Voya Financial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Voya Financial third 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 followed by the number 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 third 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.voia.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. Gap Reconciliations are available in our press release and financial supplement found on our website, investors.voya.com. Joining me on the call are Rod Martin, Voya Financial's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Mike Smith, Voya'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 Grubka, 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. We have navigated through this year and continue to be in a position of strength. As a result of the purposeful strategic decisions that we have made on a normalized basis, our third quarter EPS was $1.19. We once again demonstrated the earnings power of our company and the benefit of our diverse mix of high free cash flow businesses. We continue to see robust demand for our products and services. We are attracting new clients and retaining existing clients who value our expertise in serving the workplace and institutions. For retirement, full-service recurring deposits grew 8.4% year over year, reaching $10.9 billion. We saw strong inflows in both corporate and tax-exempt markets. In investment management, We generated $1.8 billion of net inflows during the third quarter. Institutional inflows continued to be very strong as we attracted new mandates in our specialty asset classes. And in employee benefits, in-force premiums grew 5.7% year over year. We continue to see strong demand for workplace benefit products, particularly We continue to make good progress on the remaining regulatory approvals, and we are confident that these reviews will be completed before the end of 2020. We also continue to expect to generate approximately $1.5 billion of deployable capital from the transaction. Our balance sheet and capital position remains strong. We had approximately $642 million of excess capital as of September 30, and we will continue to be good stewards of shareholder capital. We also maintained our common stock dividend at 15 cents per share for the third quarter. In addition to the status of the life transaction, we will continue to monitor the economic outlook and the impacts from the election in determining when it may be appropriate to resume share repurchases. We have also further strengthened our board, and I'm pleased to share that last week we welcomed Alwyn Lewis as a new independent director. Alwyn brings extensive experience leading several well-known brands to achieve improved financial and operational results while delivering superior customer outcomes. We are delighted to have Alwyn join us. Turning to slide five. We've maintained a strong focus on our values and culture. During October, we partnered with the National Down Syndrome Society to launch our Go Orange campaign, which awarded four entrepreneurs who have Down syndrome with grants totaling $55,000 and highlighted the need for greater employment of people with disabilities. We also collaborated with Disability IN! in a call to action for greater inclusion of people with disability and special needs in the workforce. We continue to take action in support of racial equity with two of our leaders representing Voya in focused efforts that include the Ethisphere Institute's Advisory Council on Equity and Social Justice Initiative and the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion Racial Equity Also, earlier this month, we expanded Voya's efforts to help Americans address the financial challenges of COVID-19 with the launch of our Just Right Advantage program to support minority, women, veteran disability, and the LGBTQ-owned businesses. Externally, as a testament to our ESG efforts, Voya was recognized on Just Capital's 2021 rankings of America's most just companies, earning the number two spot in the capital markets sector. Our work to advance our culture during this particularly unique year was validated by our recent recognition as a great place to work for the fifth consecutive year, which aligns with the positive feedback that we've heard Thank you, Rod. Let's turn to our financial results on slide seven.