Aegon Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Ergon's second 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, 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 Aegon's second half 2024 results. Joining me to take you through our progress are Aegon 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 I now would like to hand over to Lars.

Thanks Yves and good morning everyone and thank you for joining the call today. Let me start today's presentation by running you through our strategic and commercial developments before handing over to Duncan to address our financial results in more detail. Let's move to slide two to review the highlights of the year. In 2024, we made good progress with the transformation of AGON and are on track to meet the 2025 targets. I will begin by highlighting some of our key financials. Starting with IFRS, we reported an operating result of nearly €1.5 billion over 2024, which is in line with last year's results and with a clear improvement of claims experience following our assumption updates in the first half of 2024. AGON reported operating capital generation before holding and funding expenses of €1.2 billion in 2024 in line with the guidance we provided. We also met our guidance on free cash flow, which came in at €759 million. Based on this progress, we propose a final dividend of €0.19 per common share, which would bring the full-year dividend to €0.35 per share, which is an increase of 17%, compared with 2023. We also returned 1.4 billion euros of capital to our shareholders during the calendar year in the form of dividends and share buybacks, and furthermore, we are currently executing an additional 150 million share buyback program. These are testimony to our commitment to generating attractive returns for our shareholders. Turning now to our strategy and commercial momentum, I'm also pleased with the progress that we have made. In the United States, we are building Transamerica into America's leading middle market life insurance and retirement company. World Financial Group, our affiliated insurance distribution network, continues to attract new agents and grow its business. In mid-sized retirement plans, we are growing the portfolio and have a very strong pipeline of written sales. We continue to pursue our strategy in our protection solutions business with a focus on growing our life and indexed annuity business. In financial assets, we have reduced capital employed and made good progress in long-term care and completed the program to purchase institutionally owned universal life policies ahead of schedule, reducing our exposure to mortality risks. Moving to the UK, in June we updated you on our strategy to create a champion in the UK savings and retirement market. The results since then have been in line with our expectations. We have seen record growth in the workplace platform and while outflows continued in our advisor platform, we are executing a strategy to reverse the flow dynamics in this business that includes targeting our top 500 financial advisor firms. Our asset management business had a very strong year with solid net deposits in both the global platforms and the strategic partnership channels. Finally, in international, commercial results have been volatile this year in several markets, but mostly from pricing actions in China to reflect lower interest rates. I'm now turning to slide number three for an update on our strategic assets in the Americas. We remain on track to deliver on the transformation of Transamerica. Starting with WFG, compared with the end of 2023, the number of licensed agents increased by 17% to over 86,000. The number of multi-ticket life agents remained stable over the same period. Annuity sales through WFG network increased by 22% compared with 2023, while new life sales decreased by 3 percent. In the savings and investment segment, while large market retirement plans experienced net outflows, net deposits in the mid-sized segment amounted to $0.6 billion in 2024. Strong levels of new written sales in both mid-sized and large market plans point to solid growth of growth deposits going forward. In this segment, we also strive to increase profitability and diversify revenue streams by growing in ancillary products, as explained during the Capital Markets Day in 2023. Assets under administration in individual retirement accounts increased by 22% over the past 12 months to nearly $13 billion, while assets under management of the general account stable value product increased by 18% to $13 billion. In the protection solutions segment, new life sales decreased by 3% compared with the first half of last year to $473 million. New life sales were impacted by a number of factors within the WFG distribution channel. These included some attrition of senior producing life licensed agents higher levels of sales for third-party high-based value life contracts, which is a product segment that Transamerica is not focused on, along with a shift in the mix of sales towards more annuities. We are actively addressing these challenges, and in the fourth quarter, we noted an improvement of new life sales of Transamerica products versus the third quarter. We're also making good progress with the transformation of our life operating model, having completed major milestones in 2024. So let's now move to our UK business using slide number four. In the UK, trends remain consistent with the path we discussed at the strategy teaching. Commercial momentum in the workplace platform remains very strong, evidencing our strong position in this market. Net deposits during 2024 amounted to 3.7 billion pounds, more than double the level of 2023. In the advisor platform, net outflows amounted to 3.5 billion pounds in 2024. This reflects continued elevated levels of customer withdrawals and ongoing consolidation in non-target advisor segments. In line with our strategy, we are focusing our efforts on targeting our top 500 financial advisor firms, and improving the platform experience. At the end of 2024, the platform assets under administration amounted to 115 billion pounds, up 11% compared with the end of 2023, due to favorable markets and the net deposits on the workplace platform. I now turn to slide number five to address the progress of our international businesses. New life sales in international segments decreased by 15% compared with 2023. This was mainly driven by pricing actions in China to reflect lower interest rates. This more than offset the slightly elevated sales volumes generated ahead of a second regulatory change in October 2024. In Brazil, the decrease of new life sales is explained by unfavorable exchange rate movements and a very strong sales level in 2023. In Spain and Portugal, new life sales decreased mainly as a result of fewer mortgage-linked life sales, as higher interest rates dampened demand, especially in the first half of the year. This was partly offset by higher sales in single premium products linked to consumer loans. A similar reduction was observed for accident and health products. But we continue to profitably grow our books in these markets and have recorded solid increases in gross written premiums during 2024 compared to 2023. Moving now to slide number six. Agonass management reported solid results, very solid results over the year. In the global platforms business, we saw strong third party net deposits of 9.2 billion euros. This was driven by strong inflows in alternative fixed income funds, which also benefited from the asset management partnership with ASR. The other main contributors to net deposits were retirement funds in the UK and the Netherlands. In the strategic partnership segment, net deposits amounted to 4.5 billion euros, and that was mainly driven by our Chinese joint venture, AIFMC. These solid levels of net deposits combined with favorable markets and favorable currency movements increased the assets under management to 332 billion euros at year end 2024. Duncan, I will now hand over to you to discuss the financial performance over the second half of 2024.