Aegon Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aegon's third quarter 2025 Trading Update conference 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. I would like to welcome you to this call on Egon's third quarter 2025 trading update. My name is Yves Cormier, Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today to take you through our progress are Egon's 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 end of the presentation. With that, I would like to give the floor to Lars.

Thank you, Yves, and good morning, everyone. I will start today's presentation by running you through the strategic project progress we're making and the commercial performance in the quarter. Then I will hand over to Duncan, who will address our capital results in more detail. So let me begin on slide number two with the key messages for the quarter. During the third quarter of 2025, we continued to make good progress in transforming our businesses and we generated 340 million euros of operating capital generation. World Financial Group expanded its distribution network, adding more licensed agents and increasing their productivity. The commercial momentum in our U.S. strategic assets resulted in higher life and annuity sales. In retirement plans, account balances increased, as did the balance of our ancillary products, and written sales remained strong. In the United Kingdom, we recorded some outflows due to the departure of two large, low-margin workplace schemes, while both our asset management and international businesses continued to grow. Turning to our capital position, our units remained well capitalized. Furthermore, the cash capital at holding remains very healthy at 1.9 billion euros, despite returning just over 800 million to shareholders in the period. At the end of September, we had executed just over half of our ongoing 400 million euro share buyback program. We expect to complete the remainder by December 15th. Looking towards the end of the year, we continue to expect to achieve all our financial targets for 2025, despite the weakening of the U.S. dollar during the year. We look forward to providing you with an update on our strategy at our Capital Markets Day on December 10th. On the day, we also aim to share the outcome of a review regarding a potential relocation of our legal domicile and head office to the United States. Let's now move to slide three to discuss the recent commercial performance of the Americas. Our aim is to build Transamerica into America's leading middle market life insurance and retirement company. In the third quarter, we continue to make good progress with this transformation. At World Financial Group, the number of licensed agents continues to increase steadily thanks to the successful recruitment of new agents and improved retention of existing agents. The number of multi-ticket agents remained stable compared with the past two quarters, albeit below the level of the third quarter of last year. We have recently focused our actions on improving the productivity of existing agents. This led to a 15% increase in total life sales at WFG and a 9% increase in annuity sales backed by solid consumer demand. Transamerica's market share in WFG was 65% in the reporting period. Around half of the 39% increase in new life sales in our protection solution segment came from higher index universal life sales at WFG and our own high agency channel. The remainder of the growth was driven by higher sales of the final expense product we offer through a fully digital underwriting platform that was launched in autumn of 2024. In the savings and investment segment, Net deposits in our retirement plan business were negative, largely due to outflows in large market plans and slightly negative net deposits in midsize plans. However, business growth and favorable markets over the last year drove a 10% increase in the total account balances. Written sales in both large market and midsize plans remain strong, which implies solid levels of takeover deposits for future periods. We generated further growth in both the general accounts stable value product as well as in the individual retirement accounts as we work to increase profitability and diversify revenue streams of the retirement plans business. I now move to slide number four to update you on our other businesses. At Agon UK, net deposits in the workplace platform were negative for the first time in the last two years. This was due to the departure of two large low margin schemes. In the advisor platform, we continue to see the adverse impact of ongoing consolidation in the non-target advisor segments. We are working hard to improve the platform experience for our customers, and the enhancements we have delivered to date have been well received, leading to higher net promoter scores. Together with several other initiatives, we aim to return the advisor platform to growth by 2028. In our international segment, we continue to grow our book. Sales in Brazil continued to grow, particularly in credit and group life products, because it was largely offset by currency movements. New life sales decreased at our joint venture in China, which offset growth in the other markets. The new life sales contributed to the growth of gross return premiums across the book. In asset management, Positive third-party net deposits in our global platforms business were mostly driven by inflows in fixed income and alternative fixed income products. In strategic partnerships, net deposits were driven by Egon's French asset management joint venture with La Banque Postale. With that, I turn to Duncan to discuss our financial performance in more detail.