Reinsurance Group of America, Incorporated

Good morning and welcome to the Reinsurance Group of America second quarter 2025 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, excuse me, yeah, star followed by zero on your telephone keypad. 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, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to RGA's second quarter 2025 conference call. I'm joined on the call this morning with Tony Chang, RGA's President and CEO, 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 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 the 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 operating EPS of $4.72 per share. Our adjusted operating return on equity for the trailing 12 months, excluding notable items, was 14.3%, which is in line with our intermediate term targets. The operating results were below expectations due to large claims volatility in U.S. individual life and unfavorable claims in our healthcare excess business, which is one of our four business lines within U.S. Group. The U.S. individual experience reflected a higher level of large claims that offset the favorable experience in Q1. All the year, we are in line with expectations, and our forward-looking views have not changed. On the U.S. Group healthcare excess business, Claims were unfavorable, consistent with the trends in the market as seen by the experience of other health companies. This is short-term business, the vast majority of which will be repriced by January 2026. At a more strategic level, RJA has achieved one of our best quarters yet in terms of delivering tangible successes. Firstly, during the quarter, there was a significant increase in our excess and deployable capital measures. This will give us considerably more flexibility going forward to fund not only our strong growth, but also return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. Our business momentum remains very strong in both our financial solutions and traditional businesses. I am delighted with the closing of the Equitable transaction as we announced yesterday. This transaction has an effective date of April 1st. This start date was mutually agreed with Equitable as the experience on the block in Q2 was in line with our expectations. It is not just in the U.S. that we continue to be a market leader in the asset-intensive business. We are having tremendous success in this business line across the globe. I believe this quarter was the first time in our history we have won asset-intensive transactions in five different countries across three continents. This shows the power of RJ's global platform. In the traditional space, for the first six months of the year, our premiums rose by a strong 11% on a constant currency basis while maintaining our robust margins by delivering unique and customized solutions. Whether in the traditional or financial solution space, the nature of our solutions do vary around the world. But what is consistent throughout and what drives this business momentum is our focus on Creation Re. This focus allows us to continue to exceed our targets in terms of the percentage of business coming from exclusive arrangements. This increases our pricing returns as we create greater value for RJ and our clients. As you know, Creation Re is about our ability to create innovative solutions. It is also about our ability to maintain our strong risk discipline. We speak a fair amount about the business we do win, but as instructive is information about the blocks we do not pursue. This quarter, there were several high-profile broker transactions in the U.S. that we chose not to participate in. These transactions did not fit within our sweet spot and risk appetite. Our global platform allows us the flexibility to selectively pursue the business we like around the world. Thirdly, another area of strategic success is the continued build-out of our comprehensive asset management platform, both in terms of the breadth and depth of capabilities. Our investment results were strong this quarter. The earned rate on the portfolio increased due to the strong variable investment income and higher new money rate. Our efforts over the past year to identify and act on repositioning some existing investments also supported these results. Our success is due to our prudent, long-term approach to asset management. We build portfolios to weather the entirety of the investment cycle and have delivered strong returns while remaining well-matched to our liability profile. I will now provide more specific details on some of our new business activities in the quarter focused on our four areas of notable growth. In Asia Traditional, we had a robust quarter in terms of new treaties with all markets performing well. Our Hong Kong operations continue to shine in a market that showed a 43% increase in life insurance sales for the first quarter to a record high. In Taiwan, which is one of our strongest markets, we have been active in the senior market. Currently there are six clients in the market offering 14 senior products, all supported by RGA. Finally, in Korea, we continue to have success in the upgrade cycle relating to the next generation of critical illness products. As you can see, each new product development not only leads to greater business within that market, but also adds to our library of solutions that we then redeploy across Asia and across the globe. Moving to Asia financial solutions, our second area of notable growth. We closed several transactions in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. We continue to see regulatory changes as a key tailwind in these and other markets. While the large marquee transactions get the headlines, we also value these more frequent modest-sized flow or block transactions that are often completed without an intense bidding process. RJ, with its many touchpoints and long-standing relationships, is best positioned to provide these differentiated and more tailored solutions to our clients. Our third area of notable growth is the longevity in the PRT market. In the UK, we had a very active quarter as we closed a number of attractive transactions. We are on pace to meet our targets for new business and believe we are the clear market leader. The highlight of the quarter in the UK was an asset intensive transaction with a new client. We partnered to develop a tailored solution made possible because of RJ's strong ratings, reputation and execution certainty. In the US PRT market, we are encouraged by the increase in activity at the jumbo end of the market. Given our business pipeline, we expect a pickup in activity in the second half of the year. In the US traditional area, our fourth area of notable growth, we had strong new business, most of which was related to our underwriting initiatives. It was a record quarter for individual underwriting cases and we made inroads towards full underwriting outsourcing with a few important clients. Additionally, our broad array of underwriting services was the primary driver of us winning a leading share in many transactions. This included one in-force transaction where the client increased our share due to the services we provide. When you combine our underwriting and product development services With our partners that provide distribution technology and other services, further coupled with our ability to reinsure both sides of the balance sheet, you can see why we continue to bring holistic solutions generating exclusive business for RGA. Putting it all together, I am very pleased with our continued success in providing significant value to RGA and our clients through our creation re-efforts. When combined with our balance sheet optimization on the capital side, in-force actions, investment portfolio repositioning and other management levers, we expect to be successful in driving improved returns for shareholders and therefore a tailwind to our current ROE. We remain confident about the future of our business prospects as RJ is well positioned in its markets and we have a proven successful strategy That has stood the test of time. I will now turn it over to our CFO, Axel Andre, to discuss the financial results in more detail.