Aegon Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Ergon's first half 2024 results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to slowly press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. It is good to have you join us for this conference call on our first half 2024 results. My name is Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today to take you through our results are Egon C. Olar-Frieser, and for the last time before his retirement, our CFO Matt Ryder. As usual, after that, we will continue with the Q&A session. But before we start, we would like to ask you to review our disclaimer on forward-looking statements, which you can find at the back of the presentation. Now, I would like to give the floor to Lars.

Lars Nielsen Thank you, Yves, and good day, everyone. Thanks for being on the call. As we go through the highlights of the past six months, I would like to take a step back and place these results in the context of the implementation of our strategy. Our strategy is to grow our strategic assets, as well as our positions in other core markets, and to risk manage and shrink our financial assets. Our ultimate objective is to build leading businesses in investments protection and retirement solution in chosen markets, and by doing so, increase our operating results, OCG, and free cash flows over time, leading to growth and capital returns to stockholders. In the U.S., we are making good progress building our distribution reach. We continue to grow in indexed universal life and in retirement plans. And at the same time, the momentum in Brazil remains solid and we have achieved very strong net deposits in the U.K. workplace and in asset management. Software spots are in China, Spain, and our advisor platform in the U.K., which I will touch upon later. Again, we want to reduce our exposure to financial assets. and we have indeed delivered an approximately $400 million decrease in required capital over the first six months of 2024. The overall consequence of these developments is a further shift in the mix of our group operating capital generation and our IFRS operating results towards our strategic assets. We are also on track to meet our 1.1 billion euro operating capital generation guidance for the year, as we just delivered 588 million euros for the first half of the year, despite unfavorable mortality experience. Business growth and a higher investment result benefited the OCG, which was offset by higher new business strain, demonstrating that we are successfully growing our strategic assets. During the first half of the year, our IFRS operating result was negatively impacted by adverse mortality and morbidity claims experience. This mostly affected our U.S. financial assets, and these impacts are expected to be mitigated in our operating results going forward as we just went through an update of our assumptions and our models. As expected, cash capital at the holding decreased to 2.1 billion euros over the reporting period mainly as a consequence of returning capital to stockholders. We have now completed the 1.5 billion euro share buyback program related to the ASR transaction. As previously announced, we are currently executing a new 200 million euro buyback program that is expected to be completed by the end of 2024. This has indeed been a good half year. and on this basis we are announcing a 16 euro cent interim dividend for 2024, two euro cents higher than the interim dividend last year. Given the progress we're making on our strategic agenda, we remain confident that we can increase the dividend to our target of 40 euro cents per share over 2025. So I'm now turning to slide number three for an update on our strategic assets in the Americas. Our ambition for World Financial Group, or WFG, our wholly owned distribution channel, is to increase the number of agents to 110,000 by 2027, while at the same time improving agent productivity. We continue to make good progress with the number of licensed agents increasing by 13% with the June 2023 comparable to 79,000 in total, driven by continued recruiting and successful training of new recruits to become licensed agents. Agent productivity also continues to improve. The number of multi-ticket agents who sell more than one life policy over the last 12 months increased by 9% compared with a year ago. In the savings and investment segment, Progress in our sweet spot of mid-sized retirement plans has also been good. Net deposits amounted to $1.2 billion in the first half of 2024 and were supported by the funding of a large pooled plan sale that we wrote in the first quarter of last year. In this segment, we also strive to increase profitability and diversify revenue streams by growing in ancillary products such as an individual retirement accounts as well as a general account stable value product. In each of these, we recorded further growth over the period and now manage over $11 billion of assets in each of the products. In the product protection solution segment, we are investing in both product manufacturing capabilities and in the operating model in order to position the individual life insurance business for further growth. New life sales increased by 5% over the first half of last year, supported by old channels. Sales of indexed universal life policies drove this growth, and we continue to right this business with attractive internal rates of return in excess of 12%. Let's move to slide four. I now want to address our UK business. For the workplace platform we expect annual net deposits to increase around 5 billion to around 5 billion in 2028 and our latest results indicate that we are well in the path to achieving that goal. Net deposits in the first half of 2024 amounted to 1.7 billion pounds, driven by both inflows on new schemes and higher net deposits on existing schemes. The advisor platform, which in the past was referred to as the retail business, is expected to see positive flows by 2028, driven by our efforts focusing on our 500 target advisor firms. In the first half of 2024, net outflows in this channel amounted to 1.8 billion pounds. We continue to see the impact of competition on the attrition of advisor firms that we are not targeting, as well as industry-wide low levels of consumer activity. Platform assets under administration, or AUA, now amount to 111 billion pounds, increasing compared with the end of June 2023 due to favorable markets and net deposits on the workplace platform. Again, this puts us well on the path to achieve our target of AUA on the platform of over 135 billion by 2028. So let me now turn to slide number five to address the progress of our international businesses. New light sales in the international segment decreased by 20% compared with the first half year of 2023. While new light sales increased by 9% in Brazil, this was more than offset by weaker sales in China due to new pricing regulations and in Spain. In Spain, higher interest rates have tempered mortgage sales, which result in lower sales of new life insurance and household insurance products linked to mortgages. Operating capital generation, on the other hand, increased by 20% compared with the first half of 2023. This was driven by lower new business strain and asset liability management actions, including a reinsurance agreement in China. Using slide number six, I want to reflect on the performance of our asset manager that reported very solid results over the period. The global platforms business saw very strong third party net deposits of 5.1 billion euros. The UK fixed income business onboarded a large client and generated solid inflows following strong fund performance. In the Netherlands, we won a large contract with a large fiduciary client. and we also continue to benefit from the asset management partnership with ASR. In the strategic partnership segment, we also recorded positive net deposits amounting to 2.7 billion euros. This was mainly driven by our Chinese joint venture AIFMC on the back of a successful collaboration with a consumer finance platform for money market funds. So overall, third-party net deposits Third-party net deposits reached almost 8 billion euros over the first half year. Assets under management increased to 318 billion euros, supported by favorable market movements, third-party net deposits, and the partnership with ASR. I will now hand over to Matt to discuss the financial performance over the first half year of 2024 in more detail. Matt, over to you.