Octave Specialty Group, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Good morning and welcome to Octave's second quarter 2026 call to discuss financial results. Speaking today will be Claude LeBlanc, President and CEO, and David Trick, Chief Financial Officer. They will discuss the financial results of our business and the current market environment. After prepared remarks, we will take your questions. Also available for Q&A today will be executives from our insurance distribution segment. For those of you following along on the webcast during the prepared remarks, we will be highlighting some slides from the investor presentation, which can be located on Our call today includes forward-looking statements. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statement involves risks and uncertainties, and it is not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statement due to a variety of factors.

These factors are described as forward-looking statements in our earnings press release and in our most recent 10-Q and 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. Also in our prepared remarks or responses to questions, we may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to those non-GAAP measures are included in our recent earnings press release, operating supplement, and other materials available in the investors section on our website octavegroup.com. We would like to turn the call over to Mr. Claude LeBlanc.

Thank you, Karen, and good morning, everyone. I am pleased to report that Octave Group delivered another strong quarter, reflecting continued momentum across our platform and disciplined execution against our strategic priorities. Our insurance distribution business continued to scale at an attractive pace, supported by strong organic growth and the benefits of recent strategic investments. At the same time, our specialty insurance segment showed continued operational progress and improving financial performance. Turning to our results for the quarter. Our core insurance distribution business remains firmly on track with strong momentum demonstrated by revenue growth of 77% for the second quarter, which included organic growth of 44% and the impact of the acquisition of ArmadaCare. Our second quarter insurance distributions adjusted EBITDA was $10 million, representing a near four-fold increase year-over-year, bringing our year-to-date adjusted EBITDA to $35 million.

This reflects an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 26%, which expanded over 12 percentage points from 13% a year ago. Based on the continued and accelerated growth of our insurance distribution segment, we are adjusting our 2026 guidance for our two key metrics, organic growth and adjusted EBITDA. David Trick will provide more details on all of our guidance adjustments later in the presentation. Included in these results is strong performance from our class of 2024 and 2025 MGAs, which continued their growth trajectory this quarter. We remain confident that these MGAs, which remain in the early stages of scaling, will drive material EBITDA expansion as they scale through 2028 and beyond. Our specialty property and casualty segment continued to benefit from the early actions we have taken to reposition the platform, delivering adjusted EBITDA of $1.8 million for the quarter.

We continue to strengthen the quality of Everspan's portfolio while positioning the company to generate increasingly attractive earnings as premium growth and underwriting improvements continue to compound. The business remains well-positioned to support both third-party programs and select Octave-sponsored opportunities while delivering sustainable long-term value for shareholders. In conjunction with this, we are investing in the leadership and specialized capabilities needed to support Everspan's growth. As announced earlier this week, we have hired three new senior leaders at Everspan Group. David Kenyon, Head of Reinsurance, who recently joined the company, and Bevan Greibesland, Chief Underwriting Officer, and Clay Stewart, Chief Operating Officer, who will be joining us shortly. David, Bevan, and Clay each bring deep expertise in their respective fields. Together, they will strengthen our ability to scale Everspan while maintaining our focus on underwriting discipline, strong partnerships, and operational excellence. Turning to the market environment.

Broadly, the U.S. and global P&C insurance markets continue to soften. Property markets are being shaped by abundant capacity. The wholesale large property segment is leading the pullback, with rates down 10%-20% year-over-year, while low CAT exposed SME property markets are experiencing more muted softening. Notably, this is happening after years of increases, which gave rise to a strong technical price foundation. As a result, notwithstanding these rate reductions, price adequacy remains intact for our well-underwritten portfolios. The London market large casualty products are operating against a backdrop of robust competitive pressures, although they are demonstrating better rate resilience than large property lines. By contrast, casualty SME classes, including general liability and certain commercial auto risks, as well as targeted specialty classes, continue to show mid-single to double-digit rate progression and represent an attractive opportunity for expansion.

A&H continues to benefit from constructive positive rate trends and strong secular growth in certain markets. In this market environment, our portfolio strategy remains a key differentiator. We have intentionally built a diversified platform across A&H, specialty P&C, and select property lines, giving us multiple sources of growth and reducing our dependence on any single product class or market cycle. This diversification is especially important in the current environment, where our A&H businesses continue to provide a growing earnings base that is largely uncorrelated with broader P&C pricing cycles. This breadth allows us to manage concentration risk, reposition where appropriate, and continue pursuing profitable growth in areas where market fundamentals remain attractive. Equally important, our MGA model is built around experienced underwriting leaders who have managed through prior market cycles.

Their expertise, combined with disciplined portfolio management and strong capacity relationships, enables us to responsibly deploy underwriting capital on behalf of our partners while protecting margins and supporting sustained growth. Beyond our portfolio diversification and experienced underwriting leadership, our growth is supported by the profile of our portfolio companies and our portfolio bias towards areas where growth opportunity remains strong. Since the start of 2024, Octave has launched nine MGAs, representing 40% of our MGA portfolio. Following an MGA launch, there is an inherent strong growth trajectory, which typically continues for at least five years, and in many cases, well beyond that window. MGA launches typically break even and start to deliver positive EBITDA after 18-24 months. In contrast, our mature MGAs are driving growth through a deliberate proactive strategy, expanding distribution, repositioning towards the strongest underwriting opportunities, and broadening capacity access within core products.

We are leveraging MGA and corporate leadership expertise alongside targeted talent recruitment to drive product growth. Built on teams, a strategy we're executing across multiple platforms provides an efficient, low-cost route to growth, rivaling smaller new MGA launches. Taken together, the diversity of our portfolio, the profile of our MGAs, and the quality of our underwriting talent give Octave a differentiated ability to perform through market cycles. We believe this positions us well to deliver above-market organic growth today while preserving meaningful upside as market conditions evolve. Finally, a brief update on our AI and data strategy. We view AI as both a growth enabler and an efficiency tool. Applied thoughtfully, it strengthens our underwriting capabilities, improves speed and consistency across our enterprise, and helps our teams focus their time on high-value risk selection and client engagement.

During the second quarter, we collaborated with Cytora to develop and launch our proprietary AI-driven underwriting platform, turning submissions into decision-ready risks, allowing us to review opportunities faster and with greater underwriting quality. It is currently active in a number of our U.S. MGAs that write management, financial, and professional liability programs. To date, the results are very encouraging. In one clear example of underwriting efficiency and acceleration, we have reduced submit to quote time from several hours to approximately seven minutes. Over time, we expect this capability to reduce manual effort, accelerate underwriting decisions, improve service levels, and bring additional MGAs to market more quickly. We expect to complete the implementation across our remaining applicable U.S. MGAs in the second half of this year. I will now turn the call over to David to review our second quarter results.

David? Thank you, Claude. Good morning, everyone.

For the second quarter of 2026, Octave reported a net loss to shareholders of $14.4 million, or $0.33 per share, an improvement of over $6 million or $0.09 per share compared to the net loss to shareholders of $20.5 million or $0.42 per share reported in the second quarter of 2025. Consolidated EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA to shareholders improved to a negative $1.7 million and a positive $3.7 million compared to a negative $9.8 million and negative $4.6 million, respectively, in the second quarter of 2025, representing an $8.1 million and $8.3 million improvement, respectively. The consolidated adjusted net loss to shareholders was $1.8 million, or $0.04 per share, compared to a loss of $10.6 million, or $0.22 per share, in the second quarter of 2025, an improvement of $8.7 million, or $0.18 per share.

The results for the quarter, led by insurance distribution, also reflect improved results at Everspan, as well as our corporate operations. Total revenue for the insurance distribution segment grew 77% to $58.4 million in the second quarter of 2026. Organic growth of 44% in the October 2025 acquisition of ArmadaCare were the drivers of the substantial increase in revenue. Organic growth was aided by the diversity of our business, including de novo's launch over the last two years in certain specialty product lines, which more than offset some of the softness we experienced in certain markets, such as energy and D&F property. The insurance distribution segment's net loss to shareholders decreased to $3.7 million in the quarter, compared to a net loss of $7.7 million in the prior year quarter, an improvement of $4 million.