Manulife Financial Corporation

Stand by, your meeting is about to begin. Please be advised that this conference call is being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Manulife Financial Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. I would like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Koh. Please go ahead, Mr. Koh.

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's Earnings Conference Call to discuss our Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Financial and Operating Results. Our earnings materials, including a webcast slide for today's call, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at manylife.com. Turning to slide four, we'll begin today's presentation with a highlight of our four-year results and strategic update by Roy Gorey, 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 in more detail. After the prepared remarks, we'll move to the live Q&A portion of the call. Before we start, Please refer to slide two for a caution on forward-looking statements and slide 43 for a note on the non-GAAP and other financial measures used in this presentation. Note that certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from what is stated. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Roy Corey, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

Roy. Thanks, Hung, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Yesterday, we announced our fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results. As you can see, our strategy and discipline focus on execution are delivering, even in uncertain market conditions. We generated double-digit top-line growth with a record AP sales during the year, while Global WAM delivered another year of positive net inflows despite challenges in the retail fund market. That is the 13th year of positive inflows in the past 14 years. Core EPS grew 17%, supported by strong core earnings growth and the impact of share buybacks. Our core ROE increased to 15.9%, achieving our medium-term target. We delivered robust growth of 9% in adjusted book value per share, and our strong LICAT ratio of 137% and low leverage ratio provides ample financial flexibility. Turning to slide 7. Today, We're a very different company from when we began our efforts to reshape our portfolio towards lower risk and higher returns. And 2023 was also a milestone year in that transformation journey. As part of that agenda, we further grew our highest potential businesses. In Asia, we saw double-digit growth across key new business metrics. We are a high-growth top three Pan-Asian life insurer. In Global WAM, we acquired CQS, whose multi-sector alternative credit capabilities complement our existing fixed income and multi-asset solutions business and are a powerful addition to our global credit offering. We also generated remittances of $5.5 billion and returned $4.3 billion of capital to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. And I'm pleased to tell you that yesterday our board approved a 9.6% increase in our common share dividend beginning in March. But first, it goes without saying that meeting our customers' needs and expectations is at the core of what we do. We've sped up our processing times, reduced costs and improved the customer experience. As a result of these and other actions, we've seen a 22-point increase in our net promoter score since 2017, and we are leading or on par with our peers across the majority of our business lines. And none of this would be possible without our winning team and culture. And I'm proud that for the fourth consecutive year, we achieved top quartile employee engagement results. Finally, we enter the year with a significant milestone in our transformation journey, the announcement of the largest ever LTC reinsurance deal, which I'll touch on in the following slide. You'll remember that in December, we announced the milestone LTC transaction. We transacted at attractive terms, de-risked our business, and it will be accretive to core EPS and core ROE after deploying the capital released to share buybacks. The transaction, which we expect will close by the end of February, also contributes to establishing an active LTC reinsurance market. It's another example of the value we continue to unlock for shareholders as we reshape our portfolio to focus on lower-risk and higher-return businesses. And we aren't stopping here. We continue to work on opportunities to create shareholder value through organic and inorganic actions across our legacy and low ROE businesses. Moving to slide nine. Our transformation journey began in 2018 when we started reshaping our businesses by reducing risk, improving ROE, strengthening capital, and growing high return businesses. Thanks to disciplined execution, today our high return businesses represent a larger share of our earnings. These are impressive results considering that the transition to IFRS 17, which defers the recognition of new business gains into CSM, resulted in a two percentage point reduction in 2022. In fact, Asia already represents over 60% of our CSM balance and 70% of our new business CSM, indicating its immense future earnings potential. And as we've changed our business mix over this time, we've significantly expanded our core ROE by almost five percentage points. We've also taken significant actions to reduce risk, including our US variable annuity reinsurance transactions in 2022. Our portfolio optimization actions, along with growth in our highest potential businesses, has reduced the core earnings contribution from LTC and VA significantly, From 24% in 2017, and together with December's LTC transaction, this contribution is expected to further decrease to 11%. Returning capital to shareholders remains a priority, and since 2018, we've returned $18.9 billion through dividends and share buybacks. Those buybacks have generated a benefit of more than $1.3 billion. as our average repurchase costs were well below our recent share price levels. In closing, I'm excited by the progress that we've made and by our momentum heading into 2024. Our unique and diverse geographic footprint, all-weather strategy and focused execution position us well to continue delivering superior value. Given our strong capital position and cash generation, we will continue to look at opportunities to unlock shareholder value, including inorganic opportunities to deploy capital. I'll now hand it over to Colin to review the highlights of our financial results. Colin.