Brighthouse Financial, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Bright House Financial's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Michelle and I will be your coordinator today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. 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, The conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn 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 second quarter 2025 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 Stagerwald, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ed Spihar, 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 Miles Lambert, our Chief Distribution and Marketing Officer, David Rosenbaum, Head of Product and Underwriting, and John Rosenthal, our Chief Investment 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 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, August 8, 2025. 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 in 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 these statutory statements. And now I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Eric Steigerwald.

Thank you, Dana. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. Through the second quarter of 2025, Bright House Financial continued to make progress against its capital-focused strategic initiatives. As a reminder, those initiatives are designed to improve capital efficiency unlock capital, and remain within our target combined risk-based capital, or RBC ratio, range in normal market conditions. During the quarter, we also continued to execute on our focus strategy, delivering strong sales results, receiving additional deposits through BlackRock's Life Path Paycheck, prudently managing our expenses, and maintaining a strong capital and liquidity position. A cornerstone of our financial and risk management strategy is maintaining a strong capital position at our insurance subsidiaries, as defined by a target combined RBC ratio between 400 and 450 percent in normal market conditions. In the second quarter, our estimated combined RBC ratio was between 405 percent and 425 percent. Within our target range, in normal market conditions. Our liquidity position also remains strong, with liquid assets at the holding company in excess of $900 million as of June 30th. As we have discussed in recent quarters, we have been executing on several capital-focused strategic initiatives. Through the second quarter, we made further progress on these initiatives, including the ongoing work to simplify and revise our hedging strategy for both our in-force variable annuity and first-generation shield books of business. As we have said previously, it is important to note that our focus on protecting our statutory balance sheet under adverse market conditions remains unchanged. I am pleased with the continued success of our distribution franchise as well as the strong sales results that Bright House Financial continues to deliver. In the second quarter, we recorded strong sales in both annuities and life insurance. Total annuity sales were $2.6 billion, a 16 percent increase sequentially, and an 8 percent increase compared with the second quarter of 2024. Shield sales, as always, were a significant contributor to total annuity sales. Shield sales totaled $1.9 billion in the quarter, bringing year-to-date Shield sales to $3.9 billion, consistent with the same period last year. The second largest contributor to total annuity sales in the quarter was sales of our fixed annuities, which totaled $500 million. Our total annuity sales results in the second quarter further demonstrate the complementary and diversified nature of our suite of annuity products. Life insurance sales in the second quarter were $33 million, which contributed to record year-to-date life insurance sales of $69 million, an increase of approximately 21 percent compared with the same period in 2024. Furthermore, We received $176 million of deposits through BlackRock's Life Path Paycheck, or LPP product, in the second quarter. As I have said previously, we expect our involvement with this product to enable Bright House to reach new customers through the Worksite channel, and we remain extremely excited about its success to date. Moving on to corporate expenses. As we have said in the past, expense discipline is extremely important for us, and we remain committed to well-controlled expense management. Second quarter corporate expenses were $202 million on a pre-tax basis, down from $239 million in the first quarter, and up slightly from $200 million in the second quarter of 2024. Before turning the call to Ed to discuss our financial results, I'd like to discuss shareholder return. In the second quarter, we returned capital to shareholders through $43 million of common stock repurchases, bringing year-to-date common stock repurchases through June 30th to $102 million. Since we began our common stock repurchase program in August of 2018, we have repurchased over $2.6 billion of our common stock which represents 52 percent of our outstanding shares. As we have disclosed in our public filings, we have historically repurchased our common stock pursuant to Rule 10b-5-1 plans, and our most recent plan expired at the end of May 2025. As such, there have been no additional share repurchases since that date. We have $441 million of capacity remaining under our board-approved share repurchase program. In closing, the second quarter was another quarter of continued focus and execution on our strategic priorities, including our capital-focused initiatives. We delivered strong sales results, received additional deposits through BlackRock's Lifepath Paycheck product, and maintained our focus on expense discipline. Let me turn the call over to Ed now to discuss our second quarter financial results in some more detail.