Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Given the competitive advantages that will come from deploying AI across the insurance value chain, and the expertise, resources and data required to get there, scale will increasingly be a differentiator in our industry, as will the ability to execute complex initiatives effectively and efficiently. Expertise, resources, data, scale and execution excellence all favor Travelers.

Alan D. Schnitzer

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

To My Fellow Shareholders

In 2023, we were very pleased to deliver strong bottom-line results and excellent top-line production. We generated $3.1 billion* of core income and 11.5% core return on equity, despite a year of elevated industrywide catastrophe losses and significant marketwide headwinds impacting our Personal Insurance business. In terms of the top line, our best-in-class marketplace execution and leading field organization enabled us to generate record net written premiums of more than $40 billion for the year, positioning us well for 2024.

 

We again benefited meaningfully from having a diversified set of businesses. Our Business Insurance and our Bond & Specialty Insurance segments posted excellent results this past year, while our Personal Insurance segment continued to operate in a challenging environment.

 

Our underwriting and investment results, together with our strong balance sheet, enabled us to return nearly $2.0 billion of excess capital to shareholders.

 

At the same time, we meaningfully grew both book value and adjusted book value per share and made important investments in our business.

 

We also continued to successfully execute on our ambitious innovation agenda – motivated by the idea that tomorrow’s success is built today. In a world of unprecedented change, we have been hard at work for several years ensuring that our competitive advantages remain relevant and differentiating into the future. With this in mind, in this year’s letter I will also discuss an important area for us, artificial intelligence (AI), and how we are leveraging the power of AI across our three innovation priorities: extending our lead in risk expertise; providing great experiences for our customers, agents, brokers and employees; and optimizing productivity and efficiency.

 

First, however, let me turn to a more detailed discussion of our 2023 performance and how we are positioning Travelers for continued success.

 

Our 2023 Results – Excellence in Execution

Travelers delivered core income of $3.1 billion, or $13.13 of core income per diluted share, generating a core return on equity of 11.5%, a meaningful spread above both the 10-year Treasury and our cost of equity. We produced these very strong results notwithstanding elevated industrywide catastrophe losses and a personal lines operating environment that, while improving, was difficult during the year.

 

We delivered a record $3.2 billion of after-tax  underlying underwriting income, an increase of more than 55% compared to the prior year, and an underlying combined ratio that improved 250 basis points to an excellent 89.5%. This year’s outstanding underlying underwriting results are even more impressive when considered in their historical context. As illustrated by the following chart, over the past four years, we have taken our underlying underwriting income to an entirely new level and sustained it there.

 

Turning to the top line, today’s production generates tomorrow’s earned premiums. In 2023, we delivered record net written premiums of $40.2 billion, up 14% compared to the prior year. This represents the 14th consecutive year of net written premium growth. All three of our business segments contributed to this strong top-line performance, with Business Insurance up 16%, Bond & Specialty Insurance up 3% and Personal Insurance up 13%. We remain very well positioned to continue to profitably grow our business. Importantly, our growth has not come from competing margin away. As demonstrated by our continued strong margins, we have grown by successfully investing in the franchise value – products, services and experiences – that our customers want to purchase and our distribution partners want to sell, and, of course, through excellent execution by our field organization.

 

* See “Additional information” for a discussion and calculation of non-GAAP financial measures.

Our Investment Expertise

We strive to be thoughtful underwriters on both sides of our balance sheet, and we have always managed our investment portfolio to support our insurance operations, not the reverse. Accordingly, our investment portfolio is positioned to meet our obligations to policyholders under almost every foreseeable circumstance – anything from a global pandemic to a significant natural disaster to a financial crisis.

 

With this in mind, we are focused on risk-adjusted returns and credit quality rather than reaching for yield that is not commensurate with the underlying risk. Our well-defined and consistent investment portfolio has been a meaningful and reliable contributor to our results, year in and year out.

 

This is exactly what we saw in 2023. Net investment income increased by more than 12% to a very strong $2.4 billion after-tax. From a fixed income perspective, we benefited throughout 2023 from very strong cash flow and the trend of higher interest rates, which began in 2022. For 2024, we expect to earn approximately $2.6 billion after-tax on our fixed income portfolio, our highest level ever.

 

Our Data-Driven Underwriting Culture and Expertise Set Us Apart

Underwriting excellence is of course key to our success, and there is nothing more critical to underwriting excellence than a culture that values strong performance over time and understands how to balance the art and science of decision making based on data and analytics. In other words, evaluating risk and reward is at the heart of what we do.

 

Our culture alone is a significant competitive advantage, and one that we believe is very hard to replicate. A critical component of this culture is our granular approach to underwriting. In our commercial businesses, that means execution on an account-by-account or class-by-class basis. In personal lines, it means a very high degree of segmentation by risk profile, product and geography. With that and our advanced data and analytics, we thoughtfully select the risks we write and price our products deliberately with our target return in mind.

 

Like every aspect of our business, our focus on performance over time is core to how we manage our catastrophe exposure. Although we are unable to predict what the next event will be or where it will occur, we are taking steps every day to ensure that our portfolio of risk properly contemplates the potential for loss and that we maintain the right balance of risk and reward. While the impact of the risk-based decisions we are making today is not always immediately evident, they will continue to drive our performance over time.

 

As a result of our thoughtful risk and reward approach to catastrophe management, our share of catastrophe losses over time has been significantly below our market share. This outperformance is the result of our prudent and integrated approach to managing our catastrophe exposures through portfolio, underwriting and pricing actions.

 

We continue to make significant investments in advanced capabilities to ensure that our underwriters have the tools and insights necessary to develop a comprehensive view of catastrophe risk. As just a few examples, in 2023, we:

 

  •  Introduced new, internally developed storm surge underwriting capabilities, providing a granular view of storm surge risk to inform underwriting decisions at the point of sale;
  •  Invested in new climate research to deepen our understanding of changing climate conditions related to peak catastrophe perils; and
  •  Enhanced our view of the risks related to tornado/hail to align with the latest science and implemented a new tornado/hail catastrophe model that includes new variables to improve risk segmentation and better reflect current weather trends.

 

While weather and catastrophe losses continue to be a major challenge for the industry, we are confident that we are making the necessary investments to maintain our underwriting excellence and achieve target returns over time.

 

Deliberate and Disciplined Execution Over Time

Roughly seven years ago, just after I began my tenure as CEO, we laid out a focused innovation strategy and shared that if we were successful in its execution, we would expect to grow our business at attractive returns – a reflection of our belief that any strategy to achieve industry-leading returns over time requires a strategy to grow over time. The graphs below demonstrate our successful execution of this strategy.

 

1 Represents growth from 2012 through 2016.

2 Represents growth from 2016 through 2023.

3 Underlying underwriting combined ratio, which excludes the impact of net prior year reserve development and catastrophe losses.

Underlying underwriting income, which excludes the impact of net prior year reserve development and catastrophe losses.

5 Invested assets excludes net unrealized investment gains (losses).

Accelerating Net Written Premium Growth

Starting with the top line, we have grown net written premiums at a compound annual growth rate of 7% over the past seven years. That is 2 1/2 times our rate of growth from 2012 to 2016. The growth rate in each of the past two years was double digits, the result of a deliberate and tailored strategy: We achieved unit growth where we liked the opportunity and stronger pricing where we needed it.

The growth rate in each of the past two years was double digits, the result of a deliberate and tailored strategy: We achieved unit growth where we liked the opportunity and stronger pricing where we needed it.

In Business Insurance, we have added more than $4 billion to our top line over the past two years. The investments we have made in capabilities to enhance the franchise value that we offer to our customers and distribution partners have contributed to strong retention and growth in new business.

 

In Bond & Specialty Insurance, we have increased net written premiums by about a half a billion dollars, or 14%, over the past two years. More than half of that growth has come from our very profitable Surety business, where our market-leading position has enabled us to benefit from increased demand for bonds with higher contract values and projects resulting from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other federal programs.

 

Across both of our commercial segments, since 2021, we have about doubled our excess and surplus (E&S) writings to around $2.5 billion. That includes organic growth from the E&S business we write in National Property, our Northfield business and our Lloyd’s business, among others, as well as the impact of more recent strategic efforts, which include our relationships with Fidelis Insurance Holdings Limited and Corvus Insurance Holdings, Inc. (Corvus), an industry-leading cyber insurance managing general underwriter. The margins in our E&S business have been quite attractive.

 

In Personal Insurance, where margins have not been at target levels in recent periods, net written premium growth of $3.4 billion over the past two years has been almost entirely a result of price increases. The Personal Insurance team has done an excellent job of maintaining our strong and loyal customer base while achieving meaningful pricing gains.

 

At the same time, they have also done a great job with product management. Our advanced peril-by-peril Quantum Home 2.0® offering now represents more than 60% of the total property portfolio, and the adoption of our telematics product, IntelliDrive®, among new customers has been strong. With pricing gains and enhanced product sophistication, the book should contribute to our earnings power going forward as we move toward target returns.

 

Also important, across all three segments, our growth is concentrated in products, classes of business and geographies, and through distribution partners, that we know well. That gives us a lot of confidence in the quality of the business we are adding to the books.

 

Consistently Strong Underlying Profitability

At the same time as we have meaningfully increased our rate of growth, we have also maintained very strong and consistent underlying profitability. This demonstrates that we are not growing by underpricing the business or compromising our underwriting discipline. We have grown by investing in the products, services and experiences that our customers want to buy and our distribution partners want to sell. We have also grown through excellent execution and hard work on the part of our outstanding field organization.

 

Improving Expense Ratio

One of the clear strategic objectives of our innovation strategy has been to optimize productivity and efficiency. As you can see in the chart on the previous page, over the last seven years, we have reduced our expense ratio by 3.6 points to just over 28% for 2023, which is more than a 10% improvement relative to the average of our expense ratio from 2012 through 2016 of around 32%. Enhanced operating leverage gives us the flexibility to let the benefit fall to the bottom line and/or invest further in our strategic priorities.

 

Case in point, since 2017, we have nearly doubled our investment in strategic technology initiatives. Over that same period, we have carefully managed growth in routine but necessary technology expenditures. In other words, over a seven-year period, we have simultaneously and meaningfully increased our technology spend, improved the strategic mix of that spend and lowered our expense ratio.

 

The upshot of higher growth at strong underlying margins is record levels of underlying underwriting income, cash flows from operations and invested assets.

Higher Underlying Underwriting Income

From 2012 through 2019, underlying underwriting income averaged $1.3 billion after-tax. 2023 marks the fourth consecutive year that the underlying underwriting income exceeded $2.0 billion and the first time that we have exceeded $3.0 billion. We have taken our underlying underwriting income to a meaningfully higher level and sustained it there.

 

Higher Cash Flows from Operations

Our cash flows from operations increased to more than $7.5 billion in 2023, the fourth consecutive year that this has been more than $6 billion and more than double our average cash flow from operations in the earlier part of the last decade. Cash flow is not a metric that we or our industry talk a lot about, but it is important. It is what gives us the ability to make important investments in our business, return excess capital to shareholders and grow the investment portfolio.

 

Growing Invested Assets

We meaningfully grew our investment portfolio to nearly $93 billion, excluding unrealized investment gains (losses). As we continue to reinvest at higher rates, our fixed income portfolio will continue to be a highly reliable source of earnings and value creation.

The Power of Our Diversified Businesses

Our results this year and over time demonstrate the benefits of the diversification of our business across core commercial, specialty and personal lines coverages. We engage broadly across nine major lines of insurance through our three business segments. Our portfolio is balanced across these lines of business and further diversified by geography and customer size and type. The depth and breadth of our business is a significant competitive advantage and one that would be very difficult to replicate.

 

Our commercial business segments demonstrated exceptional performance in 2023, delivering excellent bottom-line results and strong top-line production, which positions us well for 2024. In the Personal Insurance segment, we have made substantial strides toward achieving our target returns. Notably, in 2023, we reached our target returns on a written basis in the Automobile business across states that account for the majority of our premium.

Business Insurance generated segment income of $2.6 billion, driven by record net earned premium and its best ever underlying combined ratio of 88.9%. In terms of the top line, Business Insurance grew net written premiums by 15.8% to $20.4 billion. Renewal premium change of 11.9%, retention of 87% and new business of nearly $2.7 billion were all record results.

 

Bond & Specialty Insurance generated record segment income of $942 million, driven by strong earned premium and an outstanding combined ratio of 76.9%. In terms of the top line, Bond & Specialty Insurance grew net written premiums to a record $3.9 billion. In our profitable domestic management liability business, retention improved nearly 2 points to just over 90%, renewal premium change remained positive at 3.7%, and new business improved by 20% to $285 million. In our highly profitable and market-leading domestic surety business, net written premiums grew by 6% to more than $1.1 billion for the year.

 

Another highlight for Bond & Specialty Insurance this year was its agreement to purchase Corvus, an industry-leading cyber insurance managing general underwriter.

 

Personal Insurance had a segment loss of $128 million, reflecting a historically high level of industrywide catastrophe losses and inflationary pressures. Despite challenging market dynamics, we were steadfast in our disciplined approach  to execution and took significant pricing actions to improve profitability throughout the year. In terms of the top line, these pricing actions were the primary driver of a record  $15.9 billion in net written premiums, a 13% year-over-year increase. The average renewal premium change for the year was 17.1% in Domestic Automobile and 19.8% in Domestic Homeowners and Other – both at record levels.

In Personal Insurance, we also continued to evolve our segmentation, underwriting and terms and conditions, while managing new business flow to ensure that we deployed capacity thoughtfully in the face of significant market dislocation. These actions allowed us to navigate these challenges and, as the year went on, make progress toward our commitment to improving profitability and managing growth. We are very pleased with our targeted marketplace execution and are confident that we are on a path to generating leading returns in our Personal Insurance business.

Tomorrow’s Success Is Built Today: Artificial Intelligence

For a number of years now, our employees have rallied around our Perform and Transform call to action. Perform is about delivering on our objective of industry-leading returns over time, and Transform is about innovating to ensure that our competitive advantages are as relevant and differentiating tomorrow as they are today.

 

With this in mind, we have been hard at work positioning Travelers as a leader in the property casualty industry as it relates to leveraging the power of AI. We subscribe to the view that over time, the impact of AI across the economy will be profound. So is the opportunity for Travelers. With our Perform and Transform mindset and our disciplined framework for assessing our investment priorities, we have been focused for years on responsibly developing differentiating AI capabilities across our three innovation priorities: extending our lead in risk expertise; providing great experiences for our customers, agents, brokers and employees; and optimizing productivity and efficiency.

 

Top Talent, Sound Investment, Robust Data

Powering all of our AI efforts are industry-leading experts, meaningful strategic investments and a significant, hard-to-replicate data advantage.

 

Between our colleagues who are dedicated to AI specifically and others in enabling disciplines, we have a very significant number of our employees engaged in the objective of making sure that we are leading when it comes to AI.

 

These efforts are supported by significant and strategic investments. As discussed above, for some time, we have been steadily increasing, and improving the strategic mix of, our technology spend. That includes a meaningful increase in investments to develop or acquire cutting-edge AI capabilities built on modern cloud technology.

 

Finally, at the heart of any effective deployment of AI is data. The quantity and quality of data are key differentiators when it comes to AI. For more than a decade, we have been investing in data sets, data quality and data accessibility.

 

Between submissions in our commercial businesses and quotes in Personal Insurance, we intake millions of business opportunities each year. We also take in, adjust and adjudicate millions of claims. As one of the largest risk control organizations in the industry, we provide risk mitigation to our commercial customers, completing approximately 120,000 risk control consultations annually. We capture valuable and proprietary data from virtually all of those interactions.

A key success driver in insurance is segmenting risk as finely as possible to achieve pricing that is accurately calibrated to the risk. Deep learning models have significantly improved our ability to classify and segment risk in our flow businesses.

Our data also include decades of curated institutional knowledge in the form of policies, procedures, guidelines, forensic investigations and so on. All of that creates an excellent foundation for the next iteration of generative AI. In addition to our extensive proprietary data, we have been assembling actionable third-party data for years. In fact, we have more than 2,000 data sets from hundreds of third parties.

 

All in, we believe that we have a significant and hard-to-replicate data advantage. Given the competitive advantages that will come from deploying AI across the insurance value chain, and the expertise, resources and data required to get there, scale will increasingly be a differentiator in our industry, as will the ability to execute complex initiatives effectively and efficiently. Expertise, resources, data, scale and execution excellence all favor Travelers.

 

Executing on an Ambitious Roadmap

The potential use cases for AI in our industry are many and varied. We pursue very focused opportunities that are consistent with our innovation priorities and will create meaningful and sustainable competitive advantages, all with an eye toward leveraging strategic capabilities across our organization.

 

AI capabilities that we currently have in production span the spectrum from those driving efficiency through automation to more advanced generative AI and large language models. More advanced models augment various aspects of our underwriting, claim handling, service delivery and other work. We use intelligent process automation broadly throughout our business to handle hundreds of routine workflows. Automation and AI have been meaningful drivers of our expense ratio improvement.

 

A key success driver in insurance is segmenting risk as finely as possible to achieve pricing that is accurately calibrated to the risk. Deep learning models have significantly improved our ability to classify and segment risk in our flow businesses.

 

For example, in Personal Insurance, we leverage proprietary AI and aerial imagery to assess roof and other site-related conditions at the parcel level. Parcel-level risk assessment at scale was practically unimaginable until several years ago. And that type of information is very difficult to obtain from the insured with a reliable degree of accuracy.

 

In our Select Accounts business, we estimate that AI has improved business classification, a critical underwriting input, by more than 30 points. In our Middle Market business, we have developed a suite of sophisticated AI models that facilitate targeted cross-selling, supporting our effort to sell more products to more customers. We are also using AI to better understand our customers   and their needs. Through this improved customer segmentation, we can better align new product development and generate insights to improve the customer experience. Enhancing our industry-leading analytics, we use machine learning models to deliver sophisticated actuarial insights into loss cost trends and development, which improves our already-strong pricing and product monitoring capabilities.

 

On the most advanced end, we are leveraging generative AI in large language models, and we have been doing so for several years. For example, in our Bond & Specialty Insurance business, our proprietary large language models have processed hundreds of thousands of broker submissions as we work toward improving intake time from hours to minutes. This will enhance our responsiveness to our customers and distribution partners and contribute to our productivity.

 

In our Claim organization, a proprietary large language model digests legal complaints filed against our insureds and then highlights key liability and coverage issues, assists in routing the cases to the best suited defense counsel, and provides risk-related insights that can be incorporated into our underwriting process.

 

As the power of this technology grows, our deployments will become even more sophisticated. We are currently piloting a Travelers claim knowledge assistant, a generative AI tool trained on many thousands of pages of proprietary technical source material, previously only accessible through thousands of different documents. The model provides Travelers Claim professionals with the ability to easily access accurate, actionable information on technical and procedural claim matters, increasing speed, accuracy and consistency in various workflows, including in interactions with our customers and distribution partners.

 

As you can see, in terms of AI, we are investing with speed and strategic direction, consistent with our stated objective of delivering industry-leading returns. This is only some of what is in flight, and the capabilities that we have developed are in various phases of adoption. While we are already seeing the benefits of our investments in AI reflected in our results, the full impact of the capabilities we are developing and others on our roadmap are still ahead of us.

 

Consistent and Successful Long-Term Financial Strategy Delivers Shareholder Value

It is always important to consider our strategic initiatives and financial results in the context of what we are ultimately trying to achieve. At Travelers, our simple and unwavering mission for creating shareholder value is to:

 

  •  Deliver superior returns on equity by leveraging our competitive advantages;
  •  Generate earnings and capital substantially in excess of our growth needs; and
  •  Thoughtfully rightsize capital and grow book value per share over time.

 

The results we deliver are due to our deliberate and consistent approach to creating shareholder value. We have been clear for many years that one of our crucial responsibilities is to produce an appropriate return on equity for our shareholders. This has meant developing and executing financial and operational plans consistent with our goal of achieving superior returns, which we defined many years ago as a mid-teens core return on equity over time. We emphasize that this objective is measured over time because we recognize that the macroeconomic environment, loss cost trends, weather, and geopolitical and other factors impact our results from year to year, and that there will be years – or longer periods – and environments in which a mid-teens return is not attainable. In that regard, we established the mid-teens goal at a time when the 10-year Treasury was yielding around 5%, and mid-teens was simply the quantification of what qualified as an industry-leading return in that environment.

While we are already seeing the benefits of our investments in AI reflected in our results, the full impact of the capabilities we are developing and others on our roadmap are still ahead of us.

While the 10-year Treasury rate has moved closer to that level after years of historic lows, the upward trajectory over the past couple of years will take time to earn into our fixed income portfolio, with approximately 10% of the fixed income portfolio maturing each year. In any event, we always seek to deliver industry-leading returns over time.

 

Our 2023 return on equity of 13.6% and core return on equity of 11.5% again meaningfully exceeded the average return on equity for the domestic P&C industry of 8.4%, according to estimates from Conning, Inc., a global investment management firm and insurance research provider. As shown in the chart on the following page, our return on equity has significantly outperformed the average return on equity for the industry in each of the past 10 years. Importantly, these industry-leading returns on an absolute basis are even more impressive on a risk-adjusted basis when you take into account our low level of volatility. The level and consistency of our return on equity over time reflect the value of our competitive advantages and the discipline with which we run our business.

 

A Balanced Approach to Rightsizing Capital

Our strong and consistent returns over time, together with our fortress balance sheet, have enabled us to grow book value per share and adjusted book value per share consistently over the last 10 years.

 

During this period, we have also returned a significant amount of excess capital to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Over the last 10 years, we increased our dividend each year and grew dividends per share at an average annual rate of approximately 7%.

Adjusted Book Value per Share1

Dividends per Share

Notably, since we began our share repurchase program in 2006, we have returned approximately $55 billion of excess capital to our shareholders, including through  $41 billion of share repurchases – well in excess of the market capitalization of the company at that time. Just by virtue of our share repurchase program, your percentage ownership of Travelers increased 2% during 2023 alone. If you owned Travelers stock when we began our share repurchase program in 2006, your percentage ownership has increased to approximately 300% of your initial investment percentage. These percentage increases were even higher if you participated in our dividend reinvestment program. Over that same period, we have increased our dividend at an average annual rate of more than 8%.

Our capital management strategy has been an important driver of shareholder value creation over time. Our first objective for the capital we generate is to reinvest it in our business – organically and inorganically – to create shareholder value. For example, as we continue to meaningfully grow our top line, as we have for the past few years, we will retain more capital to support that growth. Also, we continue to invest in everything from talent to technology to further our ambitious innovation agenda, advance our strategic objectives and drive tomorrow’s performance.

 

Having said that, we are disciplined stewards of our shareholders’ capital. To the extent that we generate capital that we cannot reinvest consistent with our objective of generating industry-leading returns over time, we will manage it the same way we have for nearly two decades – by returning it to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. By returning excess capital to our investors, we give them the ability to allocate their investment dollars as they see fit, including by investing in companies with different growth profiles or capital needs, thereby efficiently allocating capital across the economy. Over time, that efficient allocation of capital in the marketplace contributes to a stronger economy.

 

Total Shareholder Return

Ultimately, it is the success of our strategy – with all its component parts – that drives our total return to shareholders over time. We have a well-established track record of managing the company to create value over the long term, through periods of weather volatility; through anticipated and unanticipated developments impacting loss trends; through both foreseeable and unforeseeable economic cycles; and through any number of more extreme economic, geopolitical and other conditions. With that in mind, the graph below compares our total return to shareholders since the 2008 financial crisis to the returns for the Dow 30, the S&P 500 and the S&P 500 Financials.

 

Our total return reflects the successful execution of our long-term strategy. We provide our shareholders with industry-leading returns, low volatility and high credit quality. The success of this long-term strategy is evident in the strong performance of our stock over time, which has been remarkably consistent relative to many others in the P&C industry. Viewing our performance through this long-term lens, we are as confident as ever that executing on our long-term financial strategy, managing Travelers with an over-time discipline and continuing to invest in our competitive advantages through our ambitious and focused innovation agenda is the right approach for building on Travelers’ outstanding record.

The Power of Shared Purpose

I opened this letter with a discussion of our success in 2023 and over recent years and would like to close this letter with something that I also view as another important part of our responsibility to our shareholders – our efforts to make sure that there is a political and business environment in which we can continue to be successful going forward.

 

I often say that Travelers’ success for more than 165 years is owed, in large part, to keeping the Travelers Promise – our commitment to taking care of our customers, our communities and our employees. But we do not take for granted that our ability to fulfill that promise rests upon the environment in which we operate: a representative democracy, built on resilient public institutions and an economic system governed by the rule of law.

One of Travelers’ great strengths is the sense of common purpose that unites our colleagues across the enterprise despite distance and differences.

It is for this reason that I see rising polarization across society as a business risk that deserves our attention. What’s more, I believe that businesses have an important role to play in preserving and strengthening the stability of the democratic system we share. When big, national challenges go unresolved, and when citizens are defined by what divides them, the consequences for the economy and civil society are profound, and these harms compound over time. Put another way, when you are in the business of insuring the output of the economy, as Travelers is, a lack of forward momentum on critical public policy questions can put downward pressure on the important economic activity that drives our top and bottom lines. At Travelers, we are rejecting polarization and are embracing pluralism as we strive to be part of the broader solution.

 

Polarization may be a generational challenge, but it is also an opportunity to lead. One of Travelers’ great strengths is the sense of common purpose that unites our colleagues across the enterprise despite distance and differences. Our sense of shared responsibility has always driven us forward, and I believe recommitting to unifying values such as civic engagement and pluralism can unify our communities, too.

 

To be part of the solution, we created Citizen Travelers, our nonpartisan civic engagement initiative. Through Citizen Travelers, we support and encourage our employees’ participation in local civic institutions, and we partner with leading organizations that support an informed electorate.

 

At its core, Citizen Travelers is a recognition that the future success of our business – and the outlook for inclusive prosperity in our communities – depends on our coming together to preserve and strengthen our public institutions.

 

We see Citizen Travelers as an extension of our broader mission and purpose. Every day, Travelers employees from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives work together, organized around both a shared mission of creating shareholder value and a common purpose of fulfilling the Travelers Promise.

 

The enthusiastic response we have received from employees and others confirms that we can achieve great things when we come together.

***

I am enormously grateful to my colleagues for their unwavering commitment to all that we stand for; to our agents and brokers for their tremendous partnership and friendship; to our customers and shareholders for their trust and confidence; and to our Board of Directors  for their wisdom and support. It is an honor to lead this great company.

Alan D. Schnitzer

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

© 2024 The Travelers Indemnity Company. All rights reserved.

Travelers.com

Download 10-K

Download Full Report

Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Business Insurance generated segment income of $2.6 billion, driven by record net earned premium and its best ever underlying combined ratio of 88.9%. In terms of the top line, Business Insurance grew net written premiums by 15.8% to $20.4 billion. Renewal premium change of 11.9%, retention of 87% and new business of nearly $2.7 billion were all record results.

Bond & Specialty Insurance generated record segment income of $942 million, driven by strong earned premium and an outstanding combined ratio of 76.9%. In terms of the top line, Bond & Specialty Insurance grew net written premiums to a record $3.9 billion. In our profitable domestic management liability business, retention improved nearly 2 points to just over 90%, renewal premium change remained positive at 3.7%, and new business improved by 20% to $285 million. In our highly profitable and market-leading domestic surety business, net written premiums grew by 6% to more than $1.1 billion for the year.

 

Another highlight for Bond & Specialty Insurance this year was its agreement to purchase Corvus, an industry-leading cyber insurance managing general underwriter.

Personal Insurance had a segment loss of $128 million, reflecting a historically high level of industrywide catastrophe losses and inflationary pressures. Despite challenging market dynamics, we were steadfast in our disciplined approach  to execution and took significant pricing actions to improve profitability throughout the year. In terms of the top line, these pricing actions were the primary driver of a record  $15.9 billion in net written premiums, a 13% year-over-year increase. The average renewal premium change for the year was 17.1% in Domestic Automobile and 19.8% in Domestic Homeowners and Other – both at record levels.

Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Portrait photo of Alan D. Schnitzer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer