Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management Second Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Ms. Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield Second Quarter 2022 Conference Call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, and Nick Goodman, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as Sachin Shah, CEO of our Insurance Solutions business. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results. And finally, Sachin will give an update on our Insurance Solutions business. After our formal remarks, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. In order to accommodate those who want to ask questions, we ask that you refrain from asking more than two questions at one time. If you have additional questions, please rejoin the queue and we'll be happy to take any additional questions at the end, as time permits. 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 applicable 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. We had a very strong second quarter, reporting $1.5 billion of net income and $1.2 billion of distributable earnings for common shareholders, as well as record capital inflows. Earnings were underpinned by the essential and resilient nature of our underlying operations. The stability, diversity and scale of our business shows in markets like these. There was a significant amount of market volatility during the quarter, but even with the rate hikes we have seen, rates remain historically low-ish, and we expect them to settle in a historically low-ish range in the fullness of time. We remained well positioned to take advantage of potential opportunities with a record level of investable capital of $111 billion. The investing opportunities for businesses like ours continue to strengthen. Our fundraising efforts remain strong, with record inflows of $56 billion since the end of last quarter. Our flagship fundraising continues to progress well, with institutions attracted to the type of assets we own. We are now planning for our next round of flagship fundraising. We also continue to raise and deploy capital across our perpetual strategies. Our non-traded REIT is now on 10 platforms and is well positioned for investing. Nick will go into more detail on fundraising later. Our insurance solutions business closed on the acquisition of American National this quarter, adding $30 billion of assets to the business. This accelerates the growth of our insurance solutions business and Sachin Shah CEO of our insurance business, is here today to talk to you about that business. As a reminder, we own one of the largest portfolios of inflation-protected assets in the world. Our underlying businesses are essential in nature and therefore continue to generate stable and growing cash flows throughout cycles. These assets are highly cash generative with high margins and are largely inflation protected, hence are very attractive to buyers through market cycles. We sold $21 billion of assets at premium valuations during the quarter. While not the reason we did this, it underlines the attractiveness of the type of assets we own. Half of these sales were in our real estate business, as an example. These assets generated exceptional returns and further added to our investable liquidity available to be deployed into new opportunities. As an update on the distribution listing of 25% of our asset management business, we are progressing well towards completing the distribution by the end of the year. As part of this and using this split as an opportunity to look to the future, Our senior-most team are focused on how we continue to move along our next generation of leaders. As you know, most of our senior partners remain at Brookfield to assist with business relationships and clients, but we believe in advancing younger executives as fast as we can. The company today, known as Brookfield Asset Management, will be renamed Brookfield Corporation post the split. This is the company that you currently own shares in and it will retain most of the proprietary capital owned by Brookfield, as well as continue to own 75% of the manager. I will remain CEO and Nick Goodman will be appointed president and CFO. His focus in the future will be on capital allocation among our operating businesses and new business initiatives. Brookfield Reinsurance will remain as a paired security to Brookfield Corporation, as it is today, and holds our insurance business. Sachin Shah will remain CEO of the business, and we expect this business to become a significant operating business for Brookfield Corporation and Brookfield Reinsurance, and we are excited at what has already been done and for the growth to come. Sachin will expand on that in a moment. Our manager spinoff will be named Brookfield Asset Management Limited and will be the new entity for all of our asset management activities. You as a shareholder will receive new shares of this entity on the split. We refer to this entity in our materials as the manager. With respect to the management and the board of the manager, Mark Carney will be appointed chair of the manager in addition to his other responsibilities at Brookfield. I will remain CEO of the business. Connor Teske will be appointed president of the manager in addition to his responsibilities as CEO of our renewable power and transition business, which for now will take up most of his time. Bahir Manios will be appointed CFO of the manager and Anuj Ranjan will be appointed president of the private equity group in addition to his overall business development responsibilities in the manager. Brian Kingston, Cyrus Madden and Sam Pollock, who many of you know, will remain CEOs of their respective businesses and each will become directors of the manager with Mark myself and seven independent directors. Oaktree will continue to be run by Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. We are all excited for the future and believe these changes set us up to deliver continued long-term success for our clients and our shareholders. I will end these comments for this portion by saying that we believe Succession is best when affected as an evolution, and we are all thrilled at advancing our efforts in this regard. I will now pass it over to Nick to go over the financial results of the business. Before I do that, thank you for your continued support and interest in Brookfield. We look forward to seeing many of you at our Investor Day, which is on September 12th in New York. Additional details on this are available on our website. Over to you, Nick.