Reinsurance Group of America, Incorporated

Good morning and welcome to the Reinsurance Group of America third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeff Hobson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to RGA's third quarter 2024 conference call. I'm joined on the call this morning with Tony Chang, RGA's President and Chief Executive Officer, Axel Andre, Chief Financial Officer, Leslie Barbee, Chief Investment Officer, and Jonathan Porter, Chief Risk Officer. A quick reminder before we get started regarding forward-looking information and non-GAAP financial measures. Some of our comments or answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from expected results. Please refer to the earnings release we issued yesterday for a list of important factors that could cause actual results to differ from expected results. Additionally, during the course of this call, the information we provide may include non-GAAP financial measures. Please see our earnings release, earnings presentation, and quarterly financial supplement, all of which are posted on our website for discussion of these terms and reconciliations to GAAP measures. Throughout the call, we will be referencing slides from the earnings presentation, which again is posted on our website. And now I'll turn the call over to Tony for his comments.

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call. Last night we reported adjusted operating earnings excluding notable items of $6.13 per share. This is yet another record quarter for RGA. Our adjusted operating return on equity excluding notable items for the past year was 15.5%. Both the profit figure and the ROE continues to exceed the intermediate term targets we have previously shared. This is the result of RGA's strong focus to create long-term shareholder value. We do this by optimizing both our new business activities as well as our balance sheet management, and we are excited about the future opportunities as we continue in this fashion. It was another quarter where we showed continued strong business momentum with excellent capital deployment and strong premium growth. For 2024, we have deployed into transactions $1.4 billion of capital, which is more than 50% higher than in 2023, with one quarter remaining to go. Our internal measure, new business and better value for this year, already exceeds what we achieved during all of last year. This is the result of both the quantity as well as the quality of the new business one as we continue to execute a material number of exclusive transactions around the world. Exclusive and other higher value business, which we call creation business, has for the past one to two years been the majority of our new business embedded values. Let me provide more details on our business and some of these exclusive wins focused on our four areas of notable growth. commencing with our Asian traditional business. We see conditions there that are as favorable as I have seen over the past 15 years. This is due to our teams, the unique RJ platform, and the successful execution of the product development strategy. We have biometric capabilities second to none. We can reinsure both sides of the balance sheet and we will always exercise discipline to transact only when the risk-reward trade-off is favorable. I want to highlight three examples of exclusive transactions where we have broken new ground strategically during the quarter. In Korea, we continue to successfully execute the product development strategy that we launched nearly 20 years ago. We created a new cancer treatment product earlier this year and have completed 19 agreements with clients to sell this product. This product has already sold over 2 million policies in 2024 and will increase in 2025. Secondly, in mainland China, we take our product development strategy one step further. we can provide a solution for the biometric liability and asset sides of the balance sheet. We believe this capability is unique to RGA and generates material value for our clients as it not only supports their sales, but also helps manage their new business capital strains. Finally, in Hong Kong, this strategy has taken yet another step further by combining our underwriting technology to our product development capabilities and our ability to reassure both sides of the balance sheet. One of the market leaders in Hong Kong announced their use of our MedScreen Plus digital underwriting system. This is a major differentiator as it streamlines the underwriting process for the mainland Chinese buying policies in Hong Kong. These three examples in three markets show that each element of this product development strategy can lead to quality business. When the elements are combined together, you can see why we are able to generate a high proportion of our business through exclusive transactions. Clearly, you can see in Asia, we link our strategies, capabilities, and data across the region and then tailor and innovate in each of these markets for our treasured clients. As other markets in Asia evolve, RJ will export and tailor these initiatives to help our clients grow. In our second area of notable growth, U.S. traditional, the third quarter was one of our strongest for new business in recent memory. As announced, an important win during the quarter was with American National. This transaction includes a balanced mix of asset and biometric risk. As mentioned previously, RGA prides itself on our strong pricing discipline and prudent capital deployment. We believe the U.S. market is presenting increasingly attractive opportunities that align with RGA's sweet spot. We had over 20 other new business wins with considerable activity in terms of both organic and enforced block transactions. These wins can take months, if not years, to cultivate. This quarter is one where many things successfully came together. Our third area of notable growth is the PRT and the longevity market. In the US PRT market, we completed another transaction this quarter. The pipeline remains very strong and we are optimistic about our prospects going forward. In the UK, we continue to have a very strong year. Like in Hong Kong, we have another market-leading digital underwriting system, which allows us to win exclusive business, reinsuring individual retail annuities. In addition, we continue to win more than our fair share of business in the UK PRT reinsurance market. We are on track to surpass last year's new business performance, which was a record year for RJs. Finally, in our Asia asset intensive business, we further expanded our presence in the Korean market where we completed two additional coinsurance transactions. This included one with a market leader for an asset size equivalent to approximately 500 million US dollars. These landmark transactions have created a strong pipeline for future growth for RJ. The Korean market shares many characteristics for coinsurance business as we have seen in Japan over the past decade. Our teams are best in class and we have already cultivated many client relationships over the past 20 years on the traditional reinsurance side. Record earnings and strong business wins are two reasons why 2024 has been successful. A third reason that is just as important is our strong progress in the optimization of our balance sheet. I have previously mentioned that we have other management levels beyond winning new business to enhance our ROE and EPS growth. This quarter, we initiated a transaction to recapture retroceded business, which we expect will generate $1.5 billion in long-term value and will be accretive to ROE and PTAOI 2025 and beyond. Axel will expand on this topic shortly. This example of balance sheet management follows other initiatives we have completed this year, such as asset repositioning and enforced management actions. Collectively, balance sheet management actions have raised our expected value of enforced business margins by $2 billion, and we believe there are continued opportunities capital management. RJ continues to actively explore alternative capital sources on multiple fronts. We will imminently complete the capital raise for RubyRee at the upper end of our target. In addition, we placed another transaction with RubyRee during the third quarter. Finally, I am very pleased to see that the value of our enforced business margins increased 13.9% or $4.6 billion over the past three quarters. Long-term economics remains our key focus, and this measure is clearly aligned to that. As our earnings presentation shows, there are both material contributions from the new business place and the balance sheet management actions, examples of which I shared earlier on the call. We believe this financial information provides another lens to the intrinsic growth in value of our enterprise. So in conclusion, we enter Q4 with accelerating momentum and firing on all cylinders. I could not be more pleased with our team, our strategy, and our execution, and this shows up in results for the quarter and year to date. Our intention will be to continue this momentum, build to sustain our future growth, and ensure capital sources are diverse and best to fund this growth. Clearly, we have had great results year-to-date, and I am fully confident that the best is yet to come. I will now turn it over to our new CFO, Axel Andre, to discuss the financial results in more detail.