Equitable Holdings, Inc.

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Equitable Holdings full year and fourth quarter earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the call over to Eric Bass, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Equitable Holdings' full year and fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. Materials for today's call can be found on our website at ir.equitableholdings.com. Before we begin, I would like to note that some of the information we present today is forward-looking and subject to certain SEC rules and regulations regarding disclosure. Our results may differ materially from those expressed in or indicated by such forward-looking statements. Please refer to the Safe Harbor language on slide two of our presentation for additional information. Joining me on today's call are Mark Pearson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Equitable Holdings, Robin Raju, our Chief Financial Officer, Nick Lane, President of Equitable Financial, Onar Erzan, President of Alliance Bernstein, and Tom Simeone, Chief Financial Officer for Alliance Bernstein. During this call, we will be discussing certain financial measures that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, also known as non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and related definitions may be found on the investor relations portion of our website and in our earnings release, slide presentation, and financial supplement. I will now turn the call over to Mark.

Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. Before diving into our 2025 results and 2026 outlook, I want to take a step back to reflect on the journey Equitable Holdings has been on since our IPO. We have been intentional about refining our business mix to focus on three core growth engines, US retirement, asset management, and wealth management. These are very attractive and growing markets, and they are integral to our mission of helping our clients secure their financial well-being and live long and fulfilling lives. Our integrated model positions us well to be one of the long-term winners in each of them. At the same time, we have been reshaping our balance sheet to become more capital light, reduce exposure to legacy insurance risks, and increase the quality of cash flows. You saw further evidence of this in 2025, with the execution of our life reinsurance transaction with RGA, and we believe these actions will create a more valuable company. Our business has solid momentum entering 2026, and we remain focused on achieving all of our 2027 financial targets. Turning to slide three, I will provide some brief highlights from our 2025 results. Fall year non-GAAP operating earnings were $5.64 per share or $6.21 per share after adjusting for notable items. This was up 1% over 2024 as growth was held back by elevated mortality claims. The past two quarters have shown increased earnings power and we expect EPS growth to accelerate in 2026. We produced full-year organic cash generation of $1.6 billion. consistent with our $1.6 to $1.7 billion guidance range. In 2026, we expect this to increase to approximately $1.8 billion, and we remain on track to reach $2 billion in 2027. Assets under management and administration ended 2025 at a record $1.1 trillion, up 10% year over year. which will support growth in fee and spread-based earnings. Finally, we returned $1.8 billion to shareholders in 2025, which includes $500 million of additional share repurchases executed following the life reinsurance transaction. Excluding these incremental buybacks, our payout ratio was 68% at the high end of our 60% to 70% target rate. Moving to organic growth, we continue to see healthy trends despite competitive market conditions. In retirement, we produced $5.9 billion of net flows in 2025, a 4% organic growth rate, helped by another year of record RILA sales. We also leaned into the funding agreement-backed note market to take advantage of attractive spreads and had $5 billion of new issuance. This is not reflected in our retirement net flows, but will help support growth in spread-based earnings. Wealth management also continues to see strong momentum, with full-year net inflows of $8.4 billion, a 13% organic growth rate. The number of wealth planners who are our most productive advisors, focused on holistic wealth planning, increased by 12%. Alliance Bernstein experienced mixed dynamics in 2025. It had overall net outflows of $11.3 billion, which includes $4 billion of low fee outflows related to the RGA transaction. On the other hand, AB continues to see strong momentum in its private markets business, which increased AUM by 18% to $82 billion and is well-positioned to achieve its target of $90 to $100 billion in AUM by the end of 2027. AB ended 2025 with an institutional pipeline of $20 billion, and it has over $3 billion of additional insurance wins that are also expected to fund in 2026. One incremental growth opportunity is commercial real estate lending. AB is making investments to enhance its platform and will onboard more than $10 billion of Equitable's commercial mortgage loan portfolio in the second half of the year. This is a win for both companies and is another good example of the flywheel benefits between Equitable and AB. Finally, we continue to make strong progress on our strategic initiatives. I already mentioned the life reinsurance transaction with RGA. which freed $2 billion of capital and reduced our mortality exposure by 75%. We used a portion of the proceeds to help drive growth in asset and wealth management by increasing our ownership stake in AB and funding an investment in the FCA re-sidecar and the acquisition of Stiefel Independent Advisors. We are also on track to realize our target at $150 million of expense savings by 2027, with $120 million currently in our run rate results. We have already achieved our $110 million target for incremental investment income from shifting to private markets and see opportunity for further upside. Moving to slide four, we highlight some of the key performance indicators for our growth strategy and the progress since our 2023 investor day. I've already mentioned several of these, so I'll just focus on a couple of areas. In retirement, net flows and AUM growth are running ahead of investor day forecasts. We also are making progress in growing our institutional business, which had over $600 million of net inflows in 2025 across in-plan annuities and HSAs. We expect a similar level of inflows in 2026 and forecast this to ramp further over time. In wealth management, we achieved our target of $200 million in annual earnings two years ahead of plan, and the business has excellent momentum given top quartile organic growth and rising advisor productivity. We expect wealth management to sustain double-digit annual earnings growth, assuming normal market conditions. Finally, AV has done a good job in executing on its margin initiatives, and it reported a 33.7% adjusted operating margin in 2025 at the upper end of its targeted range. At the same time, it is seeing benefits from growth investments in areas such as private markets, insurance asset management, and active ETFs. Overall, we see good commercial growth momentum, which will support further growth in earnings and cash flows. Slide 5 provides an update on progress against our 2027 financial targets. Starting with cash generation, we remain on track to reach $2 billion in 2027. As I mentioned earlier, we forecast $1.8 billion of cash generation in 2026, which represents greater than 10% year-over-year growth. Over 50% of cash flows coming from assets and wealth management, and we now have a track record of paying dividends from our Arizona insurance entity, giving us good visibility into future cash flows. Through 12 quarters, our payout ratio is 67%, at the high end of our targeted 60% to 70% range. Note that this does not include the $500 million of incremental share repurchases funded by the RGA transaction. The one area where we are currently below our target is earnings per share growth, which has been 8% through the first three years of our plan. We attribute this primarily to the elevated mortality claims experienced in 2025. Our exposure to mortality is significantly reduced, following the LIFE reinsurance transaction, and we expect EPS growth to improve in 2026, getting us back on track. Turning to slide six, I want to highlight some of the reasons we feel confident in projecting strong growth in 2026. First, we ended 2025 with a record level of assets under management across each of our business segments, which bodes well for growth in fee and spread-based earnings. Given the healthy organic growth momentum we have discussed, particularly in retirement and wealth management, we expect continued growth in assets under management and advice moving forward. Importantly, we also have significantly less exposure to future fluctuations in mortality claims. The RGA transaction reduced our net mortality exposure by 75%, so even if 2025's experience were to recur, the bottom line impact would be materially reduced. Finally, we will get the full benefit from the additional share repurchases executed in the second half of 2025. We have reduced our share count by 9% over the past year, which provides a nice tailwind for EPS growth in 2026. Equitable is well positioned in attractive growing markets and I'm confident in our ability to execute on the opportunity in front of us. I will now turn the call over to Robin to discuss our fourth quarter results and outlook in more detail.