Manulife Financial Corporation

Please stand by. Your meeting is about to begin. Please be advised that this conference call is being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Manulife Financial Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Koh. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Welcome to Manulife's Earnings Conference Call to discuss our third quarter and year-to-date 2024 financial and operating results. Our earnings materials, including the webcast slide for today's call, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at manylife.com. Before we start, please refer to slide 2 for a caution on forward-looking statements and slide 34 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. Turning to slide 4. Roy Gorey, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will begin today's presentation with a highlight of our third quarter and year-to-date 2024 results and a strategic update. Following Roy's remarks, Colin Simpson, our Chief Financial Officer, will discuss the company's financial and operating results in more detail. After their prepared remarks, we'll move to the live Q&A portion of the call. 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. Yesterday, we announced our third quarter 2024 financial results. These strong results are a testament to the benefits of our unique business mix and geographic footprint and the tremendous momentum that we have in the franchise. We are executing on our strategy and delivering strong financial performance while making great progress towards our goal of being the digital customer leader in our industry. In the third quarter of 2024, we delivered record financial and operating results, including poor earnings, AP sales, new business CSM, new business value, our customer net promoter score, or MPS, and straight-through processing, or STP. We generated significant top-line growth, including 40% growth in AP sales, led by broad-based growth sales, new business CSM, and new business value. I'm also very pleased with the contributions from our businesses in North America. Global WAM also delivered another strong quarter with over $5 billion of net flows and positive contributions from each business line and geography. We've now generated positive net flows in 13 of the past 14 calendar years. And on a year-to-date basis, we've delivered over $12 billion of net flows in 2024. we generated solid core earnings growth of 4%, which was led by 17% growth in Asia and 37% growth in global WAM. Excluding the impact of global minimum taxes, or GMT, core earnings growth would have been 7%. On a per share basis, core EPS grew 7% year over year, or 11% if adjusted for the impact of GMT. We delivered an attractive core ROE of 16.6%, demonstrating that we're on our path towards our 18% plus goal. Finally, we maintained a strong balance sheet and ample financial flexibility with a strong LICAT ratio of 137% and leverage ratio of 23.5%. As we made clear at our investor day in June, Manulife is well positioned to continue delivering strong results like these and outperform peers, thanks to our unique geographic footprint and attractive business mix, our scale and ability to capture global megatrends, and a clear path to deliver against our strategic priorities. Moving to slide seven. As you can see, our disciplined execution continued to drive strong growth in key metrics on a year-to-date basis. Asia and Global WAM continue to demonstrate strong contributions to our year-to-date growth. In Asia, we have a diversified, high-quality distribution platform, and our ambition is to be the number one choice for customers. We've generated strong sales throughout the year, driven by growth across distribution channels. In Global WAM, our scale, unique footprint, and business mix, along with expense discipline, is driving operating leverage with our year-to-date core EBITDA margin up 190 basis points. We delivered 12% core EPS growth on a year-to-date basis at the top end of our medium-term target range, driven by sustained strong performance in our high-growth segments, coupled with share buybacks. This is an excellent result as year to date core EPS would have grown 14% without the impact of GMT. Similarly, our core ROE continue to expand and improved 0.6 points year over year. We've also delivered robust book value growth over this period with 14% growth in adjusted book value per share and 9% growth in book value per share. It's worth noting that we've delivered this growth net of returning close to $5 billion of capital to shareholders over the past year. We have repurchased 58 million common shares so far this year. And as a reminder, we're committed to fully executing the remaining 32 million shares of our current NCIB program, which expires in February 2025. Based on our current share price, Our share buybacks have generated a benefit of more than $2.5 billion since 2021. And we continue to view these as a good tool to generate value for shareholders. Turning to slide eight. In addition to capitalizing on our strong operating momentum, we remain focused on execution and on investing for the future. And we continue to make progress towards our goal of being the digital customer leader in our industry. To that end, we're leveraging our advanced GenAI capabilities across the franchise. We've already launched 11 use cases into production, with another 13 to be launched before year-end, and an additional 16 in development. These encompass all areas of our business and are being ambitiously scaled to maximize business value. For example, the Singapore GenAI sales tool that we showcased at Invest Today has achieved a successful pilot result of more than 5% higher repurchase rate, and we've since extended the tool to all agents in Singapore. We plan to further expand the tool to other markets before year-end. We've also extended AI-powered call summarization and contract lookup tools to 15% of our North American contact center agents in the past six months, These are two significant drivers of efficiency and have already delivered a 12% reduction in average handle time so far this year. We plan to continue rapidly rolling this out globally and enhancing these capabilities to drive even greater efficiencies. Our mission is decisions made easier, lives made better. And our digital priorities are all about optimizing the customer experience. Our relationship MPS score is now at an all-time high of 25. and our STP has now exceeded our 2025 target of 88%. We also continue to invest in helping our customers' health and wellbeing. We hold our second Longevity Symposium in Boston in October, where we gathered over 500 industry leaders, distribution partners, academics, and government officials to discuss the latest developments to help our customers live longer, healthier, better lives. This event generated overwhelming positive feedback from the participants, and preliminary results of our post-event survey saw an MPS of over 92. Our digital efforts have not only enhanced customer experience, but also drove improved financial outcomes. To that end, we are well positioned to extract maximum value from our digital investments, and we're on track to exceed the $500 million in benefits we expected to generate in 2024. representing more than 2.5 times growth from 2023. We have a clear line of sight to generating additional value and look forward to updating you on our progress going forward. In summary, our strong execution this year is driving quality growth in new business and earnings and generating significant value for shareholders. We're delivering strong operating and customer satisfaction metrics, And we are well positioned to deliver on the ambitious but achievable new targets that we announced at Investor Day. With that, I'll hand it over to Colin to review the highlights of our financial results.