You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Yesterday, after the market close, we issued our quarterly release.
The pass code you will need for both numbers is 5371939.
Today's call is also available through the Investor Information section of www.
renre.com and will be archived on RenaissanceRe's website through midnight on August 31, 2021.
Additional information regarding the factors shaping these outcomes can be found in RenaissanceRe's SEC filings, to which we direct you.
With us to discuss today's results are: Kevin O'Donnell, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bob Qutub, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
This resulted in annualized return on average common equity of 27.6% and annualized operating return on average common equity of 16.8%.
Now that many of our locations are tentatively reopening, we are excited to begin reestablishing our normal cadence of business.
In many ways, last year was a trying one, but it was also a year of great opportunity.
I'm especially proud of our team's ability to continue to thrive and execute in a time of great uncertainty.
While for many, 2020 was a year of challenges; for us, it was also a time of opportunity and growth.
I am pleased with all that we accomplished and we'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the journey we have been on and how that affects who we are and what we do.
Back in 2013, the market was evolving rapidly.
We anticipated that investors would increasingly seek yield, which would result in capital becoming more interested in reinsurance risk.
At that time, we made the strategic decision to focus on our vision, which is to be the best underwriter.
For us, this meant leveraging our skills into remaining the leading reinsurer, while diversifying both geographically and into traditional casualty lines.
It meant remaining focused on reinsurance business and not pursuing an insurance strategy.
It also meant committing to grow our hybrid business model by expanding our Capital Partners franchise.
We knew that achieving this strategic imperative would require us to become more efficient.
We set specific goals to increase our capital leverage, investment leverage and operating leverage with particular focus on managing expenses.
This was because we expected the market to become more efficient and we wanted to insulate our investors as best we could from the effects of the soft market.
Lowering our expense ratio help to mitigate the effect of the falling rates and offset its impact on our ROE.
In short, we transformed the profile of the company to ensure we continue to benefit our shareholders over the long-term.
We knowingly began building our casualty business during a challenging phase of the market with the intent that by doing so we could construct a portfolio with embedded options for growth when pricing improved.
This is not a strategy for the faint of heart.
You must believe that you understand the risk you are taking because there is little room for error.
You need conviction in your beliefs on how, when and why the market will change.
And you must be positioned as a respected market participant so you can grow quickly when opportunity arises.
I am pleased to report that we have succeeded in executing this strategy in our casualty book.
Of course, we continue to monitor the impact of social inflation and other trends.
What I am confident of, however, is that the successful execution of our strategy to grow casualty in a clearly improving market will serve us well and the favorable balance of profitable business will ultimately benefit our shareholders.
As we have said many times, we evaluate our casualty business over rolling 10-year periods.
For the last few years, we've been writing well-rated risk that we believe will serve as the foundation for a strong portfolio with superior returns.
While we believe that we are already beginning to see this profitability, we are in no rush to make changes today.
Our long-term shareholders support us and they will be rewarded.
Shifting gears briefly to capital management, which Bob will address in greater detail.
We have always been thoughtful and careful stewards of our capital and have methodically grown our capital base at a pace consistent with scaling our business while maintaining strong ratings.
Since the second quarter -- we have -- of 2020, we have raised $1.1 billion in equity capital, raised over $1 billion of partner capital, grown gross written premiums in our in-force portfolio by $1.8 billion, earned $1 billion in net income and returned over $700 million to our shareholders through share repurchases and dividends.
As a result, we now find ourselves in the enviable position of having what we believe to be the most -- to be more than ample financial flexibility to support our existing risk, take advantage of potential opportunities and continue repurchasing our shares on what we believe are attractive valuations.
I cannot emphasize too strongly, however, that last year's common equity raise was the cornerstone of all these capital management and underwriting successes.
Having the right capital at the right time provided us the fortress balance sheet necessary to accomplish all that we have.
That concludes my opening comments.
I'll provide more detailed update on our segments performance at the end of the call.
My comments today will focus on our accomplishments during the quarter and items that drove our results, including our three drivers of profit.
Starting with our consolidated results where we reported net income of $457 million and operating income of $278 million for the quarter.
These results were driven by strong performances in each of our three drivers of profit: excellent underwriting results, increased fee income and high-quality net investment income, as well as robust mark-to-market gains in our strategic investment and fixed income portfolios.
This produced annualized return on average common equity of 27.6% and annualized operating return on average common equity of 16.8%.
I'll now shift to our three drivers of profit starting with underwriting income.
Our top-line grew significantly in the quarter.
Gross premiums written were up $392 million or 23% with the Property segment growing $141 million and the Casualty segment growing $251 million.
Year-to-date, we have grown net premiums written by $886 million or 36% and remain on track to grow well over $1 billion.
We reported underwriting profit of $329 million in the quarter and a combined ratio of 72%.
For our Property segment specifically, gross premiums written grew $141 million over the comparable quarter or 14% and we reported a combined ratio of 44%, driven by a lack of cat losses and strong performance in our other property business and $51 million in prior year favorable loss development.
Growth in gross premiums written was $50 million or 7% in property cat and $91 million or 28% in other property.
Most of the growth in our property catastrophe business took place in our joint ventures.
As a result, we currently only retain about 28% of the gross premiums written in our property catastrophe business.
Attritional losses in other property book ran at about 46%.
This is somewhat favorable to our expectations for this business.
As a reminder, in addition to attritional risk, we also take catastrophe risk in our other property business.
Moving on to our Casualty results.
Our Casualty segment reported gross premiums written of $911 million, growing $251 million or 38% versus the comparable quarter.
Kevin will elaborate on the drivers of this growth in his discussion of underwriting performance.
We experienced a small amount of favorable development and the combined ratio was 97.8%.
Underlying this was a 67% current accident year loss ratio, which is a 1.4 percentage point improvement from the same quarter last year and consistent with our expectations.
This quarter, there were no significant changes to our COVID-19 loss estimates.
That said, this is a developing situation and we will continue to receive information over time.
We continue to monitor COVID-19 development across both segments and our current reserves represent our best estimate of potential losses.
Now moving on to our second driver of profit, fee income.
Total fee income was $46 million, which is up from the second quarter of last year.
Management fees increased and we expect that they will continue to serve as a strong, stable source of recurring revenues going forward.
Overall, we shared $114 million of income with the partners in our joint ventures as reflected in our redeemable non-controlling interest, driven by profitable performance and a low cat quarter and prior year favorable loss development.
Our Medici and Epsilon funds raised in aggregate over $200 million in new quarter capital this year, which we deployed it to June 1 renewal.
We made a small addition to our financial supplement this quarter.
You will see that on the bottom of Page 11, we have broken out our fee income to show its contribution to underwriting results.
The goal was to provide additional disclosure on the geography of our fee income in the income statement.
Turning now to our third driver of profit, investment income.
We recorded strong investment returns this quarter due to falling interest rates as well as gains in our equity portfolio.
Net investment income was $81 million and we had $191 million of mark-to-market gain.
This resulted in total investment returns of $272 million.
The decrease in interest rates has lowered the yield on our retained fixed maturity and short-term investment portfolio to 1.3%.
The duration on a retained portfolio remained roughly flat at 3.8 years.
You'll note that we reduced our exposure to corporate credit this quarter, shifting the portfolio to US Treasuries.
We did this as credit spreads approach multi-year lows.
And turning now to our expenses and starting with the acquisition expense ratio, which was up slightly to 24%.
This was driven by casualty acquisition ratio, which increased by 1 percentage point to 28%.
The current expected run rate of our casualty acquisition expense ratio is in the upper-20%s.
So this quarter is consistent with expectations.
Meanwhile, the property acquisition ratio -- expense ratio -- acquisition expense ratio was flat.
Our direct expense ratio, which is the sum of our operational and corporate expenses divided by net premiums earned, was flat from the prior quarter at 6%.
On an absolute basis, operational expenses were up in the quarter but remain below 5% as the ratio to net premiums earned.
Going forward, as we grow our top-line, we will also continue to invest in the business to support our growth.
We expect our direct expense ratio to remain generally consistent with this quarter, absent one-time items.
I'd like to now shift to our discussion on our capital management during the quarter.
Earlier this month, we issued $500 million of our Series G Perpetual Preference Shares with a fixed for life dividend of 4.20%.
We plan to use $275 million of the proceeds to refinance our 5.375% Series E preference shares, which we have already been called and the remainder of the proceeds for general corporate purposes.
As a reminder, last year, we redeemed the outstanding $125 million of our 6.08% Series C Preference Shares and retired $250 million of our 5.75% senior debt.
So in total, we have replaced $650 million of capital at an average cost of 5.67% with $500 million of capital at a cost of 4.20% [Phonetic].
This is part of our long-term strategy to minimize the cost of capital.
Even with the incremental $225 million raised this month, we are comfortable with our various capital ratios which are stronger than two years ago.
Also in the quarter, we participated in the issuance of additional $250 million tranche of our Mona Lisa cat bond.
Consistent with our strategy, this adds additional efficient underwriting capital to our fortress balance sheet.
As Kevin noted, since June -- since last June, we have earned $1 billion.
In the second quarter of 2021, we continued returning these earnings to shareholders repurchasing 1.9 million common shares for $309 million.
This works out to an average price per share of about $159 and an average price to book value of 1.1 times our current book value.
Subsequent to the quarter-end, we continued to repurchase shares and, as of July 19, had repurchased an additional 920,000 shares for $138 million at an average price of just over $149 a share.
In total this year, we have purchased 3.9 million shares for $618 million at an average price of $157 per share.
This has reduced our share count by about 7.8% from the year-end 2020 total.
Despite substantial quarterly share repurchases, we ended the quarter with more capital than we began, which reflects our excess earnings, net of share buybacks and dividend.
Our common equity now stands at $6.7 billion.
To be clear about the use of the $1.1 billion of common equity we raised last year, that money has been fully downstreamed into our operating entities to support the attractive opportunities we took advantage of to substantially grow our book this year and position us well for the future.
Now before turning the call back over to Kevin, I'd like to finish with a brief discussion on tax.
We have been closely following recent G7 and G20 announcements on setting a global minimum corporate tax, the OECDs work on Pillar 1 and 2 and President Biden's proposals for US tax changes.
When it comes to tax reform, the details matter and they are not yet clear.
Over the years, however, the flexibility of our global operating platform has proven resilient and we anticipate this resilience will persist.
That said, we will continue to monitor this issue closely.
So, in closing, we are pleased with our solid financial performance this quarter across our three drivers of profit and believe we have demonstrated proactive capital management, which should continue to contribute to shareholder value.
As usual, I'll divide my comments between our Property and Casualty segments.
Starting with Property, while we always maintain our leadership and property cat underwriting, to be clear we are increasingly doing it differently.
We currently take more of our cat exposed risk through our other property portfolio because that is where we are seeing better returns for taking cat risk.
Our existing other property book has access to some of the most dislocated property lines in the US E&S market.
We have the platforms, capital and expertise to focus across classes to target and obtain the best risk due to the long-term relationship that we've cultivated with customers for over 25 years.
This is evident in the 28% year-on-year growth, which our other property book has delivered and we now have an in-force portfolio of over $1 billion.
We also grew our property cat portfolio this quarter but by a smaller percentage.
The June 1 renewals proceeded as anticipated and, overall, we believe that we have constructed one of our best cat books in years.
The Florida renewal saw rate increases averaging 5% to 20% with abundant capacity for upper layers, while many lower layers struggled to get placed, especially if they were loss impacted.
As we anticipated on last quarter's call, we reduced the number of Florida programs that we wrote from 18 to 13, which is a continuation of last year's trend when we reduced from 25 programs.
Since 2019, we have reduced our bottom line exposure to Florida domestic companies by almost half.
The Florida market remains highly challenged due to social inflation and, as anticipated, proposed reforms do not appear likely to materially change the landscape.
I reiterate that the Florida domestic market now represents less than 3% of our gross written premiums.
That said, decreased exposure to Florida domestics is not the same thing as decreased exposure to Florida hurricanes.
Southeast wind remains the peak risk in our portfolio.
What has changed is that we have moved away from Florida domestic companies to more regional and nationwide programs and over the last year have increasingly taken southeast wind risk through our other property portfolio.
I should note that as we have grown, so has our tail risk on an absolute basis.
On a percentage of equity basis, however, it is similar to where we were prior to last year's capital raise.
It is easy to grow in this business by simply going risk on, but we created a larger and more efficient portfolio than we had prior to the capital raise and we did this while holding our relative risk levels consistent with prior years.
Inflation has been in the news recently with headline CPA in May exceeding 5%.
Most relevant to our property book, however, is inflation in the commodity and labor markets as that is more likely to impact rebuilding cost after an event.
Lumber and other commodity prices have been elevated this year although recently they appear to be moderating.
We price for inflation in our models.
Given the elevated risk in the current environment, we have stress tested our portfolio and remain comfortable with its exposure to inflation.
From our perspective as a reinsurer, it was a quiet quarter for tax.
Claudette made landfall in Louisiana as a disorganized weak tropical storm.
In the beginning of July, Elsa made landfall in Florida as a strong tropical storm and was the earliest east storm on record.
While these storms may result in some losses, we currently do not anticipate these to be material.
We are closely monitoring meteorological conditions as we head into the third and fourth quarters.
You've probably read news reports about wildfires and record droughts already in the US, particularly in California.
We are expecting an active hurricane season having already having three US landfalling storms.
Europe recently experienced a significant flooding event, which we are closely evaluating although it's too early to estimate potential losses.
As always, RenaissanceRe Risk Sciences is proving invaluable in helping us understand the climate dynamics likely to influence the remainder of the year.
I am often asked if we vary the amount of business that we write based on weather forecasts.
I strongly believe that due to our superior tools and better understanding of climate change, we play a critical role in managing our customers' natural catastrophe risk.
Behaving like a partner by providing long-term stable capacity is part of our value proposition for which I expect we will be rewarded.
Moving now to our Casualty and Specialty segment.
Our Casualty portfolio is performing well.
Original insurance rates continuing to increase although the magnitude appears to be moderating in those classes which have experienced the greatest uplift such as D&O.
We have grown our Casualty business by more than 300% since 2015 on an in-force basis.
This includes adding over $1 billion of new business in the last 12 months, also on an in-force basis, which should position as well as the market has clearly improved.
Reflecting over my career, I believe that many underwriters do not go large enough when opportunity knocks or small enough when it recedes.
I am proud of how our team has performed and believe that we have executed into this market opportunity with great skill and dexterity.
Our competitive advantages, including our long-term relationships and first mover status, have served us well this year.
We anticipated this market well in advance and adopted a strategy of confident provision of consistent capacity.
While other reinsurers haggled over terms and conditions, we were discussing new structures and coverages.
We believe that this was the appropriate approach and it explains our ability to grow proactively into an improving market, which should benefit from building our largest and what we believe to be our best Casualty and Specialty portfolio as the market hits a multi-year high.
Cyber insurance has been getting a lot of attention lately.
Rate changes have been greater than 40% year-on-year and the market has been growing by about 25% each year for the previous five years.
Recently, this is being driven by multiple large cyberattacks and increasing instances of ransomware.
As a result, the cyber market is currently experiencing increasing demand and limited supply.
We have been reinsuring cyber liability for almost a decade and believe there are good opportunities to grow this book.
Casualty and Specialty losses, including those related to COVID-19, continue to develop within our expectations.
In our credit book, mortgage forbearance rates also continue to improve and the US housing market continues to be very healthy.
As I mentioned on our previous calls, in the Casualty business, our actuaries are being patient in recognizing positive rate movements.
We are optimistic that over time we will benefit from the improved underwriting terms and pricing that we believe we are enjoying.
Closing now with our Capital Partners business.
The big news for this quarter was that our Medici capital and fund surpassed $1 billion in capital under management.
This quarter experienced near-record cat bond issuances.
And we continue to see strong demand for our Medici fund.
Our strategic approach to asset management is not as an asset accumulator, but rather as an underwriter looking to match the most efficient capital with desirable risk.
To achieve this and provide the best solutions to our customers, we need multiple capital structures and capital sources.
It is for this reason that we manage several vehicles both rated and unrated to provide additional capacity to our customers from third-party capital.
Since 2015, we have grown our Capital Partners business from four vehicles and $6 billion in capital to six vehicles with more than $11 billion in capital.
This is a critical component of our strategy, provides our customers efficient capital with our owned rated balance sheets are less efficient.
It allows our third-party investors to partner with the best underwriter and benefit from our unparalleled understanding and modeling of the catastrophe risk that they desire.
And it is good for our shareholders that it results in a stable growing source of fee income.
In conclusion, we delivered a solid quarter with strong premium growth, improving profitability and proactive capital management.
We maintained a fortressed balance sheet while heading into the winter season, continuing to build the foundations for long-term shareholder value.

user
net claims and claim expenses incurred associated with covid-19 pandemic were not significant in q2 of 2021.

assistant