Manulife Financial Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Manulife Financial's first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. Your host for today will be Mr. Hong Ko. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's earnings conference call to discuss our 2022 comparative results under IFRS 17 and IFRS 9, as well as our first quarter 2023 financial and operating results. As this marks the first quarter of reporting under the new accounting standards, we are extended to call to two hours. Our earnings materials, including the webcast slides for today's call and IFR 17 related reference materials, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at Manulife.com. We will begin today's presentation with an overview of our 2022 comparative results under IFR 17 and 9 by Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer. This will be followed by Phil Worthington, our Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss our 2022 restated results, including the new DOE analysis, CSM movement analysis, and our updated sensitivity disclosure. Please note that we are providing the 2022 comparative results for users to better understand and interpret our results under RFI 17 and 9. This presentation will mainly focus on full year 2022 results, not period over period variance, or comparing the results between the two accounting bases. Following our 2022 comparative presentation, we will turn our attention to the first quarter of 2023, and Roy will provide an overview of our results and a strategic update. Phil will then discuss the company's financial and operating results in the first quarter under the new accounting regime. After the two sets of prepared remarks, we will move to the live Q&A portion of the call. We ask each participant to adhere to a limit of two questions, including follow-up questions. If you have additional questions, please re-queue, and we will do our best to respond to everyone. Before we start, Please refer to the slide containing the caution on forward-looking statements and non-GAAP and other financial measures within each of the respective presentations. Note that certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from what is stated. I also encourage you to take note of the factors mentioned in our Notes to Readers slide when interpreting our 2022 restated and 2023 financial results. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

Roy. Thanks, Hung, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Let me share with you a few highlights of our 2022 results under IFRS 17 before passing it to Phil to walk you through the details. While IFRS 17 does not impact the fundamental economics of our business or financial strength, the new accounting standards are expected to improve the stability of our financial metrics. I'm pleased to confirm that our IFRS 17 transition impacts are consistent with the guidance we previously provided. On a restated basis under IFRS 17, we delivered solid core earnings in 2022 and stable growth in adjusted book value, which incorporates the strength of our CSM. Our strategic priorities remain unchanged, and we're well positioned to achieve our medium-term financial and operating targets under the new accounting regime. Turning to slide seven. We delivered solid core earnings of $5.8 billion despite the claims experienced losses in our US life business due to COVID-19 and charges in our property and casualty reinsurance business due to Hurricane Ian. After adjusting for hedge accounting and ECL principles, we reported $3.5 billion of net income attributed to shareholders on a transitional basis for the full year. We believe our net income could have reached up to $4.7 billion in 2022 had we managed our investment activities aligned to the new accounting standards throughout the year. Phil will elaborate further on this in a few moments. We delivered new business CSM of $1.9 billion in 2022, reflecting the profitable growth of our insurance businesses globally. We generated $1.3 billion of organic CSM and the total CSM balance ended at $17.3 billion on a pre-tax basis. Our adjusted book value per share grew by approximately 6% compared with the IFRS 17 opening balance and reached $29.42 at year-end 2022. The new adjusted book value metrics incorporates the after-tax CSM balance into book value and reflects CSM's intrinsic connection to the value of our insurance businesses. And our capital remains strong with a LICAT ratio of 136% under IFRS 17, an increase of 5 percentage points relative to IFRS 4, reflecting a more stable capital ratio relative to interest rate movements under the new accounting regime. On a comparative basis, the IFRS 17 transition impacts on our core earnings and balance sheet metrics as of January 1st, 2023, were consistent with our previous guidance. I am incredibly proud of all of our colleagues who worked tirelessly to deliver a smooth transition. Thank you. And I'll hand it over to Phil Witherington to provide an overview of our 2022 comparative results.