Voya Financial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Voya Financial fourth quarter 2019 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star followed by the zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Participants are limited to one question and one follow-up. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Katz, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Voya Financial's fourth quarter and full year 2019 earnings conference call. We appreciate all of you who have joined us for this call. As a reminder, materials for today's call are available on our website at investors.voya.com or via the webcast. Turning to slide two. Some of the comments made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law. I refer you to this slide for more information. We will also be referring today to certain non-GAAP financial measures. GAAP reconciliations are available in our press release and financial supplement found on our website, investors.voia.com. Joining me on the call are Rod Martin, VOIA Financial's Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Mike Smith, FOIA's Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will take your questions. For that Q&A session, we have also invited the heads of our businesses, specifically Charlie Nelson, Retirement, Christine Hertzellers, Investment Management, and Rob Grupka, Employee Benefits. With that, let's turn to slide three, as I would like to turn the call over to Rod.

Good morning. Let's begin on slide four with some key themes. 2019 was a strong and successful year for Voya, our shareholders, and our customers. On a normalized basis, our full year EPS was $4.22, representing an 18% increase in adjusted operating earnings per share compared with 2018. This earnings growth was driven by the significant progress we have made in reducing cost and in returning capital to shareholders. It also reflects the sale of our individual life business, which we announced in December. The life transaction accelerates our plans to generate free cash flow from the business, reduces risks, and Marks the completion of a fundamental restructuring of Voya. The transaction will remove five regulated insurance companies, a broker-dealer, and 15 administrative systems, creating significant opportunities for Voya to become even more efficient. Looking ahead, we expect normalized adjusted earnings per share to reach a quarterly run rate of $1.80 to $1.90 by the end of 2021, representing a 10% plus growth from the 2018 base that included life earnings. We remain committed to growing normalized adjusted operating EPS by at least 10% in both 2020 and 2021 while generating a strong return on equity. We have purposely evolved to become a company with a clear focus and strategy centered on high growth, high return, capital light businesses. There are three reasons why we're confident in our continued EPS growth potential and the power of our core businesses. First, we're delivering cost savings We remain on track to achieve the run rate cost savings of at least $250 million by the end of 2020. As of the fourth quarter, we successfully eliminated all of the stranded costs associated with our 2018 annuities transactions. We will bring the same focus in addressing stranded costs related to the life sale. were generating high free cash flows and returning capital to shareholders. We had approximately $896 million of excess capital as of December 31st. With our plans to repurchase at least a billion dollars of our shares in 2020, we are on track to have returned approximately $7 billion of capital in seven years.