platforms. We also continued to diversify our sources of capital through various owned and managed balance sheets as well as the equity, debt and insurance-linked securities markets. This has afforded us significant flexibility to react when the world changes. We believe that the trusted relationships we have developed have provided us an incumbency position, contributing to our significant growth in attractive business in 2021. Despite our recent growth, we reduced our growth rate at the recent January 1st renewals, electing to focus more on optimizing our portfolio and increasing its efficiency and profitability. As always, we were a consistent partner, offering capacity across the risk spectrum. Recent Industry Trends In 2021, the insurance industry experienced its fifth consecutive year of elevated catastrophe losses. We saw a market trend shift away from property catastrophe risk due to the effects of climate change, social and monetary inflation, as well as a lack of confidence in catastrophe modeling. Despite these challenges, we believe that our expertise and experience allow us to determine that we are being paid adequately to assume risk, which we are uniquely positioned to understand due to our strong underwriting bench (which has been through multiple market cycles), as well as our integrated system, and our team of scientists, engineers, and risk modelers at RenaissanceRe Sciences. We believe that market conditions have created significant opportunities to source attractive risk in the lines of business that we write, and that such opportunities will result in superior returns for our shareholders. Social inflation continues to be a risk, and we expect it to be an ongoing trend. Over the course of 2021, we also saw the rapid increase of monetary inflation. This is particularly impactful to our industry, as it drives rebuilding costs, such as increases in wages and commodity prices. We consider the anticipated effects of inflation on us in our catastrophe loss models and on our investment portfolio. In the current market, we believe that we are uniquely positioned to write a variety of risks, leveraging the enhancements we made over the last several years to our risk and capital management technology and underwriting expertise to cover additional lines of business. In particular, we have invested heavily to understand the influence of climate change on the weather and its impact on the risks that we take. We plan to continue to seek to take advantage of additional opportunities throughout the year and believe that strategic decisions that we have made in prior periods have laid the foundation for these initiatives. We believe that our clients value our ability to be a long-term partner that brings access to multiple forms of capital and innovative, large-scale solutions. January 1st Renewals ro4ert= . The January 1 renewal is the largest renewal period for our Property segment. We had several goals we wanted to achieve, including seeking rate increases, improving terms and conditions, adjusting for our increased view of risk, and decreasing our exposure to aggregate deals; and we were pleased with the results and the portfolio we built. We believe that we saw improved market conditions, and across markets we pushed hard for higher rates, while remaining disciplined when rate increases were not sufficient. We used the options we have developed, such as our third-party capital vehicles, to provide flexibility and to optimize our gross-to-net strategy, as evidenced by the growth in DaVinci and the increased percentage of property catastrophe business that we allocated to it. A significant amount of the growth in our Property segment over the last few years has been in the other property class of business, due largely to the substantial rate increases in the U.S. property excess and surplus market. As we expected, there was significant dislocation in the property retrocession markets at January 1, and we expect these trends to continue in 2022. Casualt= an) !4ecialt= . The January 1 renewal is also important for our Casualty and Specialty segment. Casualty and Specialty business has become increasingly desirable due to a combination of robust multi- year rate increases, as well as recent favorable plan performance. We continued to see underlying rate increases across multiple lines of business and geographies within our Casualty and Specialty segment, and we expanded participation on multiple casualty and specialty lines. We believe that our book of business is continuing to reflect the rate improvements that we have seen over the past several years. We think that our prior work building strong relationships with key customers allowed us to gain superior access to desirable business. General Economic Conditions We actively managed our capital in 2021 and expect to continue to do so in 2022. We believe that our shares have been trading at attractive levels, which provides us with additional options to manage excess capital. If this trend continues, we expect to utilize our strong capital position to continue to return excess capital to shareholders. When possible, our preference is to deploy any excess capital into profitable business opportunities before returning excess capital to shareholders. 107