MARCH 10, 2026 / 3:00PM, GBLI.OQ - Q4 2025 Global Indemnity Group LLC Earnings Call
Our short duration investment portfolio delivered acceptable net investment income results at
$15.3 million, down a tad from the prior period of $16.1 million. As Brian will provide more details on the investment portfolio, I would just observe that we are sitting at an extremely short
duration of one year with very high-quality fixed income investments. Given where we are in a very uncertain world today, I am personally happy that we are
playing defense and have the ability to redeploy into a more attractive portfolio once things settle down.
As we noted in our press release, excluding
the largest ever California wildfire loss that we experienced in the first quarter, our quarterly year-to-date accident results improved each quarter with a sequence of
94.8%, 94.7%, 93.2% and 92.2% for the full year. Even including the wildfire losses, which occurred in the first quarter, we still had an okay full year accident year result of 96.2%. I would also note that we did make a modest adjustment to prior
year loss reserves in the fourth quarter of $9 million. That’s about 1.2% of year-end carried reserves.
The adverse development continues as it has over the past few years to be largely attributed to the accident years 2020, 2021 and 2022. These are the three
years where we had an extraordinarily poor loss experience in a couple of programs, both since terminated and our New York City habitational risk. We continue to grow our ongoing book of business, which we label as core Belmont at 9%. The press
release mentioned our overall reported premium growth was flat as we continue to trim back our remaining underperforming specialty programs.
I will note
that the 9% growth was driven by a 77% growth in our assumed reinsurance book. 16% in Vacant Express, 8% in Collectibles and 3% in Penn-America Wholesale. The modest 3% growth in Penn was a disappointment given that we had grown at 8% for the first
nine months of 2025. This was driven by a major drop in new business submissions, resulting in a very weak fourth quarter as we observed a major shift in the level of price competition in the E&S wholesale space. This heightened competition has
been fueled by both our existing E&S competitors and the admitted market coming back into the property markets in a big way.
Given the work we have
put into improving our current products and the discipline to trim everything that didn’t meet our underwriting criteria, we feel very strongly that we should now see Belmont core gross premiums grow in the 15% to 20% range or more in 2026. As
we expected, our restructuring expenses remain high. This is due to the combination of, number one, our ongoing investments in completing year two of the three-year digital transformation of our technology stack that includes software,
infrastructure and data; and number two, our investment in talent to grow our Katalyx distribution platform.
I recognize that this focused combination,
along with normal operating costs leaves our overall expenses too high. As such, we are deeply focused on minimizing the effect on our competitiveness within each product channel. Having established that our Kaleidoscope platform is working for our
first two deployed products exactly as envisioned two years ago. Building on this momentum, we are confident that all three of our existing direct product groups, that would be wholesale commercial, Vacant Express and Collectibles will be fully
integrated on the platform by year end.
Not only will our customers see a difference in both our service levels and responsiveness, but our organization
will finally be structured to benefit from scale over the next few years. In addition to the progress we have made in our software development, 98% of our data center servers have now been moved into our cloud configuration with the remaining few
servers scheduled to move midyear. As we have previously commuted, all our internal data has now been moved to a modern cloud-based Fabric Lakehouse. We are currently running a large number of our existing reporting packages against both the old and
the new data sources to verify that the mapping is 100% reconciled.
Equally important, the data has been structured and stored to prepare us for the
significant number of emerging AI projects that are being identified across all aspects of our company. Reflecting on the last three years of significant IT investment and our renewed focus on core business, it can be challenging to see just how far
we’ve come. However, our ongoing commitment to underwriting excellence has resulted in an exceptionally attractive book of in-force business. As the year progresses, we’re set to start seeing the
business rationale for our digital transformation unfold in real time.
I want to reaffirm my personal belief in the strength of our existing core
business. With our reorganized structure and the strategic efforts we’ve been putting in place, I am very confident that we are well positioned to deliver substantial value to our owners in the near future. At this point, I’ll turn it
over to Brian.
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