Aegon Limited

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the airgun third quarter 2024 trading update 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 call out the conference call over to your speaker, Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. My name is Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations, and I would like to welcome you to this conference call on EGON's third quarter 2024 trading update. Joining me today to take you through our progress are EGON CEO, Lars Friese, and CFO, Duncan Russell. 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. And now, I would like to give the floor to Lars.

Yes, thank you Yves, and good morning everyone. And thank you for joining the call today. I will start today's presentation by running through our strategic and commercial developments in the third quarter before I hand over to Duncan to address our results in more detail. Let's move to slide number two with the key messages for the quarter. We continue to execute our strategy to grow our franchises. Despite experiencing some volatility in our commercial results, we are on track to deliver on our strategy. In the third quarter, we reported operating capital generation of €336 million driven by our US businesses. Having generated more than 900 million euros of operating capital generation year to date, we now expect 1.2 billion euros of operating capital generation for the full year. This compares with the 1.1 billion that we previously guided for. We experienced some volatility in our commercial performance during the quarter. The UK workplace platform and the third party business and asset management saw strong net deposits growing the assets under administration in both businesses. New life sales in the US were lower compared with the third quarter of last year, and we experienced net outflows in the retirement plans business due to higher customer withdrawals and contract discontinuances. Similarly, and as anticipated, outflows continued in the UK advisor platform. In our international business, Spain and Portugal as well as Brazil saw cyclical headwinds leading to lower new business volumes. At the same time though, we continued to execute our strategy in the US to reduce our exposure to financial assets and have completed our program to purchase universal life policies from institutional shareholders. This program has a negative impact on our US RBC ratio but will benefit our operating capital generation going forward as we indicated at our Capital Markets Day back in 2023. During the third quarter, Agon returned more than 650 million euros of capital to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. Consequently, cash capital at holding decreased to 1.5 billion euros over the reporting period. Our capital position is strong and consistent with our capital management framework we today announced a new share buyback program of 150 million euros. We expect the new program to begin in January 2025 and to be completed during the first half of next year. Part of the program will be used to neutralize the effect of issuance of shares for share-based compensation programs. This new program follows the 200 million euro share buyback program that we're currently executing, which was 91% completed as of November 8th. These actions demonstrate our commitment to returning excess capital in the absence of value-creating opportunities and generating attractive returns for stockholders. We also clarify that we plan to gradually manage our cash capital at holding down to the midpoint of the operating range of half a billion to a billion five by the end of 2026. Let's move to slide number three to discuss the recent commercial performance starting in the Americas. We remain on track to deliver the transformation of Transamerica that we outlined at a Capital Markets Day in 2023. That said, we experienced commercial volatility during the quarter. The number of licensed agents active for our wholly-owned distribution channel, World Financial Group, continued to increase by 19% compared to the same quarter of last year to over 82,000 agents. We remain on track to meet our ambition of increasing the number of agents 210,000 by 2027, while at the same time improving agent productivity. World Financial Group has also implemented a new activation program to provide training and support for newer agents to accelerate their productivity more quickly. With the number of multi-ticket agents, we measure those agents who sold more than one life policy over the last 12 months. This number increased by 4% compared with a year ago, as agents followed market demand and focused on selling third-party annuity products. This resulted in a decrease of new life sales within our protection solutions business. Here, new life sales amounted to $112 billion in the third quarter of 2024, a decrease of 6% compared with the same period of 2023. This was driven by lower index universal life sales. In the savings and investment segment, we recorded net outflows in our retirement plans business during the reporting period, of which the majority was related to the discontinuance of two large-market, low-margin record-keeping plans. In midsize plans, we recorded net outflows of $373 million during the period. However, our written sales remain strong this quarter, and I'm confident that we are on the right path to profitably grow this business further. In this segment, we also strive to increase profitably and diversify revenue streams by growing in ancillary products. The progress continues to be strong. Assets under administration, or AUA, in the individual retirement accounts increased by 29% over the past 12 months to over $12 billion, while assets under management of the general account stable value product increased by 8% to also nearly $12 billion. Using slide number four, now I want to address our UK business. Here, trends remain consistent with the update we provided at the strategy teach-in earlier this year. We remain on path to reach our ambitions in this market. Commercial momentum in the workplace platform remains strong with net deposits of 865 million pounds in the quarter. This was driven by growing levels of inflows due to the onboarding of new schemes and higher regular contributions from existing schemes. This is testimony to our strong position in this market. The advisor platform net outflows amounted to 960 million pounds. We continue to see the adverse impact of ongoing consolidation and vertical integration in non-target advisor segments, as well as continued elevated withdrawals. Platform assets under administration amounted to 112 billion pounds by the end of September. increasing compared with the same period of 2023 due to the favorable market and the net deposits in the workplace platform. Let us turn to slide number five to address the progress of our international businesses. New live sales in the international segment decreased by 17% compared with the third quarter of 2023 to 65 million euros. New business volumes experienced some cyclical headwinds. New light sales in Brazil were lower, where the higher interest rate environment impacted demand for life insurance linked to lending solutions. Sales in Spain slowed down for health and protection products, while sales linked to consumer loans increased. In China, we saw temporary higher sales ahead of the regulatory pricing change at the end of the third quarter. The decrease of operating capital generation for the international segment compared with last year was driven by the absence of favorable non-recurring items recorded in the prior year period. So let's move to the performance of our global asset management business. In the third quarter of 2023, the global platforms business once again recorded strong third-party net deposits amounting to 2.8 billion euros. This was mostly driven by strong fund performance of the alternative fixed income strategies, which also benefit from the asset management partnership with ASR. Furthermore, our UK retirement business recorded solid net deposits in fixed income products and also benefited from net deposits in equities and multi-asset solutions. In the strategic partnership segment, net deposits amounted to 1.2 billion euros, driven by our Chinese joint venture, AIFMC, following the successful collaboration with the consumer finance platform for money market funds. Third-party net deposits and favorable markets led to a 29 billion euros increase of assets under management compared with the end of September 2023. At the end of the reporting period, the business managed 324 billion euros of assets. I will now hand over to Duncan to discuss the financial performance in more detail.