Voya Financial, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Voya Financial first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be on a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star 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 touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Participants will be 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 Kass, Executive Vice President, Finance, Strategy, and Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Voya Financial's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. We appreciate all of you who have joined us for this call. As a reminder, material 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. Gap reconciliations are available in our press release and financial supplement found on our website, investors.boya.com. Joining me on the call are Rod Martin, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Mike Smith, our Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will take your questions. For that Q&A session, we have also invited our Vice Chairman and Chief Growth Officer, Charlie Nelson. as well as the heads of our businesses, specifically Heather LaVallee, Wealth Solutions, Christine Hertzellers, Investment Management, and Rob Grupka, Health Solutions. 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. Overall, we delivered solid results during the first quarter. This included strong adjusted operating EPS, organic growth across our businesses, as well as disciplined and opportunistic capital management. These results were achieved despite the macroeconomic challenges during the quarter. Our performance speaks to strong client demand as well as being proactive in both capital and expense management. As a result, we generated first quarter adjusted operating EPS of $1.47. Excluding notable items, EPS grew 15% year over year. A key driver of our results was the commercial momentum that we demonstrated across our businesses. In wealth solutions, full service recurring deposits for the trailing 12 months grew 11.2% compared with the prior year period. During the first quarter, we generated positive full-service net flows of $446 million. And this reflects the strong organic growth as well as lower participant and plan surrenders. In health solutions, annualized in-force premiums grew 9.7% compared with the prior year period. This was driven by growth across all product lines, including a 22% increase in our voluntary results. In investment management, we generated $1.3 billion of net flows during the first quarter, driven in part by several new private credit mandates. Net flows over the last 12 months were $9.5 billion, which represents organic growth of 4.5%. As we shared at Investor Day, we are generating organic growth the products and solutions that we provide today while also making investments that will enable us to do even more for our customers going forward. For example, in March, we announced the launch of My Health and Wealth. This is a new integrated and holistic benefit selection experience that offers personalized and digital guidance. Specifically, it helps employees optimize their spending, across retirement, health insurance benefits, and emergency savings. This is just one example of how we're taking a customer-centric approach to helping our clients with their health, wealth, and investment needs. In addition to our commercial growth, we are continuing to benefit from our high free cash flow businesses. During the quarter, we deployed more than $700 million of excess capital. Given the decline in the equity markets during the quarter, we opportunistically repurchased $500 million of our shares. The remainder of our capital deployment during the quarter consisted of approximately $200 million of debt extinguishment and $20 million in common stock dividends. As of March 31st, we had approximately $900 million of excess capital. We've also recently received an additional share repurchase authorization of $500 million from our board. Moving forward, we will continue to be disciplined and balanced with the use of our capital, including investing in our businesses to support our growth plans and meet our client needs. Despite Inflationary pressures, equity market volatility, and rising interest rates, Voya remains well positioned. And this is due to the purposeful decisions that we took to de-risk Voya and to create a simpler company. We have a clear strategy, strong businesses with significant scale, and multiple levers to achieve the growth plans that we shared at Investor Day. We will continue to execute as we did in the first quarter, on all components of our plans, net revenue growth, margin expansion, and disciplined capital management. By doing so, we see a path to achieve double-digit adjusted operating EPS growth in 2022. And while macro conditions will affect this result, we will be steadfast in adapting and pivoting. Specifically, we will continue to demonstrate our experience as strong operators and expense managers. As you've seen this management team demonstrate in the past, during challenging market conditions, we will be proactive in controlling what we can control. And we'll continue to balance both short and long-term needs of our stakeholders while positioning WUYA for future long-term success. Turning to slide five, our focus on our values and culture continue to differentiate Voya. Recently, Voya was named as one of the world's most ethical companies for the ninth consecutive year. We were one of only 136 companies to earn this recognition and one of only six companies in the financial services category. And our commitment to sustainability earned Voya Inclusion in S&P's Global Sustainability Yearbook. We also came together in April for Voya's Celebrate Diversity Month. This coincided with our continued partnership with the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion focus on a day of understanding the actions of our people and our company reflect the strength of our culture and how that carries through in all that we do. With that, let me ask Mike to provide more details on our performance and results.