Sun Life Financial Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Blue, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Sun Life Financial Q4 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on me to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. The host of the call is Lee Chalmers, Senior Vice President, Head of Investor Relations and Capital Management. Please go ahead, Ms. Chalmers.

Thank you, Blue, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Sun Life Financial's earnings conference call for the fourth quarter of 2020. Our earnings release and the slides for today's call are available on the investor relations section of our website at sunlife.com. We will begin today's presentation with an overview of our fourth quarter results by Dean Connor, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sun Life Financial. Following Dean's remarks, Kevin Strain, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of will present the financial results for the quarter. After the prepared remarks, we will move to the question and answer portion of the call. Other members of management will also be available to answer your questions on today's call. Turning to slide two, I draw your attention to the cautionary language regarding the use of forward-looking statements and non-IFRS financial measures, which form part of today's remarks. As noted in the slides, forward-looking statements may be rendered inaccurate by subsequent events. And with that, I will turn things over to Dean.

Thanks, Leigh, and good morning, everyone. 2020 presented a new challenge to the world in the form of COVID-19 and shone a bright light on existing challenges, particularly systemic racism and climate change. At Sun Life, these served as a catalyst to accelerate change. we had already made digital a key focus. The pandemic meant we needed to accelerate our digital program even faster to serve clients virtually when face-to-face became impossible. The horrific murder of George Floyd galvanized action to drive lasting change and eliminate systemic racism. At Sun Life, we started a series of dialogues and training around racism. We set a goal to have 25% of executive roles staffed by underrepresented ethnicities in North America by 2025, including goals for black, indigenous, and people of color, and to achieve gender parity in these executive roles. Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. In our annual MD&A, we have included our first climate change disclosures under the Financial Stability Board's Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, or TCFD. At the end of March, we will publish our 2020 sustainability report that will provide more detail on our objectives and ways where our expertise can have the most positive social and environmental impact. Turning to slide four, reported net income of $744 million grew 3% over the prior year, while underlying net income grew by 9% to $862 million. Underlying earnings per share grew 10% over the same period, and we generated a strong underlying return on equity of 15.4% for the quarter. Our capital and cash positions remain healthy, and along with a low leverage ratio, provide flexibility and opportunity for further capital deployment. MFS ended the year with U.S. $610 billion in assets under management, driven by asset appreciation and positive net flows, demonstrating the continued strength of MFS's performance and brand. SLC, our alternatives asset management business, grew third-party AUM to $106 billion, with strong investment performance and positive net flows. And we reached $33 billion in AUM at Sun Life Global Investments in Canada, with strong investment performance for clients and positive net flows. Insurance sales of $1.4 billion in the quarter were up 2% over last year, with 11% growth in Asia and 4% growth in the U.S. on a constant currency basis. In Vietnam, we entered into a 15-year bank assurance partnership with Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank, or ACB, which started last month. This partnership complements the exclusive bank of partnership with TP Bank in Vietnam that started a year ago January and in its first year nearly doubled our Vietnam sales compared to 2019. Throughout the year, we also expanded our agency distribution network across Asia, where we now have 138,000 advisors in the region, up 12% over 2019. Turning to slide five, as you know, we are on the journey of accelerating everything digital, driven by our purpose of helping clients achieve lifetime financial security and living healthier lives. We've made big strides using digital data and analytics to change and improve the client experience. And here are just a few examples. In Canada, our digital coach, Ella, helped clients save an additional $700 million in wealth deposits in 2020, up 69% from 2019. Ella also helped clients to close the coverage gap, contributing to $1 billion of face value in insurance sales, up 83% over 2019. We made client interactions more frictionless, digitally processing 90% of Canadian retail insurance applications and 79% of retail wealth transactions. Our artificial intelligence and predictive modeling accelerated and improved the individual insurance application process with 71% of policies underwritten without the need for lab tests, an increase of 26% over prior year. In the U.S., we've just launched a fully integrated disability and absence management technology platform that simplifies the experience for clients. As legislation continues to evolve, absence management is becoming increasingly complicated for employers, particularly those who operate in multiple states. To date, we have onboarded nearly 10,000 employer clients to our new state-of-the-art claim system that will enable us to coordinate absences as a single event across all benefits. In the fourth quarter, we launched a digital non-face-to-face sales platform in Malaysia, and we now have virtual sales experiences in each of our markets across Asia. And finally, this year, we introduced digital enterprise across the company, bringing together the business and IT to help us deliver exceptional digital experiences and client outcomes. Digital enterprise is a new way of working for us. It's how we will ensure our clients can have a distinctive digital experience integrated across life, health, and wealth. Turning to slide six, I'll touch on some highlights from our full year 2020 results. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we benefited from our chosen business mix and strong execution. And this also came through in the returns we delivered to shareholders, with five-year total shareholder return of 9.6% compounded annually top quartile among 20 global competitors. Reported net income for the year of $2.4 billion was down 8% from 2019, mostly as a result of equity market volatility and fair value of real estate investments. Underlying net income of $3.2 billion grew 5% over 2019, reflecting strong business growth and a 13% increase in expected profit, strong investing activity due to market dislocations early in the pandemic, and favorable morbidity, which includes the impact of lower benefits usage brought about by the pandemic. On the other hand, we also saw elevated mortality experience in the year, mostly related to clients who sadly succumbed to COVID-19. Credit experience in the year was also unfavorable, driven mostly by downgrades in the second quarter. Full-year insurance sales decreased by 1%, primarily reflecting lower large-case sales and lower market activity in Canada's group benefits business, while insurance sales were up for the year in both the U.S. and Asia, including our international high net worth business, which doubled its sales from the prior year. Wealth and asset management sales grew 39% to $221 billion, with strength across all our businesses. We also reached a milestone of $1.25 trillion of AUM. MFS finished the year with four quarters of net inflows, totaling US $13.1 billion for the year. and continued to deliver strong investment performance for clients, with 97%, 95%, and 94% of U.S. retail assets ranked in the top half of their Morningstar categories based on five-, ten-, and three-year performance, respectively. SLC Management, our Alternatives Asset Manager, reached an inflection point, with underlying net income of $94 million, reflecting strong contributions from recently acquired businesses, including Benthall Greenoak, and infrared capital. We also completed our acquisition of a majority stake in Crescent Capital Group on January 5th of this year, broadening the solutions we bring to institutional clients and bringing SLC's third-party AUM to $145 billion on a pro forma basis. On slide 7, you'll see how we were there for our clients in a tough year. We delivered nearly $200 million of claims payments to the families of clients who succumbed to COVID-19. We extended grace periods for our clients to make premium payments, provided credits to employers for the lower benefits usage we saw during the pandemic. We enrolled over a half a million Canadians in a new virtual health care service through Lumino Health and Dialogues. Our client index score measures how our clients rate us on proactive contact, ease of doing business, and problem resolution. Our score increased again this year, increased by three percentage points over last year, with increases across all categories, indicating that our obsession with the client experience is showing up in results for clients. When I stand back from this, I'm incredibly proud of all that we accomplished in 2020. It was a hard year for people, for communities, for countries around the world, yet it was a year that showcased the tremendous determination of Sun Life employees and advisors coming together to stand behind our purpose. Now, we're not out of the woods yet on the pandemic, and yet there's every reason for optimism as vaccines are rolled out around the world. Sun Life is well-positioned for 2021 and beyond. with the strength of our people and culture, diversified and balanced business models, strong capital, and our ambition to be one of the best in the world at what we do. 2021 will also be a year of leadership change for Sun Life. In December, we announced that Kevin Strain will succeed me as the president and CEO when I retire in August. I know that Sun Life will remain in great hands under Kevin's leadership. He's a strong leader with great knowledge and passion for our business, And I'll have more to say about that on the Q2 call in August. And now over to you, Kevin, to take us through the fourth quarter results.