Voya Financial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the VOYA Financial second quarter 2020 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 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 touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Participants are limited to one question and one follow-up only. 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 second quarter 2020 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. This includes potential impacts related to COVID-19. 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.ca.com. Joining me on the call are Rod Martin, FOIA 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 Gruka, Employee Benefits. With that, let's turn to slide three, as I would like to turn the call over to Rod. Good morning.

Before we begin, I want to recognize Boya board member Barry Griswold, who passed away on June 5th for his significant contributions to our board. Barry, who was 71, joined Boya's board of directors as part of our IPO in 2013, bringing with him an extraordinary reputation in the financial services industry, which he established over four decades, including serving as chairman and CEO of Principal Financial Group. Barry was a passionate proponent Thank you. Let's begin on slide four. As COVID-19 evolves, our team continues to closely monitor the situation across the country and here at Voya. We hope that everyone participating in this call and your families are safe and healthy. Our commitment to protecting our employees and their loved ones and our customers remains our top priority. Our management team is extremely proud of the dedication and commitment demonstrated by our 6,000 employees They have enabled Voya to remain open for business while more than 95% of our people are working remotely. As we shared with you during our last call, we've also taken action to support our customers and clients and our communities. This included being the first major retirement company to waive fees in response to the CARES Act and providing financial counseling and educational resources for customers impacted by COVID-19 and granting free access to our financial advisors. We will continue to take appropriate actions to support our employees, customers and communities as the COVID-19 situation evolves. Turning to slide five, I want to address the important subject of racial injustice. As we have shared on previous earnings calls, diversity, inclusion, and equality are foundational elements of the Voya culture. Internally, we have actively engaged with our employees at all levels of the organization. We have hosted employee open forum discussions, conducted focus groups, and created a video series that featured Voya leaders sharing their thoughts and personal experiences with racial injustice. The response to our video series was so positive that we shared it externally on social media where it's been viewed more than 20,000 times. We're also partnering with organizations such as the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion and the Ethisphere Institute to help drive meaningful change. At a time when the societal challenges can seem daunting, we have an obligation to help and we will. Let's move to slide six in our key themes. We have navigated this year in a position of strength as a result of the purposeful strategic decisions that we made to simplify our company and to streamline our businesses. On a normalized basis, our second quarter EPS was $1.09. We saw solid results during the quarter. We continue to see demand for our products and services Thank you for joining us. and are close to finalizing the sale of the individual life in our legacy annuity businesses. We continue to make great progress with Resolution Life and our regulators, giving us confidence that we will close the transaction in the third quarter. We expect to generate approximately $1.5 billion of deployable capital from the transaction. We also continue to deliver on the cost savings that we previously announced. We have now achieved the $250 million in savings that we were targeting by year-end 2020. We expect further savings and have a strong track record in managing spend, which gives us momentum as we begin to address the stranded costs associated with the sale of individual life. Finally, our balance sheet and capital position remain strong. We had approximately $668 million of excess capital as of June 30. And while we have paused our share repurchases earlier this year, we feel good about our capital strength, and we will continue to closely monitor developments through the third quarter. We also maintained our dividend at 15 cents a share for the second quarter. Turning to slide seven. As we have shared with you previously, our culture and the character of our brand, our commitment to corporate responsibility, and our leading ESG practices are differentiators for our company. We regularly share this slide with investors to highlight our ongoing commitment to ESG. A recent example of this commitment is the comment letter that we sent to the Department of Labor concerning the DOL's proposed amendments Thank you very much. Recent Voya research found that more than 76% of individuals felt it was important for their employer to apply ESG principles to workplace benefits, and 60% would likely contribute more to an ESG-aligned retirement plan if it were available. Turning to slide eight. In recognition of our ESG efforts, for the third year, Voya has maintained its listing on the FTSE for Good Index. This index series is derived from the FTSE Global Index Series and is a tool for investors seeking to invest in companies that demonstrate good, sustainable practices. Also, for the third year in a row, Voya was honored as a Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion on the Disability Equality Index. Our brand marketing efforts also earned Thank you, Rod. Let's turn to our financial results on slide 10. We delivered normalized after-tax adjusted operating earnings of $1.09 per share in the second quarter of 2020.