Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management Second Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield Second Quarter 2021 Conference Call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Nick Goodman, our Chief Financial Officer, and Sachin Shah, Chief Investment Officer for Brookfield and CEO of our insurance business. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results for the quarter. And finally, Sachin will give an update on our insurance business. After our formal remarks, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. I'd like to remind you that in today's comments, including in responding to questions and in discussing new initiatives and our financial and operating performance, We may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of a principal Canadian and U.S. securities law. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks, and future events and results may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S. and the information available on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Suzanne, and welcome everyone on the call. Nick Goodman will walk you through our financial results in more detail in a moment, but I am pleased to say they are good on almost every front. The market environment has been strong and continues to get stronger in most, if not almost all, of our key markets we operate in. While a total reopening will not be without challenges... We seem to be on a good path, and GDP growth remains strong. We are seeing this in almost all of our operating businesses. Just to give you a few examples, in our infrastructure business, new connections doubled this quarter within our UK regulated distribution business, where we install and, after that, own household connections for water, gas, electricity, and fiber. In our U.S. real estate business, tenant sales per square foot on average have now increased to higher than 2019 levels, not 2020, 2019 levels, across our retail centers. In our private equity business, we saw our residential mortgage insurance company benefit from higher premiums earned supported by the continued strength of the housing market. These are just a few examples of which there are countless others across the business. Capital markets remain very strong with strong levels of global liquidity and a search for yield driving demand. Ten-year treasury, as most of you know, is in the low 1% range. It appears certain that interest rates will remain lowish for some time. Overall, with a strong GDP growth backdrop and lower for longer interest rates, This leaves us well-positioned to execute on our growth plans as we push further to assist our clients with capital and fixed-income investment options. To that end, we recently announced a transaction of bar 100% of American National, which will add a great base to our insurance businesses. Sachin Shah, as Suzanne mentioned, is here with us today and will discuss what our plans are with regards to reinsurance insurance, and dispense transactions specifically. More broadly, across all of our businesses, our teams have been busy. While valuations are generally high, we continue to find assets for value. This is because we often find ourselves as a buyer of choice, given our operational capabilities, our bench strength across a number of industries, our access to large-scale capital, and we can therefore execute on transactions swiftly and also our proven and long-term track record. So while the market is competitive right now, we're still very confident that we can deploy capital while staying disciplined within the business. Moving to fundraising efforts, we've made significant progress with $24 billion of private capital raised since we last spoke to you, including three of our flagship funds, which are now in active fundraising. The capital raised so far includes the $7 billion of our founders' close for our inaugural global transition fund. And capital raised is part of our initial close for our fourth flagship real estate fund of just over $9 billion. Compared to the first close of its prior vintage, this is more capital raised in a quicker timeline and should lead to a much larger fund than last vintage. Our latest private equity fund signed agreements for a couple of transactions recently. Our latest private equity fund has passed the commitment threshold to start fundraising for its next vintage, and we expect that launch to happen soon. Deployment within our infrastructure fund, large infrastructure fund, is progressing well, and we're confident we will shortly complete the acquisition of IPL. This acquisition sets us up well to be in the market with the next vintage of our flagship infrastructure fund early next year and should be an excellent investment for our listed entity, Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. We also expect to have a final close on our opportunistic credit flagship fund in the coming months with the final closeout of our $15 billion fund, the largest in Oak Tree's history. And while we continue to scale up our flagship funds, we're also focused on expanding our client base and growing our product offering, designing and innovating new products that cater to our clients' needs, in particular in this low interest rate environment. As an example of this, in July we announced the creation of our private non-traded REIT, which will merge with an existing Oak Tree REIT, which will assist us getting to market quicker, and it will be rebranded as Brookfield REIT. This private wealth product is geared towards private income-oriented investors. It's focused in the United States, and we expect it will be very attractive in this wealth channel. Brookfield REIT will own high-occupancy, de-risked assets with recurring cash flows, of course, which has been long a specialty of our real estate business. We hope to fully launch the strategy by the end of 2021. The flexibility provided by the privatization of BBY will be instrumental to this launch and the forward business plan for this product. Lastly, we completed or progressed a number of our key initiatives that we previously laid out for the business, including the spinoff of Brookfield Reinsurance Partners to You by way of a special dividend at the end of June, and the privatization of VPY, which closed in July. Thank you all for your continued support, and I'll turn it over to Nick to discuss the financial performance.