Brighthouse Financial, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Bright House Financial's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Livia, and I'll be your coordinator today. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Later, we will facilitate a question and answer session towards the end of the conference call. In fairness to all participants, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to send the presentation over to Dana Amante, Head of Investor Relations. Ms. Amante, you may proceed.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Bright House Financial's first quarter 2023 earnings call. Material for today's call were released last night and can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. We encourage you to review all of these materials. Today, you will hear from Eric Sagerwald, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ed Behar, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call up for a question and answer period. Also here with us today to participate in the discussions are Myles Lambert, our Chief Distribution and Marketing Officer, David Rosenbaum, Head of Products and Underwriting, and John Rosenthal, our Chief Investments Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to note that our discussion during this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Bright House Financial's actual results may differ materially from the results anticipated in the forward-looking statements as a result of the risks and uncertainties described from time to time in Bright House Financial's filings with the SEC. Information discussed on today's call speaks only as of today, May 9th, 2023. The company undertakes no obligation to update any information discussed on today's call. During this call, we will be discussing certain financial measures that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, also known as non-GAAP measures. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures on a historical basis to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and related definitions may be found on our earnings release, slide presentation, and financial supplement. And finally, references to statutory results, including certain statutory-based measures used by management are preliminary due to the timing of the filing of the statutory statement. And now I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Eric Stagerwald.

Thank you, Dana. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining the call today. Bright House Financial entered 2023 in a position of strength and with a cautious view on the market and economic environment. We feel very good about our business franchise, our strong cash and capital position, and our well-diversified and high-quality investment portfolio. Profitable new business growth is essential to drive our business mix toward lower risk, higher return products, and away from legacy variable annuities. We are very pleased with the progress that we continue to make toward shifting our business mix. In the first quarter of 2023, we achieved strong annuity sales results. Total annuity sales were $2.8 billion, an increase of 35%, compared with the first quarter of 2022. Sales of shield level and fixed deferred annuities were the largest contributors to the strong sales in the quarter at $2.5 billion combined. As I have said before, we are focused on providing a product portfolio that meets the evolving needs of our distributors and their clients. As part of that focus, we continue to seek ways to strengthen our flagship suite of annuity products. Last week, on May 1st, we announced new enhancements to our Shield-level annuities product suite, including the launch of Shield Options with StepRate Edge, a strategy that is designed to help clients keep their plans for retirement on track by providing additional growth opportunities in certain down markets. Life insurance sales were $23 million in the first quarter of 2023, an increase of 15% compared with the first quarter of 2022, and the highest level of quarterly life insurance sales since the fourth quarter of 2021. As we've said previously, we plan to introduce a new life insurance product later this year, which we expect will further diversify and strengthen our life product suite. As we execute on our business strategy, we remain disciplined in our financial and risk management. Maintaining balance sheet strength is imperative in order to support our distribution franchise and the growth and evolution of our business mix. In the first quarter of 2023, Bright House delivered strong results. with an estimated combined risk-based capital or RBC ratio between 460% and 480%, which is above our targeted range of 400 to 450% in normal markets. And we continue to have a robust cash position with $1.1 billion of holding company liquid assets at the end of the first quarter. We remain committed to returning capital to our shareholders. In the first quarter of 2023, we repurchased $62 million of our common stock with an additional approximately 27 million repurchased through May 5th. As I said last quarter, while we have reduced the level of buybacks to reflect a cautious view on both the market and economic environment, we intend to maintain an active and opportunistic share repurchase program. Since we began our common stock repurchase program in August of 2018 through May 5th of this year, we have reduced the number of shares outstanding by over 44%. Along with the lower level of common stock repurchases, we have taken additional actions over the past several years to further reduce our risk profile. In the fourth quarter of 2021, we began de-risking our investment portfolio by selling down portions of our emerging markets and high yield portfolios. We repositioned approximately $2 billion from lower quality to higher quality assets. This resulted in an approximately 20% reduction in the below investment grade portion of our credit portfolio. As it relates to the office sector, We have intentionally reduced our office exposure within our commercial real estate loan portfolio from 40% in 2019 to 25% as of March 31st, 2023. We have included slides in our earnings presentation, which provides some additional detail on our investment portfolio. And as I have said previously, We added a substantial amount of low interest rate protection in 2022 to materially reduce tail risk associated with extremely low interest rates for an extended period of time. We are very pleased with the proactive measures we took to further improve the quality of our balance sheet. These actions build upon other significant de-risking efforts that we have implemented since becoming an independent public company and demonstrate our commitment to supporting growth of our franchise through a broad range of market scenarios. To wrap up, despite the ongoing volatile market and economic environment, we continue to have a robust balance sheet, and our liquidity position remains very strong. Our investment portfolio is high quality and well diversified, and we believe that we are well positioned to weather challenging environments. Additionally, we believe the combination of our focused business strategy along with our disciplined approach to financial and risk management will drive increased shareholder return over time. Now I'll turn the call over to Ed to discuss our financial results in more detail.