastest growing business segment, you know, for us, you know, with the strongest consistent margins, you know, over a longer period of time. So that’s small. Then if you look at middle, again, I think middle’s SME orientation is very similar to small, a little different just because there’s more underwriting required in some of those lines of business, but everything that we’ve learned in small over the last twenty five years, we’re going try to implement from a process side, a workflow side, a data and analytics side. Using more AI in that business unit today from an underwriting side than most. So that’s the business unit that’s going to lead sort of our AI underwriting activities and we’ve really worked hard on diversifying our product offerings and underwriting appetite in sort of that middle to large segment.

So I think again, we will be able to serve our agents and their customers, our shared customers in a more holistic fashion because our premise is, and if Moe were here, he would say it eloquently, you know, that as agents and brokers continue to consolidate, they’re gonna deal with fewer carriers, and those fewer carriers need to serve more of their holistic needs, and that’s exactly what we’ve been working on for the last ten years. Okay. And then

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: No. I was just gonna say, the other thing I would add to that, especially as it relates to the small business aspect, is we already talked about speed and accuracy but the third component that we talk about quite often is consistency and that to the point that you made on would agents or brokers not want to concentrate with certain insurers, if you’re not consistent they’re not going to want to do that. And so that’s a really important part of the strategy that the small business unit has.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: So just in terms of a follow-up there, so you’ve talked about obviously the analytical relevance the relevance of analytics to small commercial and a little bit more underwriting when you get to the middle market. If you were to continue on the spectrum to global specialty, is it reasonable to just say, okay, that’s the same idea, a little bit more underwriting, but still will benefit from the analytical investments that you’ve made?’

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yes, totally. And I would say again there’s two bifurcations or two components of when we think of global specialty. Global specialty has a small business orientation too. Right. Again, there’s everything we have done and continue to do in small commercial, Global Specialty for their small E and S, you know, written capabilities are going to use some of their own proprietary technologies, not Icon, not Guidewire that we have the administrative platform, but they do have something similar that again I think has been very effective in the marketplace and is getting accolades as far as speed, ease and accuracy that Beth talked about.

And then some of their other products just have a little bit more of a specialty orientation, and I’ll give you examples there, that do involve a little bit more underwriting. But again, with middle market sort of leading the way from the AI side, global specialty will do a fast follow with some of that underwriting knowledge and how we could apply it to AI. But if you look at global specialty, global specialty is about a 3 and a half billion dollar written premium business for us. And I think in term of global specialty of you know, what what do they what do they really do? And it’s some of it’s some of it’s products, some of it’s some of it’s industry verticals, you know, some of it’s international, some of it’s tech and cyber.

So it is a very diversified, you know, book of business that, you know, we built up over the years on our own organic basis and then obviously with some acquisition activity over, you know, the past couple of years. But, that business now is running pretty consistently in sort of the mid nineties from an underlying combined ratio basis with strong margins and again, very good growth potential. And it’s really diversifying, right, because there’s product lines like ocean marine in there or surety or political violence and terrorism, trade credit, E and O, D and O. And then you have some of our industry concentrations in verticals of construction where we have excess casualty products and then everything we’re doing in the energy space particularly in London and opening up a Singapore office. I’m just trying to give you sort of that excitement or that orientation of, you know, we’re gonna continue to find profitable pockets of business to underwrite, either on the small side or the large side with our global specialty business.

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: And I think on global specialty you said mid-90s, but I think you meant to say mid-80s Mid 80s, yes. I’m just

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: That would be better. I want to follow-up. Chris and I before we went live were chatting about the fact that it’s important not to confuse peak pricing with peak profitability and probably the best example of that has been workers’ compensation over the last several years where profitability has held up despite the fact that there has been little in the way of rate increase. I was hoping just for an update, what’s the current state of workers’ compensation? You’ve done a great job of diversifying so that it’s a smaller percentage but it’s still an important line of business.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yeah, no, it’s our largest individual product line along with disability in in our benefits business. So I I would say, you know, simply it’s still performing well. You know, we’ve been able to, you know, manage, you know, selection and and rate and use our proprietary approach from a portfolio side how we manage pricing and regulators. But I think the biggest component that we’ve always talked about is, you know, we still price for and reserve for medical severity at a 5% and that trend is holding up. In fact, you know, maybe it’s ticked up over the last year since we’ve been here and but it’s under five for sure and again, as long as it’s under five, you know, the economics that business for us still holds up very, very well.

You know, if you particularly look at it sort of on an accident year basis than on a calendar year basis as far as with all the reserve releases and some of that is a curse and a benefit at the same time. The curse is regulators won’t approve pricing because they don’t see the need to it on an accident year basis but that still benefits us and to the extent that medical trend is under 5% that means we’re putting up margin in our reserves to absorb any potential future shocks. We don’t see any of those on the horizon, but it’s always nice to have prudence in your reserves to observe any unknown trend that might merge. But I don’t know if you would add anything, Beth?

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay, fantastic. If we can shift to another line of business that’s been getting a lot of attention, commercial auto. How’s Hartford’s commercial auto book playing out? It’s been tough for the industry.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: You know, again, the context I would give you, and you don’t realize just what compounding rate increases of 15%, 20% every year does, and that’s about a billion 2 book for us today, spread amongst small SME businesses, whether it be small commercial or middle market. We do have some commercial auto orientation in our global specialty, you know, operations, which, is relatively small, but, so it’s a $2,500,000,000 excuse me, 1,200,000,000.0 book. I think it’s performing well. We had to make some reserve adjustments last year in 2024 that put our combined ratios I think a little above 100. But as we sit here today, we’re running below 100.

I wouldn’t say we’re at complete target margins, target margins here to produce a 15 or even a higher ROE. We still have some work to do, but we’ve been getting rate. I think we’ve made adjustments on trends from the loss reserve side. Beth can add her color. And it’s a product line that we just can’t avoid.

We have to price it for individual product line profitability, but we also need to think about it from an overall relationship and account basis of, again, trying to do more with our agents and distribution partners to serve their customer needs. That philosophy is alive and well, particularly for the auto line of business. But would you think?

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: No. I think you covered it well. I mean it is a combination of both rate we’re getting, looking very closely at the trend that we put into our loss cost estimates as well as then the work that we do on the underwriting side as far as size of fleet, deductibles, limits, all of those things kind of together point to improving profitability in commercial auto. Okay.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Is it a line that you’re looking to grow at this point in time other than through rate?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yes. We want to participate in the line, particularly when we account round other products. You would not expect us to be a monoline commercial auto writer.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Right. Okay, fair enough. Moving along this line of business discussion, this is a tough question because you can ask why didn’t this thing happen? But a lot of competitors have really struggled with general liability reserves and Hartford has not. So I have my own thesis in terms of why you’ve done a pretty good job of that, but was hoping you could flush it out.

Is that what you underwrite, the size of accounts, analytics or anything

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: you want to Well, sit back. Tell us. No. You know, I would say honestly, we haven’t been pristine. You know, we made some adjustments last year, we needed to.

You know, trends and certain assumptions, particularly for the slip and fall activity that I think we described in certain real estate related activities or malls or foot traffic was a little higher, those slip and fall claims just got more and more expensive to settle and we needed to take our adjustments. I think the good news for everyone in this room and listening is that ’25 is holding up. So the recalibration of our trends is holding. We feel good about that. It’s a line that it’s getting the strongest rate across our portfolio.

And when we think about it, I’ve always talked in terms of sort of primary GL, umbrella, and then obviously our excess capabilities. But in aggregate, you know, we’re probably 9%, 10% rate, you know, for all three of those products. And then the excess line, we’re probably in the 16%, you know, rate area. So and I expect that will continue for, you know, the foreseeable future just given trends, social inflation, legal system abuse, everything that agitates me. I promise not to go off.

But those trends are still alive and well until there’s more national wide reform in certain areas. But I think to answer your question, it’s a little bit of price, it’s a little bit of avoiding certain classes of business, it’s a little bit of terms and conditions, you know, knowing where not to write umbrellas, particularly in states with auto fleets and things along those lines. So again, I think our underwriters, again led by Moe, if you were here, I think he’s doing and the team is doing a great job on risk selection, participating where we want to, getting the rate where we want to, and again, solving customers’ and agents’ distribution needs. I think we’re balancing all those equations pretty well. Yeah.

What would you add?

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: The only other thing I would add is that throughout that process, there’s very tight alignment between the underwriters, the claim folks, the actuarial folks. As claim activity changes, our actuaries are responding to that and our underwriters are responding to that as well. So it’s a very tight loop. Because ultimately, if you start to see that activity, you got to respond with pricing and you’ve got to do that quickly. And so even though we did have to make adjustments last year, we were real time also adjusting our views on pricing need so that we could get that into marketplace.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Great. Thank you. And we touched on this earlier.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Does that match up with your thesis?

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: It does. It has a few more details than I put in there, but I was hoping you’d know more about it than I did. So I think we’re good there. When you talk to your distribution about growth in global specialty, can you talk a little bit more about which product lines you’re looking for?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yeah. Yeah. So I tried to allude to some of our product lines, but I would say from the industry specialization, energy is in there. So energy would be one, both carbon and non carbon based energy. It’s global product line that the way we manage now, particularly with our US resources, but our strong resources in London, So there’s an orientation there.

I mentioned surety, both contract and construction related, you know, surety activities which has been a very profitable line in global specialty, you know, there. You know, we’re top 10, top seven maybe in global specialty, in surety, but it’s a product line we’d like to continue to grow. I mentioned everything we do in our construction vertical on an E and S basis, you know, is in this line of business and that’s close to a billion dollars of premium across the country. I mentioned Ocean Marine, you know, particularly led here in The US, but the contributions from our London operations, our e and o, d and o practices, again, a global product line. Strong capabilities here in The US led by that team, but also equally strong capabilities in London.

And then I would say London rounds out global specialty with a casualty, a liability orientation in various, you know, segments, industry segments in various economies that bring those needs to the London market. I think that’s sort of the highlight. And I would put cyber in there. Cyber is, I think this group knows, is a product line that we didn’t have a lot of appetite for, but I think that’s changed over the last two years. We built a, I’ll just call it a new chassis, you know, that involves a lot more upfront risk management, detection, avoidance, you know, sustainability in sort of those products, and then with a full suite of recovery capabilities and vendors.

So again, that’s a small mid market orientation with that product, but that’s a product managed by global specialty. And then we use distribution in small and middle market agents.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Great. Fantastic. My takeaway is both diversification and the growth opportunities in having all of these product sets. I just want to take a second and say if there are questions in the room, please, well I guess you could have your phone ring or raise your hand and we’ll get the mic to you right away. But moving along, you mentioned this earlier, wanted to dig into this a little bit more, reentering the independent agency market for personal lines.

What’s the medium and long term goal? What is it that you want to achieve?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yes. I think the context, and we’ve alluded to when we struck a new ten year deal with AARP that we were going to make an investment in that direct response chassis. I was actually in DC last night and yesterday had dinner with the new AARP CEO and just really really excited about, you know, I I think ARP’s rebranding and some of their digital efforts and sort of modernizing, you know, their their membership and thinking about value differently. So I’m so glad, you know, that we have that relationship with that contract that I think goes through 02/1933, somewhere in there. But the whole premise of making that investment in the AARP direct response business was then to be able to use the same technology, maybe different class plans to come back into the agency channel and after three, four years of rolling out to ARP, we were ready to use again that same chassis and products Prevail to our direct or to our independent agents.

And I think the benefit for us is a lot of our independent agents, particularly in small and middle, know us. They know what we stand for, they know our product sets, they know our reputation and always doing things in the right way. So turning back on an agency, independent agency orientation commercial auto and home, I think will be relatively straight forward. We have our experiments going right now, our initial rollouts in two states, I think Illinois and Arizona. We’ll be in six states by the end of the year and we hope to be in 30 states by the end of 02/1926.

I gotta forget what year I’m in.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: It keeps changing.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: And so you say the goal, I think the goal is, look, we’re not gonna try to be the the absolute leader in in personal lines.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Mhmm.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: But to have a a growth orientation with a mature market segment orientation, you know, with our brand, products that stand for quality, products that we really step into exposures when when people need it. We’re not a bare minimum company. Right? There’s a lot of organizations out there that just sell basic $10,000 liability policies so that someone can check the box. That’s not us.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Right.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: We actually want to protect our policyholders. They could be small business policyholders that give us them the opportunity to do their home and auto. And look, if we’re able to grow that business from say 4,000,000,000 of premium today to 7,000,000,000 over the next five years or so, I think that would be a reasonable goal. It’s not growth at any cost, it’s growth at profitable levels with key agents that represent our brand and our customers in the way that we would want it. So that’s sort of the mission.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay. That’s very helpful and very thorough. Thank you. I think the personal auto industry has gotten past the last couple of years of really sustained, really elevated claim cost inflation. Right now the current risk is tariffs where there’s some uncertainty.

And I was hoping to just get a sense as to how quickly, if and when we get certainty on tariffs, you can implement those pricing changes.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: I’m going ask Beth to answer that. But we’ve said before, particularly for the ’25 here, you know, the tariff impact is going be pretty modest. I think it’s, as we said, it’s, it can be contained within our loss cost picks, know, for the full year where we have a certain amount of, you know, prudence. So we’ll have to see then how things ultimately play out in in ’26 and beyond. You you guys follow the news like we do.

You know, there’s still a lot of debate on tariffs, legality, what levels, how it’s all gonna, you know, work and get implemented. So we’ll have to see how that plays out. But I feel like we got the right listening post and right abilities to react pretty quickly.

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: Yeah. I mean, I think our teams are ready to react. And there’s always a little bit of lag with the way pricing works. I mean, some states, you can obviously implement faster than others. But I think unlike some of the trends that we saw several years ago, which were just like building upon building upon building, like it was hard to get ahead We of really see the tariff impacts as sort of a step change, and we’ll react to that and then, move forward.

So I would expect the lag to be, contained. And as Chris said, manageable, especially as we think about the loss trends that we’re picking to incorporate the fact that we could see some pressure on some of those types of costs.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay. Fantastic. And I apologize for not knowing this, but the independent agency auto product, is that a six month or twelve month term?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Six month.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Twelve month home. Right. Six month auto.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay, perfect, thanks. I want to spend a little time on employee benefits. What are the and you’ve talked about how there’s price competition there and these are multi year policies, so to the extent that there may be loss trend it can take longer to be able to respond to that. What are the impediments to changing that and issuing one year policies?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that question, Meyer.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: I like to be creative.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Yeah. It’s very creative. I think the honest answer is customers, particularly the large national account customers, want a level of certainty their costs, their employee costs and benefits. So as you know, most of our disability products, both short term and long term, generally have three year rate guarantees. A three year rate guarantee doesn’t mean the client can’t test the market after any period in there.

Right? So it’s not like it’s locked down. But there is a level of certainty from a price side that we’ve communicated to a client for that three year rate guarantee. The life component, you can even get longer in sort of the five, seven year trends. And that’s why we’ve always talked about being prudent with the assumptions over those guarantee periods, because you really have to be thoughtful and prudent to give a price that you’re willing to accept for that period of time that meets your profitability and your return characteristics.

So I think we’ve done pretty well in getting that right. As I said on the last earnings call, I think our life insurance assumptions, particularly coming out of the pandemic, were probably too conservative in hindsight. We were pushing for too much rate. That had the impact of slower new business because there was alternatives. I think we’ve recalibrated at least through ’26 and the next couple years after that, you know, mortality trends that I think will be more competitive.

But more importantly, still realistic of what’s happening from a trend side. And the endemic state that we anticipated is no longer in our assumptions.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Okay. Fantastic. And again, if there are questions in the room, raise your hand. But I was hoping within employee benefits, if you could talk about the various tools you have. And I’m thinking again primarily technology tools that enable you to control loss costs to sustain the really good results that we’ve been seeing.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: I would say, Mare, we’ve built a lot of great tools both in our claims systems, our digital portals, how we interface with employees and employers from an absence size. We’ve got a new leave lens product that we put out there which is sort of the new trends, absence management or leave in general. And again, really proud of the capabilities that we’ve built there and continue to roll out to various parts of the country. I think the question you’re getting at from a technical side of what tools do you have that helps manage claims and benefits, I would say is that we have a unified claims system, so that’s important. We have good data.

We have good collaboration with the workers’ comp side of the business, particularly in the disability product line where, again, there’s a layer of management that sits on top of both. There’s layers of data and analysis that we do on both. But if you really think about it, from the disability and the life insurance side, I don’t mean to be callous, but on life mortality, it’s not too sophisticated. Right.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: That’s

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: You get a death certificate and just got to make sure it’s a covered claim. On the disability side, again different than the workers’ comp side. Remember workers’ comp, we actually direct medical care. We don’t provide it, obviously we have provider networks, but we’re ultimately responsible for directing and paying to get a person that is injured back to work. In disability, whether it be short term or long term, we’re replacing income, lost income due to the inability to work, a disabling condition.

Again, relatively straightforward but there’s always opportunities to challenge diagnosis, always opportunities to maybe suggest different treatments. So those are all the skills that we have and it’s really based in I think the over 300 nurses that we have embedded in the organization. It’s the consultation we get with our medical staff with our frontline claims capabilities in addition to having a modern integrated claims platform for disability.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: And that claims platform, as I understand, is integrated with workers’ compensation on the business side? Yes. Okay. Perfect.

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: Customers that use our product line in comp and disability get increased capabilities from insights just insights on what’s happening with their employee base.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Right. I want to move to Hartford Funds and ask, because this question doesn’t come up a lot, I don’t know if it’s never been asked, but operationally what’s the strategy to maximize this unit’s earnings?

Chris Swift, CEO, The Hartford: I would say, again, just so everyone understands, Hartford Funds is a 40 act based organization that sells mutual funds through independent financial planners. And we have two sub advisors, so sort of the machinery of actually choosing the investments is done by Wellington and Schroders, two long term partners. So the value proposition there is performance matters. They’ve had a rich history of performing very strongly, both domestically and internationally. They have strong fixed income capabilities and strong equity capabilities in various flavors of equity.

So it is ultimately perform and compete for mind share of the independent financial planner that needs still to use mutual funds in their business. We’ve morphed some of our mutual fund product into ETFs that tend to be more tax efficient, easier to administer, a little cheaper. But, you know, that’s that’s just part of a general trend, you know, that is happening in the advisory businesses. So to me, it’s getting our brand out there, representing Wellington and Schroeder’s capabilities and performance and solving again for customer needs through their independent financial planner.

Unidentified speaker, Analyst: Great, thanks. And then we’ve got time for one more question, I’m going to direct this to Beth and I’m making the argument for inconsistency, sort of. Your share repurchases have been very, very consistent. We don’t really see much of a change when let’s say the market has been very sour on P and C. And I was hoping you could talk us through that approach and why not be more aggressive when the market is less optimistic?

Beth Costello, CFO, The Hartford: Yes. Mean if you look at how we’ve executed on our share repurchase activities through the years, which have been increasing as our cash flows have increased from our businesses. But quarter to quarter, as far as allocating funds, are pretty consistent. We think that there is value there. Within a given quarter, the activity that we’re doing within a quarter, the way we set up our plans, they do respond to changes in price and there’s an incentive for our trading partner to outperform what the average share price is.

So I think we balance it both ways, but we have felt that having that consistent approach, it’s consistent. I also don’t see that when large events happen, we also don’t pull back on our program. So you look at what happened in the first quarter with the California wildfires. I mean, again, the way we’re balancing our excess capital, feel very good about our ability to still be in the market. And I think that, that has served us well over the years.

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