Manulife Financial Corporation

This conference is being recorded. Cette conférence est enregistrée. Please stand by. Your meeting is ready to begin. Please be advised that this conference call is being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Manulife Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. I would like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Han Ko. Please go ahead, Mr. Ko.

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's earnings conference call to discuss our third quarter and year-to-date 2023 financial and operating results. Our earnings materials, including webcast slides for today's call, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at manulife.com. Turning to slide four, we'll begin today's presentation with an overview of our third quarter results and strategy update by Roy Corey, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Following Roy's remarks, Colin Simpson, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the company's financial and operating results. After the prepared remarks, we'll 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 speak to and we'll do our best to respond to everyone. Before we start, please refer to slide two for a caution and forward-looking statements. Note that certain material factors or assumptions are applied to making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from what is stated. I would also refer you to slide 35 for a note on the non-GAAP and other financial measures used in this presentation. which includes an explanation of our use of transitional results for 2022 comparison. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

Roy. Thanks, Hung, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Yesterday, we announced our third quarter 2023 financial results. Let me first share with you some quick thoughts on the quarter. We delivered growth across our global business, which is evidenced through the strong operating and new business results. In the third quarter, we saw double digit growth in AP sales and new business value compared with the prior year quarter. We also generated solid growth in new business CSM of 6%, which contributed to an annualized organic CSM growth of 5% on a year-to-date basis. Since the adoption of IFRS 17, we've been delivering steady year-on-year growth in core earnings over the past three quarters. including a 35% rise in core EPS this quarter. We also reported core ROE of 16.8% ahead of our medium term target of 15% plus for the second consecutive quarter. And we continue to focus on allocating capital to our high return businesses to drive ROE growth. Despite the impacts of the challenging macroeconomic environment on our net income, we grew our IFRS 17 adjusted book value by over $1 per share in the third quarter, which translated to a 4% increase year-on-year. And finally, enabled by our strong capital position, we continued to deploy capital to further enhance returns to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Turning to slide seven, we are driving profitable growth while focusing on the needs of our customers and returning capital to our shareholders. which contributed to a strong third quarter. Asia continued to build on the momentum of the previous quarter, capitalizing on the return of demand from mainland Chinese visitor customers, and delivered strong new business results with APE sales and new business CSM growth of 20% and 16% year-on-year respectively. In Canada, we delivered impressive APE sales growth of 51% compared with the prior year quarter. driven by a large affinity market sale, and it translated into an increase in new business value of 72% in the segment. We're also making decisions easier for our customers, notably to accelerate the growth of our global high net worth business. We launched a unified onboarding platform in the third quarter in Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Singapore to deliver a consistent high touch experience for both distributors and customers. I'm encouraged by the continued growth across our global franchise. Now let me speak to our continued journey of becoming a digital customer leader and highlight some of the key initiatives across our businesses. Starting with Canada, we continued our digitization efforts to meet growing demand for more personalized digital healthcare experiences for our group benefits members with a strategic partnership with League, a leading healthcare technology provider. This partnership will help our customers understand their health, focus on prevention, access care, and better understand and optimize their benefits. In Global WAM, we accelerated customer adoption of digital applications in Canada retirement through our Say Goodbye to Paper campaign, which contributed to a 165% increase in members converting to e-statements over the three-month campaign period. and an increase in satisfaction in their digital experience over the prior quarter. Moving to Asia, we further automated our claims handling process in Hong Kong to deliver a better customer experience and drive operational efficiency. Through continued leveraging of data to enhance our auto adjudication engine, the initiative drove a nearly twofold increase in straight through processed claims year on year. In the US, we continued to optimize our digital capabilities to create a more seamless digital customer experience through various initiatives, including an enhancement of the interactive voice response authentication, enabling 31% of inbound calls to be completed with no human interaction during the quarter. These are just a few recent examples of how we're making decisions easier for our customers and meeting their personalized digital needs. and part of our investment of more than $1 billion since 2017 to digitize our business. Looking ahead, we'll continue to build on our strong digital platform while accelerating our adoption of new technologies such as generative AI. We're already piloting a number of initiatives that we will look to scale as we uncover their potential to generate top and bottom line benefits. Moving to capital management, we continue to maintain a strong capital position supported by a higher LICAT ratio in the quarter of 137%. We also generated stable growth in adjusted book value per share with a 4% increase year-on-year in the third quarter. Coupled with a financial leverage ratio that is close to our medium-term target of 25%, we are in a position of strength to weather the macroeconomic uncertainties and continue returning capital to our shareholders. In fact, we've returned approximately $7.7 billion of capital to our shareholders through dividends and share buybacks since we resumed our share buyback program in 2022. And our dividend per common share has grown an average of 10% annually since 2017. In summary, I am pleased with our strong results in the third quarter. While we continue to operate in a tough and uncertain environment that presents challenges, I see tremendous opportunities against the backdrop of higher rates and continued recovery in Asia. Manulife is uniquely positioned to capture these opportunities given our financial strength, business and geographic diversity, and a leading insurance business that will continue to benefit from higher rates. Thank you. I'll now hand it over to Colin to review the highlights of our financial results. Colin.