The Phoenix Companies, Inc. Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-08-04 13:41:21.0

Tags: Exposure, Arbitration, Call Transcript, Reinsurance, Phoenix Companies Inc., Earnings, Reserve, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from Bob Glasspiegel, Langen McAlenney.

Bob Glasspiegel - Langen McAlenney

I was wondering if you guys can give me some more color on the discontinued reinsurance, specifically what happened on the arbitration, how many more arbitrations are outstanding? Any help on how we should think about this going forward would be appreciated.

Jim Wehr

Bob, I am going to ask Dave Pellerin to respond to that.

Dave Pellerin

In terms of the discontinued reinsurance situation we had a settlement in the quarter relating to a dispute that had been subject to arbitration proceedings and that was certainly a contributing factor to the decision to increase reserves in the quarter. In terms of remaining disputes, you will recall perhaps that this is legacy business and over the past 10 years we have successfully, in most cases, mitigated our exposure through a combination of arbitration proceedings and commercial settlements. We have a handful of disputes that I would characterize as active at this stage. We are clearly at the tail-end of the exposure, at this point our reserves reflect our current best estimates and terms of active arbitrations, there are two in particular that are likely to occur out in 2010, but we are at a quite preliminary stage in terms of discovery.

Bob Glasspiegel - Langen McAlenney

Have you done an external review for the reserves on this [book]?

Dave Pellerin

The significant exposure in the book of business related to a pool, referred to as (inaudible) and that particular exposure has been regularly reviewed on an annual basis since 1999 and indeed that exposure has been quite benign in recent years. The remaining disputes tend to be outliers in the sense that they relate to a similar type of business that was written in the same timeframe, however, did not throw out the level of volume and scrutiny, shall we say, as [bad as] like Unicover, and it is really cleaning up those outlier exposures that we are talking about here.

Bob Glasspiegel - Langen McAlenney

Thank you very much. Jim, good luck on the four pillars up from, I guess the three prongs before. Good luck.

Jim Wehr

Thanks Bob.

Operator

Our next question comes from Steven Schwartz, Raymond James & Associates.

Steven Schwartz - Raymond James & Associates

Quick follow-up, so Unicover is a name I haven't heard in a while. So, everything outstanding here is some type of [spiral] business in the London market?

 

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