W.R. Berkley (NYSE:WRB) versus Ategrity Specialty (NYSE:ASIC) Financial Contrast

Ategrity Specialty (NYSE:ASIC) and W.R. Berkley (NYSE:WRB) are both finance companies, but which is the better stock? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, profitability, earnings, dividends, valuation, risk and institutional ownership.

Risk & Volatility

Ategrity Specialty has a beta of -0.62, indicating that its share price is 162% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, W.R. Berkley has a beta of 0.28, indicating that its share price is 72% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares Ategrity Specialty and W.R. Berkley’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Ategrity Specialty	21.06%	17.12%	7.03%
W.R. Berkley	12.94%	19.44%	4.28%

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Ategrity Specialty and W.R. Berkley”s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Ategrity Specialty	$424.34 million	3.20	$74.00 million	$2.14	13.22
W.R. Berkley	$14.92 billion	1.74	$1.78 billion	$4.87	14.38

W.R. Berkley has higher revenue and earnings than Ategrity Specialty. Ategrity Specialty is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than W.R. Berkley, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and target prices for Ategrity Specialty and W.R. Berkley, as reported by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Ategrity Specialty	0	3	3	0	2.50
W.R. Berkley	6	9	3	0	1.83

Ategrity Specialty presently has a consensus target price of $28.88, suggesting a potential upside of 2.05%. W.R. Berkley has a consensus target price of $70.83, suggesting a potential upside of 1.12%. Given Ategrity Specialty’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, research analysts clearly believe Ategrity Specialty is more favorable than W.R. Berkley.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

68.8% of W.R. Berkley shares are held by institutional investors. 84.7% of Ategrity Specialty shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 25.1% of W.R. Berkley shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

W.R. Berkley beats Ategrity Specialty on 7 of the 13 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Ategrity Specialty

We are a profitable and growing specialty insurance company dedicated to providing excess and surplus (“E&S”) products to small to medium-sized businesses (“SMBs”) across the United States. We have built a proprietary underwriting platform that combines sophisticated data analytics with automated and streamlined processes to efficiently serve our clients and deliver long-term value to our stockholders. The SMB market is characterized by large volumes of small-sized policies, and we believe our competitive edge lies in our ability to offer consistent, high-speed, and low-touch interactions that our distribution partners value. This advantage stems from our technology-driven method of standardizing, simplifying, and automating our transaction process, which we call productionized underwriting. We target industry verticals where we have deep expertise and develop data-driven insights to gain a competitive advantage. We leverage our expertise and our efficient underwriting platform to deliver tailored insurance products and customized services that meet the needs of our distribution partners. We believe the universe of distributors in the SMB segment of the E&S market is rapidly shifting toward agents and brokers who were raised in the digital age. These digital-native and tech-savvy distribution partners expect real-time, frictionless insurance transactions that mirror the seamless experiences they encounter in their daily lives. In an industry where insurance applications are often submitted via email with slow response times, we have designed a technology-driven underwriting process that addresses our distribution partners’ demands for rapid, high-quality interactions. Our strong value proposition has contributed to a growing network of 512 distribution partners as of March 31, 2025, which provides us with increased transaction opportunities and diversified sources of business. Our fully integrated claims management function is designed to enable us to resolve claims efficiently and effectively. We take an active approach to risk management through real-time performance analytics, rigorous risk aggregation monitoring, and robust reinsurance protection aimed at minimizing volatility and generating consistent underwriting results. We have grown our business substantially while generating attractive underwriting results. For the three months ended March 31, 2025, we wrote $116.1 million in gross written premiums, an increase of $34.5 million, or 42.3% compared to the three months ended March 31, 2024. Our combined ratio for the three months ended March 31, 2025, was 90.9%, a decrease of 3.3% from the three months ended March 31, 2024. Our members’ equity at March 31, 2025, was $426.8 million, an increase of $28.5 million (7.2%) from December 31, 2024. For the twelve months ended March 31, 2025, our return on members’ equity was 12.6%. For the year ended December 31, 2024, we wrote $437.0 million in gross written premiums, representing a compound annual growth rate of 28.4% over the last two years. Our combined ratio for the year ended December 31, 2024, was 93.9%, a decrease of 3.6% from the year ended December 31, 2023. Our members’ equity at December 31, 2024, was $398.3 million, an increase of $76.6 million (23.8%) from December 31, 2023. We believe that our productionized underwriting capabilities will continue to drive enhanced profitability as we continue to scale our business. Our company’s mission is to transform the E&S marketplace for SMBs through the power of productionized underwriting with precision, simplicity, and efficiency. When we entered the E&S industry, we found what we believe to be an under-served and inefficient marketplace that was hindered by inconsistent and antiquated processes of legacy insurance carriers. We also believe that many distribution partners and their end-clients were struggling with slow response times, unpredictable underwriting capacity, and subpar pricing, which we believe make the market ripe for technology and efficiency-driven disruption. To address these challenges, we developed a technology-enabled underwriting process that we believe sets us apart in the E&S market. Our productionized underwriting approach combines rigorous technical underwriting with a highly efficient and centralized operating platform powered by advanced technology. This process begins with a deep understanding of our end-clients, the insurance policyholders. We intensely study the industry and geographical micro-segments in which our end-clients operate using sophisticated data analytics. We leverage these analytics to build quantitative risk models that shape our risk appetite and client targeting. Furthermore, we aim to eliminate unnecessary complexity by standardizing our processes and automating key underwriting tasks, such as submission intake, risk classification, pricing, and documentation. This allows our underwriters to focus on high-value underwriting tasks and make timely and accurate decisions in a uniform manner. For each individual transaction opportunity, our underwriting models efficiently determine which components of the process can be automated. For simpler products with clearly identified risk characteristics, we can execute the entire underwriting process without human intervention. We believe our productionized underwriting approach generates consistent, efficient, and scalable processes that allow us to deliver differentiated value to our distribution partners without compromising accuracy and profitability. Our location is in New York NY.

About W.R. Berkley

W. R. Berkley Corporation, an insurance holding company, operates as a commercial lines writers worldwide. It operates in two segments, Insurance and Reinsurance & Monoline Excess. The Insurance segment underwrites commercial insurance business, including excess and surplus lines, admitted lines, and specialty personal lines. This segment also provides accident and health insurance and reinsurance products; insurance for commercial risks; casualty and specialty environmental products; specialized insurance coverages for fine arts and jewelry exposures; excess liability and inland marine coverage for small to medium-sized insureds; and commercial general liability, umbrella, professional liability, directors and officers, commercial property, and surety products, as well as products for technology, and life sciences and travel industries. In addition, this segment offers cyber risk solutions; crime and fidelity insurance products; medical professional coverages; workers' compensation insurance products; general insurance; personal lines insurance solutions, including home, condo/co-op, auto, and collectibles; automobile, law enforcement, public officials and educator's legal, and employment practices liability, as well as incidental medical and property and crime insurance products; at-risk and alternative risk insurance program management services; professional liability; energy and marine risks; and provides insurance products to the Lloyd's marketplace. The Reinsurance & Monoline Excess segment provides treaty and facultative reinsurance solutions; property and casualty reinsurance; facultative reinsurance products include automatic, semi-automatic and individual risk assumed reinsurance; and turnkey products such as cyber, employment practices liability insurance, liquor liability insurance and violent events. The company was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut.