Aegon - H1 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Aegon first half 2023 results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to slowly press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our speaker, Hielke Hoekema, Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Hielke Hielkema (Investor Relations Officer)

Thank you, Operator, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call on Aegon's first half year 2023 results. My name is Hielke Hielkema from Aegon Investor Relations team. With me today are Aegon CEO, Lard Friese, and CFO, Matthew Rider, who will take you through the highlights of the first half year, our financial results, and the progress that we are making in the transformation of Aegon. After that, we will continue with the Q&A session. Before we start, we would like to ask you to review our disclaimer on forward-looking statements, which you can find at the back of the presentation. On that note, I will now give the floor to Lard.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Thank you, Hielke. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate that you are joining us on today's call. Today, we present our results under the new IFRS 9 and 17 accounting standard for the first time. First, let me run you through our strategic developments and commercial momentum. We have a lot to talk about. Let's move to slide number 2 for the achievements in the first half of 2023. We have started the next chapter in Aegon's transformation, delivering a successful Capital Markets Day in London in June. We closed the transaction with a.s.r. in July and have started the EUR 1.5 billion share buyback program associated with the deal, which we expect to complete before the end of June 2024.

In addition, we still intend to reduce our leverage by up to EUR 700 million in the same time frame, and we'll update you on that when appropriate. On the strategy front, we continue to take steps to transform our business. We have increased our financial stake in our Brazilian joint venture. We expanded our partnership with Nationwide Building Society in the U.K. and extended our asset management partnership with La Banque Postale in France. The sale of our remaining Central and Eastern European businesses has been closed, and we have announced the sale of our stake in our joint venture in India. We are now fully focused on three core markets, three growth markets, and one global asset manager. We're also delivering on our commitment to continue to reduce our exposure to U.S. financial assets and to improve the level and predictability of capital generation.

Transamerica has been able to execute an additional reinsurance transaction encompassing 14,000 universal life policies with secondary guarantees. This will free up approximately $225 million of capital, which will be used for management actions to further reduce our exposure to financial assets over time. It also significantly improves our risk profile. Together with a prior similar reinsurance transaction, the total of 25% of the statutory reserves backing these policies have now been reinsured. Turning to our results over the first half of 2023, the operating results, now reported under the new accounting standards, IFRS 9 and 17, increased by 3% compared with the first half of 2022. This was driven by increases in the U.S., the U.K., and the international segment, which more than offset a decreasing operating result in asset management.

Operating capital generation before holding, funding, and operating expenses increased by 13% compared with the first half of 2022, reflecting business growth in our U.S. strategic assets together with improved claims experience. Turning to our commercial results, Transamerica performed well. We delivered strong sales growth in all of our U.S. strategic assets. The U.K. Workplace Solutions platform continued to deliver strong growth, and sales increased in our partnerships in China and Brazil. The results of our asset manager and our U.K. retail business continued to be negatively affected by adverse market conditions. Recently, we have announced our intention to move Aegon's legal seat to Bermuda. Subsequently, the Bermuda Monetary Authority will then assume the role of group supervisor. Today, we have convened 2 extraordinary general meetings to be held at the end of September to seek shareholder approval for the move.

Finally, on our path to increase the dividend to around EUR 0.40 per share over the year 2025, we have increased the 2023 interim dividend to EUR 0.14 per share, up more than 25% compared to the 2022 interim dividend. This is testament to our strong financial position and prospects. Before I move on to the results, I want to recap the priorities we presented at the recent Capital Markets Day in London on slide number three. We have defined four key priorities to create value for our shareholders during this second chapter of Aegon's transformation. The first of the near-term priorities we announced in June has already been achieved. We have closed the transaction with a.s.r., we now own a nearly 30% strategic stake in a Dutch market leader.

Moving our legal seat to Bermuda is the next step ahead of us on our journey to transform the group. We are on track to accomplish this. We presented our plans to increase Transamerica's value and to capture the opportunities in the U.S. middle market. Our ambition is to build America's leading middle-market life insurance and retirement company. Over the coming three years, we will increase both the level and the quality of capital generation from strategic assets while reducing our exposure to financial assets. At the same time, we will continue to strengthen the U.K. and asset management businesses. We will invest in growing the joint ventures we have in international and asset management. The final priority announced at our Capital Markets Day relates to our capital management.

We will continue to be rational and disciplined allocators of capital, looking to utilize our significant financial flexibility at the holding to create value for our shareholders. With the strategic priorities clearly set, let's move on to our commercial momentum in the first half of 2023, starting on slide four. I would like to start with the progress made by World Financial Group or WFG, our vast life insurance distribution network, one of the two focus areas in our U.S. individual solutions business. Our ambition is to increase the number of WFG agents to 110,000 by 2027, while at the same time improving agent productivity. Momentum remains strong, with the number of licensed agents having grown to 70,000 by the end of June, an increase of 20% compared with a year earlier.

In addition to extending WFG's distribution reach, we are taking actions to improve the productivity of the agency sales force. The number of multi-ticket agents, these are agents selling more than 1 life policy over the last 12 months, has increased by 12% compared with a year earlier. Transamerica's market share of life insurance products sold by WFG in the U.S. remains high. This is due to the improvements we have made to the service experience for WFG agents, combined with the continued competitiveness of Transamerica's products in this distribution channel. Slide number five addresses the second focus area of our U.S. individual solutions business. We are investing in both product manufacturing capabilities and the operating model in order to position the individual life insurance business for further growth through WFG and third-party distributors.

As you can see, commercial momentum remains strong in the first half of the new year. New life sales increased by 17% compared with the first half of last year, largely driven by higher index universal life sales within WFG. In the first half of 2023, new business stream increased by 12% compared with the first half of 2022, and earnings on in-force increased by 35%, reflecting the strong growth of this portfolio. Let's move to slide six, where we show the progress made in the U.S. Workplace Solutions retirement plans business. Transamerica aims to increase earnings on in-force from its retirement business by leveraging its capabilities as a record keeper, with the ambition to materially increase the penetration of the ancillary products and services it offers.

Sales momentum remained strong in the first half of 2023. Net deposits from mid-size plans increased 32% over the same period last year, benefiting from both strong written sales in previous periods and lower withdrawals. We also saw good growth of our general account stable value product, as well as an individual retirement accounts, in line with our strategy to grow and diversify our revenue streams with the Workplace Solutions segment. In the first half of 2023, the earnings on in-force of our strategic assets in the retirement plans business were $45 million, which was an increase of 20%, mainly from the general account stable value product. Let's move to slide number seven, the United Kingdom.

In the half of 2023, net deposits in the workplace channel amounted to a record high of GBP 1.5 billion, an increase of 36% compared with the first half of last year. Sales momentum in workplace remained strong. In the retail channel, on the other hand, commercial results were weak. The macroeconomic environment continued to negatively impact investor sentiment across the industry. As a result, net outflows amounted to GBP 1.1 billion in the first half of 2023, more than in the same period of 2022. Annualized revenues lost from net deposits amounted to GBP 6 million for the quarter. This was predominantly due to the gradual runoff of the traditional product portfolio, which was partially offset by revenues gained on net deposits in the workplace channel.

I'm now turning to slide number 8 to comment on the challenging performance of our asset management business. Market conditions remain challenging, which led to third-party net outflows in both global platforms and strategic partnership segments. Combined with adverse market movements and unfavorable currency movements, assets under management declined by 7% compared with the end of June, 2022. Encouragingly, we saw improvements in third-party net deposits towards the end of this half year. Operating capital generation declined compared with the first half of 2022. This was driven by lower net deposits and unfavorable market movements, despite lower expenses. Let's move on to our growth markets on slide number 9, where we continue to see steady progress. New life sales in our growth markets increased by 45% compared with the first half of 2022.

This was largely driven by our business in China, following the relaxation of the country's COVID-19 measures. We also recorded good growth in Brazil. Non-life new premium production in Spain and Portugal rose 6%, as weaker demand for property and casualty solutions was more than offset by growth in accident and health insurance. Operating capital generation of the international segment, excluding TLB, increased by 27% as a result of new business growth. On slide number 10, you'll see that we maintain a high pace on the transformation of Aegon and sharpening of our strategic focus. The transaction with a.s.r. has been closed, and disentanglement solutions are in place. The new combination moves forward, we expect a significant synergy to be realized from which our shareholders will benefit. Aegon U.K. has extended their partnership with Nationwide Building Society and will onboard Nationwide's advisory business early next year.

This supports Aegon U.K. strategy to be the leading digital platform provider in the workplace and retail markets, and to drive forward our pension and investment propositions. Aegon Asset Management and La Banque Postale have extended their partnership in the asset manager, La Banque Postale Asset Management, through 2035. We have also participated in the capital raising to fund La Banque Postale Asset Management's acquisition of La Financière de l'Echiquier, a French asset manager. The acquisition will consolidate La Banque Postale Asset Management's strong market position. In Brazil, we have increased our economic ownership stake in the life insurance joint venture, Mongeral Aegon Group, from 54% to 59%. This puts us in a stronger position to benefit from the growth in that market. We also took significant steps in our strategy to exit subscale or niche positions.

We have closed the sale of our remaining Central and Eastern European businesses, first announced in 2020, and have announced the sale of our stake in the India business. The final topic I want to address in slide 11 is the intended transfer of our legal seat to Bermuda. Bermuda Monetary Authority, or the BMA, is to assume the role as our group supervisor after this. Given the importance of this topic, I want to address the rationale behind this development. Following the closure of the transaction with a.s.r., Aegon no longer has a regulated insurance business in the Netherlands, and under EU Solvency II rules, the De Nederlandsche Bank can no longer remain our group supervisor, and a new group supervisor is required. Various options were explored. Some options were, however, not feasible for various reasons.

For instance, in some jurisdictions, Aegon does not have a meaningful business presence. In others, the financial reporting requirements do not align with our accounting framework, or prevailing regulatory uncertainty would not provide a stable basis for the execution of our global strategy. After consulting the members of the College of Supervisors, which consists of the different supervisors which regulate our local entities, the BMA informed us that it would become Aegon's group supervisor if we were to transfer our legal seat to Bermuda. Transferring the legal seat to Bermuda and being regulated at the group level by the BMA is consistent with our strategy outlined at the recent Capital Markets Day. Bermuda has an established, well-regarded regulatory regime and has experience in regulating insurance groups and companies with an international presence.

Its regulatory regime has been granted equivalency status by both the EU and the U.K.. It has been designated as a qualified and reciprocal jurisdiction by the U.S. National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The transfer of the legal seat to Bermuda allows Aegon to maintain its headquarters in the Netherlands, where we have the experience and the talent to manage this international company. It also allows us to maintain our listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New York Stock Exchange, bringing stability to our shareholders and to remain a Dutch tax resident. On slide number 12, this addresses the governance consequences of the intended transfer of our legal domicile. Following the transfer to Bermuda, Aegon NV will become Aegon Ltd., a Bermudian company. This means that the basis of Aegon's bylaws will be established on Bermudian law and governance practices.

At the same time, we remain committed to applying well-recognized international governance standards. Aegon will preserve its current governance principles to the extent possible and practical in view of the re-domiciliation and where appropriate in the context of Aegon's international footprint. This includes Aegon's commitment to take into account the long-term interests of the company and all its stakeholders. We conducted an extensive engagement process with our shareholders and other stakeholders following the initial announcement in June. We have listened carefully to the feedback we received and made a couple of changes to the proposed bylaws on the basis of that dialogue. Aside from the other voluntary commitments to restrict governance we have already announced, we have added further buying rights for shareholders in terms of approval of major transactions and on the board's remuneration policy.

These changes and all other relevant information have been published on our corporate website today as part of the complication documents for the extraordinary general meetings, during which investor approval for the transfer of the legal seat will be requested. I now hand over to Matt for the results of the first half of 2023. Matt, over to you.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Thank you, Lard, and good morning, everyone. Today, we are reporting our results under the new IFRS 17 and IFRS 9 accounting framework for the first time. It's been a huge endeavor over the past years to prepare for this shift, so I wanted to start off by thanking the many colleagues who are involved in this process. As you can see, we've provided a lot of new disclosure, and it will likely take you some time to digest it and get comfortable with the new standard. Implementing the new framework, also in the context of the a.s.r. transaction, has meant some changes to our processes. For example, we're reporting a week later than we did last year and now half yearly.

Beginning with our full year 2023 results disclosure, our financial reporting calendar will move even later to accommodate bringing in the results of our 30% shareholding in a.s.r. on an IFRS 17 basis. We also will move our expense assumption review process to the fourth quarter for all business units in order to leverage our budgeting process. At this moment, we are not publishing IFRS 17-based sensitivities, we will do so by the time we publish our 2023 annual accounts. With that, I want to walk you through the overview of our financial results, starting on slide 14. The operating result increased by 3% compared with the first half of 2022. Increases in the U.S., the U.K., and the international segments were partially offset by a decrease in asset management.

Operating capital generation before holding, funding, and operating expenses increased by 13% compared with the first half of 2022. This was driven by the U.S. and reflects business growth of strategic assets and improved claims experience. Free cash flow in the first half of 2023 amounted to EUR 287 million, mainly reflects remittances from the U.S., the U.K., and Aegon's Asset Management joint venture in China in the first quarter. Cash capital at the holding decreased to EUR 1.3 billion at the end of June 2023 as planned, as remittances from the units were primarily offset by capital returns to shareholders. Our gross financial leverage was stable at EUR 5.6 billion.

The group Solvency II ratio decreased by six percentage points since year-end 2022 to 202%, due to a number of items, including the deduction of the interim dividend, a reduction of eligible own funds due to tiering restrictions, previously disclosed one-time items, and unfavorable market movements. The latter notably includes the impact of lower real estate valuations in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, our capital position remains strong, and the capital ratios of our main units remained above their respective operating levels. Let's move on to the operating result on slide 15. The group's operating result was EUR 818 million, which is an increase of 3% compared to the prior year period. The operating result for the U.S. increased by 4% in the first half of 2023, or 3% in local currency terms.

This increase was driven by an improvement in mortality claims experience, but largely offset by a decrease in the net investment result, partly from higher interest expense on short-term variable rate borrowings. The non-insurance operating result benefited from growth in both retirement plans and WFG. Over the same period, the operating result from the United Kingdom increased by 24% in local currency. This was driven by an improvement of the net investment result as a result of favorable market movements, which more than offset the impact of the planned transfer of the protection business to Royal London. In our international segment, the operating result increased by 9%, predominantly due to our growing businesses in Spain and Portugal and in Brazil. Finally, the operating result from Aegon Asset Management decreased by 34% in constant currency terms compared with the same period of 2022.

The decrease was driven by lower management fees in both global platforms and strategic partnerships, despite a lower operating expense, which included reduced variable remuneration of rules. Slide 16 shows the net result over the first half year of 2023. Non-operating items totaled a loss of EUR 180 million, driven in equal parts by realized losses on investments and net impairments. Realized losses on investments were primarily recorded in the U.S. and stemmed from the sale of bonds in the context of the reinsurance of part of this SGUL portfolio, as well as to facilitate a reduction of short-term borrowings. Net impairments were driven by an increase of the expected credit loss balance in the U.S. due to an update of economic forecasts. Other charges amounted to EUR 870 million.

In the U.S., other charges amounted to EUR 574 million. These were driven by investments in the life operating model and the restructuring of an earn-out agreement with a founding WFG agent. It also included the impact of model and assumption updates in the U.S. These impacts were in line with what we had indicated at the recent Capital Markets Day. Other charges also included a EUR 110 million charge related to the first half of 2023 results of Aegon Nederland, which was driven by an impairment as a result of the reclassification of these activities as held for sale. Another EUR 110 million charge relates to a book loss on the remaining activities in Central and Eastern Europe following the completion of their disposal.

I will now turn to slide 17 to address the development of Aegon's contractual service margin, or CSM, in the first half of the year 2023. New business CSM creation amounted to EUR 0.2 billion, mainly driven by growth of the individual life portfolio in the U.S., partly offset by the reinsurance of the U.K. protection book. The CSM release of EUR 0.5 billion was mainly driven by the runoff of the financial assets in the U.S. and of the traditional book in the U.K.. Negative claims and policyholder experience variance was driven by unfavorable experience in individual life and unfavorable lapse and utilization experience in variable annuities, both in the U.S.. A main driver for the decrease of the CSM in the U.S. was the impact from assumption changes in the Americas, as was previously announced.

This includes the removal of the morbidity improvement assumption and an increase in inflation assumptions in long-term care, partly offset by the benefit of the expected premium rate increase program. In addition, the impact of investments we will make into a more customer-focused operating model for life was reflected in the assumptions and reduced the CSM. Markets had a favorable impact on the CSM for products accounted for under the variable fee approach, primarily variable annuities in the United States. At the end of the first half of the year 2023, the CSM stood at EUR 8.3 billion. Let me now turn to our view on capital on slide 18. Operating capital generation before holding, funding, and operating expenses increased by 13% compared with the first half of 2022.

Earnings on in-force before holding expenses increased by 26% compared with the prior year period. The increase was driven by Transamerica and reflects improved claims experience and growth of our strategic assets. The increase in earnings on in-force was partly offset by higher new business strain compared with the last year, mainly from growth in the U.S.. This is in line with our ambition to drive profitable growth in our U.S. strategic assets. The release of required capital was broadly stable compared with the first half of 2022. In conclusion, we remain well on track to meet our guidance of at least EUR 1 billion operating capital generation from the units in 2023. On Slide 19, I want to walk you through the development of the capital ratios of our main operating units.

Compared with year-end 2022, the U.S. RBC ratio increased slightly to 427%, above the operating level of 400%. Operating capital generation contributed favorably to the ratio, more than offsetting remittances to the holding. Market movements had a marginally positive impact, with benefits from favorable equity markets being largely offset by fund basis risk. One-time items had a negative impact. These were driven by the investments made in strategic assets and the annual model and assumption updates, which reduced the RBC ratio by 13 percentage points. We guided at the Capital Markets Day for a negative impact of, in total, around 20 percentage points on the U.S. RBC ratio. We therefore expect to reflect the remaining negative impact of around seven percentage points in the RBC ratio in the second half of this year.

The impact of credit impairments and rating migrations on the RBC ratio remain negligible in the first half of the year. The solvency ratio of Scottish Equitable, our main legal entity in the U.K., decreased by 3 percentage points to 166%. This reflects the negative impact from market movements and a remittance to the U.K. intermediate holding. This remittance was subsequently used in part to fund the acquisition of Nationwide's advisory business. Let me now turn the page for an update on our financial assets on Slide 20. Here we summarize the continued value creation from our financial assets. In July, we reinsured 14,000 universal life policies with secondary guarantees, also known as SGUL policies, through a reinsurance transaction, reducing exposure to mortality risk.

This has freed up $225 million of capital, which we will use to further reduce our exposure to financial assets, in line with our plan to expedite the runoff of these exposures. The benefit of the reinsurance will be recognized in 3Q 2023. Together with the prior reinsurance transaction, undertaken a total of 25% of the statutory reserves backing the SGUL portfolio has now been reinsured. In long-term care, our primary management actions are rate increase programs. Since the start of the year, we have obtained regulatory approvals for additional rate increases worth $86 million. This represents 12% of the new target of $700 million worth of premium rate increases that we had announced at the Capital Markets Day.

We will continue to work with state regulators to get pending and future actuarially justified rate increases approved. In the first half of 2023, we extended our track record of successfully hedging the targeted risks embedded in our variable annuity guarantees, achieving 98% hedge effectiveness. The capital employed in our financial assets was stable compared to the end of 2022, at $4.1 billion. During the first half of 2023, releases were realized on the universal life and fixed annuity blocks. These were offset by increases in required capital on variable annuities and the higher allocation of alternative assets to the LTC block. On slide 21, you can see that cash capital at the holding decreased to EUR 1.3 billion during the period, which is still in the upper half of the operating range.

Free cash flow for the period was in part offset by the impacts of the divestitures and acquisitions Lard talked about earlier. Cash outflows in the first half of 2023 were mostly related to capital returns to shareholders. We completed the EUR 200 million share buyback program and returned a further EUR 232 million to shareholders through the 2022 final dividend. Let me now turn the page for my concluding slide. In summary, we continue to deliver on our plans, and the results over the first half of 2023 show that we continue to make good progress and that we are on track to achieve our 2025 financial targets. With that final note, I now pass it back to you, Lard, for your concluding remarks.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Thank you, Matt. Let me summarize today's presentation with the final slide number 24. Aegon has entered the next chapter of its transformation from a position of strength. We have concrete ambitions and plans to move forward with our strategy as we presented at the Capital Markets Day in June. Operating capital generation growth was strong in the first half of 2023. Commercial momentum remains strong in our U.S. strategic assets, in our U.K. workplace activities, and in our international growth markets. More work needs to be done on asset management in our U.K. retail business. We will address our ambitions here with you in 2024. The next important milestone will be the extraordinary general meetings in September to receive shareholder approval for the transfer of our legal seat to Bermuda.

We are convinced that the proposed move is in the interest of shareholders and provides stability for the group to continue to execute upon its announced strategy. If you have any questions on this process, we have published detailed documents on our corporate website. Feel free to reach out to the IR team if any questions remain. I want to be clear that the redomiciliation process will not distract us from what is most important: accelerating the execution of our strategy, driving growth, and creating value by reallocating capital from financial assets to strategic assets. Let me conclude by reiterating my confidence that we will deliver on our strategic commitments and financial targets. We are committed to become a leader in investment, protection, and retirement solutions, and we have a clearly articulated strategy to achieve this. I would now like to open the call for your questions.

Please limit yourself to two questions per person. Operator, please open the Q&A session.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one and one slowly on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please be aware that we will take and answer one question at a time before moving to the next question. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. This will take a few moments. We will now go to our first question. Your first question comes from the line of Andrew Baker from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Andrew Baker (VP)

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is on the OCG. Are you just able to provide the moving pieces on the OCG versus the previous EUR 270 million quarterly guidance from what you see the normalized run rate going forward? I guess within this, can you just talk a little bit about the new business strain? Because my understanding from the CMD was that this was expected to grow over time, but it looks like 2Q specifically, it declined EUR 20 million or so. How should we be thinking about this going forward? Secondly, just on the CSM growth, a look at the new business and interest accretion, this looks lower than the CSM release in the first half. I appreciate some of this is driven by mix between strategic and financial assets.

Just wondering if you are able to provide a sense of the sort of normalized CSM growth expectations for the strategic assets versus the financial assets going forward. I'm just really trying to get a better picture of how you are positioning the growth story against sort of this CSM that's declining from the financial assets drag going forward. Thank you.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Thank you very much, Andrew. Matt, over to you.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Thanks for your questions, Andrew. I can pick up the OCG one first. The bottom line, I will just tell you, the guidance that we had provided for last quarter of around EUR 270 million OCG per quarter is still the same guidance. I can walk you through the moving pieces. In the second quarter, we reported EUR 328 million of operating capital generation. Within that, we had some very favorable claims experience. EUR 35 million worth, vast majority of which is coming from mortality claims experience in the U.S.. We also had that lower new business strain of about EUR 10 million, that I'll come back on in one minute.

We also had about EUR 10 million of favorable underwriting variances in the U.K.. If you do the, if you do the sums, then you'll come to a, you know, what we think of as a clean run rate for the quarter of EUR 273 million, which is pretty much spot on with the guidance that we gave for the first quarter. For your second question, you, you clearly noted the reduction in the new business stream, although it's actually coming from the retirement plans business. We're still seeing continued growth in new business stream from life insurance, which is where we want to see it, because we're issuing profitable new business there.

In the, in the retirement plans business, you may have seen that we had a, like, quite a large net deposit number in the first quarter, and it was lower in the second quarter, and we hold capital against that. That's the, that's the reason for the lower new business, the lower new business stream. Let's, let's go through the, the CSM interaction here a little bit. I want to call out, and we'll do it, we'll do it at a group basis, but it's largely the same, by the way, in the U.S., the same kind of explanations. What we did at the group level is we, we added CSM for new business of about EUR 194 million, and we had a corresponding CSM release of EUR 483 million.

What we're seeing is that the new business CSM that we're putting on is lower than the release that we're getting on the CSM, on the in-force block. The biggest driver of that is the fact that the CSM that we actually have, vast majority of it is related to the financial assets. These are closed block assets that are going to run off over time. Just to give you an idea, we have about, in the, let's say, in the US, a little bit over $7.1 billion of CSM. Of that, 72% of it is sitting in the financial assets, and only the balance is sitting in the strategic assets.

If you look at the CSM release for the second half of the year, more than 80% of that was driven by the financial asset portfolio. Again, this is running off. What you're going to see over time is the CSM release is going to get lower and lower as those financial assets roll off. Here's the important thing: when you think about the way that we generate earnings, and we've talked about this quite a lot at the Capital Markets Day, is we would expect to see a pickup in the earnings that are generated from businesses that are not accounted for under IFRS 17. Here we, we talk about the growth in WFG.

We talk about the growth in, for example, the U.K. platform sales, which, you know, as of 2020, are really not accounted for under IFRS or not accounted for as insurance contracts, asset management, retirement plans in the U.S., ex the stable value funds and, and that sort of thing. You're going to see this little tipping point where you get a reduction in the, in the insurance results, and you're going to see increases in the, in the, in the results for, for, for non-insurance. I think that reflects pretty well what we talked about at the Capital Markets Day, with respect to the, the earnings on in-force development over time.

Andrew Baker (VP)

Very helpful. Thank you so much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Michael Huttner from Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Michael Huttner (Insurance Analyst)

Thank you. I wanted to ask on the US claims experience, but if you can maybe split the mortality and the long-term care. You just said that you didn't expect the mortality to remain this strong, so I just wondered if you can give some more granularity around that. The numbers are... I was thinking the numbers are lovely, but you obviously think they're not going to carry on. The other question is, you did that universal life buyout program. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I remember it was a topic a little bit because I think you started it on the day of the Capital Markets Day or about then.

I was, I was getting quite excited because you, you, you did similar programs in the variable annuities business. I just wondered if, it's done now and, and what, what more can be done? Just to get a, a bit more granularity around this. Thank you.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Thank you very much, Michael. This is Lard. Just to clarify your second piece, is this also pertaining to what we disclosed today about the reinsurance transaction, the UL, with secondary guarantees?

Michael Huttner (Insurance Analyst)

Yes, please. Thank you.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Okay. Thank you very much. On both questions, Matt, can I hand it over to you?

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Thanks, Michael. On the first one, on mortality, we have to look at it slightly differently, between the way that it's reflected in operating capital generation and the way that it's reflected in the results for IFRS. I think it's easiest to do it on the operating capital generation side. We had a relative, relative to our long-term expectations, we had about EUR 34 million in the better, better claims experience on the mortality side and EUR 1 million. As I said before, on the morbidity side. As I said before, we had good claims experience, but the vast majority of it is sitting in the mortality result.

One thing that you may wanna think a little bit about when we report under IFRS 17, the way that we reflect mortality experience is somewhat different than the way that we had reflected it before. Here we look at straight up, basically the cash difference between our actual and our expected mortality based on our long-term management best estimate. What you see in the first half of 2023, that it was basically EUR 30 million worse than our long-term management best estimate expectations, which is actually not a lot, given the size of the book.

One thing I would note, or I would mention, is that we did quite some assumption updates in the, you know, for the first half of the year. What's, what's gonna happen now is we do our assumption updates as the last step in the process. We actually did some things for mortality, which would make our expectation worse. What you're gonna see in that experience variance number is that that should be reduced now that we did our, that we did our, that we did our assumption update. You can, you can contact our dear colleagues here in HR for a, or in IR for a, tutorial on how this works, I think at a, at a later moment.

Now, with respect to your second question, I think you're, I think you're referring to the buyout of institutionally owned contracts rather than the SGUL. We have continued, you know, we have continued that program. This is something that we had started at the beginning of last year. We have added to it. At this point, I think, the ReStoli business, we've taken out pretty 15% of the face value that's associated with these policies that are owned by institutional investors. We're generally making an investment return of greater than 10%. That's what we price for, and that's what we monitor.

Going forward, we, we intend to do more of this, but we do want to take a measured approach, because we do want to be able to meet our pricing hurdles on this. You know, we'll, we'll do it as we, we'll, we'll do it as we go on. As I said in my opening remarks, we're gonna use some of the, you know, the capital that has been released from that SGUL reinsurance deal to be able to, to whittle down these financial assets, including the institutionally owned, SGUL contracts, even further.

Michael Huttner (Insurance Analyst)

You can say a little bit about the SGUL, or not?

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah, I can talk about the SGUL deal. I mean, just let's frame it a little bit. What we're talking about here is reinsurance of 14,000 policies representing about 1.4 billion of reserves. I think as, as Lard had said in his opening remarks, that's, it represents about 25%. All the SGUL reinsurance we've done to date represents about 25% of the U.S. statutory reserves related to the block. Just to put it in perspective, it's also about 30% of the net amount at risk. Think of it as the face, think of it as the face amount. This transaction generates $225 million of capital, and the, and it, and it's basically gonna reduce the RBC required capital by about EUR 50 million.

Importantly, it's also going to improve operating capital generation going forward because this block had a drag as the contracts get older and reserves increased, there was an OCG drag. We'll get to see a benefit of about $25 million per year. I got to tell you, that's all embedded in the capital markets today expectations. We had baked all that in. I just wanted to give you a framing for what that SGUL reinsurance deal does for us.

Michael Huttner (Insurance Analyst)

Good. Thank you so much.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Thank you, Michael.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to your next question. Your next question comes from the line of David Barma, Bank of America. Please go ahead.

David Barma (Executive Director and Equity Research)

Yes, good morning. Firstly, just to come back on what you've just said about the OCG benefits from the reinsurance deal that you've announced today. Is that part of the EUR 0.1 billion of additional OCG that you flagged at the CMD?

Lard Friese (CEO)

Yes, it is. Yeah.

David Barma (Executive Director and Equity Research)

It is. Okay. Okay. Then, and then secondly, on, on the U.K., can you please talk a bit about the, the rationale for your recent extended partnership with Nationwide? And, and should we see this more as a, as a retention tool for your existing book, or, or is it part of a bigger strategy to increase advice, take on U.K.?

Lard Friese (CEO)

Yeah. Thanks, David. Yeah, we're very pleased with... I mean, your first question was answered by Matt, right? The answer was yes. On the extension of the partnership with Nationwide Building Society, we're actually quite pleased with that. We have always been, for a very long time, the, you know, the partner of Nationwide when it comes to their customers since 2016, right? We, we've been doing that for 2016. What we did is basically provide access to our products advised by Nationwide's in-house financial planning service.

This extended strategy, strategic partnership will continue, of course, will continue to be the provider of choice for the customers of Nationwide, where it pertains to the ISAs and the General Investment Account, providers will continue to be the provider of choice. We're, we're moving across the advisory, the advisory teams from Nationwide Building Society. We're moving that across to our side, which is actually playing to the strength of both partners even better. This is really something that sets up and extends the partnership into the future, and therefore it's something that we, we're very pleased with, that we were able to do.

David Barma (Executive Director and Equity Research)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Farquhar Murray from Autonomous. Please go ahead.

Farquhar Murray (Senior Analyst)

Morning, all. Just two questions, if I may. Firstly, on the CSM roll forward on slide 17, please, could you just elaborate on the policyholder experience in the VA book there? You mentioned lapse in utilization. I just wonder if you could give a little bit more color on which products are driving that, and a sense of what's behind it and how it might develop. Secondly, momentum in WFG looks very solid in terms of licensed agents, but the multi-ticket one is slightly lagging that improvement. Could I just ask how long it is taking for a typically newly licensed agent to follow through into a multi-ticket one? What kind of initiatives can you do to encourage conversion there? Thanks.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Yes. Hi, Farquhar. I'm going to take your WFG question, and Matt will take the CSM roll forward. On WFG, yeah, so we have said that we want to do a couple of things. We want to grow our agents to the 110,000 target by 2027, and we're well underway to get there. You noticed quite a nice increase year-over-year for that. We also want to grow overall, overall tickets, and productivity of the agents. It depends a little bit on... There's not one single rule for this on how long it takes from to move from a single ticket to a multiple ticket agent.

It takes time. I have to get back to you on how much time that exactly takes, but it's, it's something that, that is not, let's say, it, it requires a very targeted approach to make sure that the agents become more and more productive over time. We have seen this productivity improvement. We are measuring it, and we're reporting on it, so you can continue to, to see the progress in the near future. On the CSM?

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah. I'm looking at slide 17, where you directed me. Just to level set everybody, we see that minus 163 in the CSM balance, and on the right, you see that it's related to U.S. variable annuities and individual life. It is generally related to, on variable annuities, it's a poor, poor surrender experience and benefit utilization experience. And on the life side, there is a little bit of a mixed bag of, of persistency and mortality in there. One thing to note is that, you know, that I think we're all going to have to get used a bit to the geography of these things.

For example, on the variable annuity side, you have these, you have these experience variances that are hitting the CSM, and that's in contracts that have CSM, which is mainly withdrawal benefits, historically written, withdrawal benefits, rather than the, the, like, the IB and DB business that we have, which doesn't have a CSM. You see experience variances there going through the P&L rather than, rather than the, rather than CSM. But if you call into IR, we can give you a little bit more detail on that one.

Farquhar Murray (Senior Analyst)

Great. Many thanks.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yep.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Iain Pearce from Exane. Please go ahead.

Iain Pearce (Executive Director)

Hi. Morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple on the CSM. Firstly, thinking about the CSM walk, I'm guessing you expect the sort of size of the decline on a, on a normalized basis to be slowing. The expectation is that new business will be growing in its contribution towards CSM, and the release of the CSM should shrink as, as the 80% in run-off declines. I'm just wondering on the sort of timeframe of how long you expect that CSM to be declining for, and if you expect a gradual switch over of, of new business becoming bigger than the, the run-off of the CSM, and if there's any sort of timeframe for, for what that might look like?

Then the second one was just on the assumption changes that were made in CSM, flagging some deteriorating assumptions in long-term care. Just wondering if this means that sort of profitability has declined in, in the long-term care business. Because I guess that would be quite surprising given the sort of rate increases that you've been putting through there and the sort of favorable morbidity experience that, that you've been having recently. Just those two questions on CSM, please.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Thank you, Iain. Matthew, over to you.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah, it's hard to give a bit of a timeframe on the on where we're going to get a crossover point, where we get the new business, the new business added in CSM, to cross the release of the release of the CSM. It's certainly not in the not in the short term or the medium term. The way to think about CSM release and just to kind of stick it into your models when you're starting to model this stuff, it's really what we're looking at is, you know, somewhere between 8%-12% of the beginning balance of the CSM to be released every year. You can, you can kind of walk, you can kind of walk that, walk that down.

I, I know we're, it's not a, it's not a perfect answer for now, and we'll come back with something a bit later on the, on that one. With respect to the assumption changes on long-term care, let's recognize what we're, what we're actually doing here. You, you, you have it exactly right, that in the, in the CSM roll forward, you're seeing a, a big reduction in CSM as a consequence of the removing the morbidity assumption and increasing the inflation assumption. That is only partially offset by the by the increase in the CSM as a consequence of the premium rate increase program that we're putting in. Profitability, here's the thing.

Had we not removed that morbidity improvement assumption, we could have, if we, if we don't see morbidity improvement coming through, we would have seen a drag in that experience, in that experience line for the, for the block. Yes, you are right. We've had good experience for it in the past, and we expect that to continue in the future. Right now, by removing that morbidity improvement assumption, to the extent that morbidity improvement actually improves, we're going to see that as good guys, in the experience adjustment going forward. It's also, it's difficult to connect these two, but you can imagine that, you know, we always do actuarially justified premium rate increases, and part of that actuarial justification is the fact that we have removed the, the morbidity improvement assumption and increased the, increased the inflation.

What we would expect to see in our experience results going forward, if anything, it's gonna be good guys, rather than the possibility that future bad guys occur. If that, if that kind of makes sense?

Iain Pearce (Executive Director)

No, that does. That's great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Nasib Ahmed from UBS. Please go ahead.

Nasib Ahmed (European Insurance Equity ResearchAnalyst)

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. The first one on ULSG, generally. You clearly have a drag. You've got EUR 25 million on the block that you've reinsured. Is there anything you can do on the assumptions there, similar to what you've done on the long-term care morbidity, on persistency or mortality, to make sure that drag is zero, and take a hit on the stock of RBC ratio? That's question one. The second one is on the capital release from the reinsurance transaction. That's only EUR 50 million of the EUR 4.1 billion. I think you mentioned a few actions at the CMD that you could take to unlock further of the EUR 4.1 billion. Are there any more actions that you're considering, anything to update on versus the CMD? Thanks.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Matt?

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah. The, the, the short answer is that there are additional management actions that we can do, either unilateral or bilateral actions, as we said at the CMD. We'll also consider the, the potential for additional third-party transactions, but we're not gonna, we're not gonna comment on those at this, at this moment, at this moment in time. One of the questions that we sometimes get is, you know, we've, we've now got, you know, approximately 25% of the stat reserves that are, you know, that, that have been the, you know, part of reinsurance deals in the past. The question is: Well, why don't you do another one? Well, we, you know, we can do those, but we try to attack the blocks bit by bit.

Every cohort, every issue year can be slightly different in terms of the character, so we're gonna whittle away at this over time. I would not expect one giant, one giant reinsurance transaction. We've been successful, in the past, and we expect to do that, going forward, to attack these blocks 1, 1 bit at a time. This last SGUL reinsurance deal was a very, very good one for us.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Ashik Musaddi (Head of European Insurance Research)

Thank you, good morning, Lard. Good morning, Matt. Just a few questions I have. First of all, on a bit of clarity on this reinsurance transaction. How do we think about this EUR 225? Is this just like a EUR 50 million release of capital times four, which is ultimately freeing up the own funds that can be used? Is it EUR 50 million is the own funds release, basically because of the SCR reduction, and then on top of that, you have generated EUR 200 million? That's the first one, a bit of clarification. Second one is: if I look at the U.S. holding company, there was a EUR 20 million, 20% drag in first quarter from the RBC calibration to the holding company calibration, but now that's 28%.

What is that 8% extra, and how should we view that? I mean, does it matter from a capital perspective, or we should just ignore what's going on in the U.S. holding company? Do you need to fill it back if you have used it up, something in that bucket? That's the second one. Third one is, I mean, this CSM, I mean, how do we think about the CSM? Do we need to care about the CSM? If we need to care about this, then there is a bit of a concern, because if CSM is going down this fast, I mean, if I look at first half, your CSM balance went down by 10%, and if we use 8%-12%, whatever, 10% release of CSM, then this CSM-... release, which is ultimately earnings.

Earnings are coming down by 10% every year for next many, many years to come. That will be offset by your non-insurance business, WFG and retirement, but probably not, that's not as big as the, the decline in CSM. Do we need to care about the CSM and these one-off items, there's so many negative one-offs? Do we need to care about those as well? Any visibility, whether there are more in the future as you keep restructuring the book or... That, that's one question I have, is how do you think about the CSM? Sorry, it's a bit broad question.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Okay. No, that's, that's okay. These were your questions, Ashik? I hand over to Matt.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's first break down the, so on the reinsurance transaction, we'll break down the $225 for you. Basically, on a U.S. statutory basis, we have a gain on the transaction. We have a gain on the transaction, and that amounts to about $355 million. We also had to, because we had to transfer assets to the reinsurer. We took losses on bonds in order to be able to fund the transfer of assets, and the losses on bonds were about $180 million. The balancing item here would be the release of the RBC required capital of $50 million. Hopefully that, that answers your question.

The second, the second one related to the U.S. holding company. I think you, I think you pointed out that, you know, in the, in the, let's say, the normal conversion of our RBC ratio to our group Solvency II ratio, we had a few, we had a few differences because there are some things that are happening, again, outside of the regulated entities, but they are happening in the holding company. There are a couple, there are a couple in there. You may recall, the first one is, you, you may recall in the, at the Capital Markets Day, we signaled that there was a, that we were gonna restructure an earn-out agreement with one of these WFG founding agents.

That has, that has an impact on the holding company, and which would not have, which would not have been reflected in the RBC ratio. If you combine that with a couple other ones, there was also an impairment of, I think it was a software asset that was sitting on the balance sheet of the holding company, and that was related to the project to bring, to bring in the TCS previously outsourced business into us. Then there was a contribution to the employee pension scheme, which happens outside, again, of the regulated entities. If you add those up, you get to about 3 percentage points.

The, the other one that I, that I kind of flagged in the, in my opening remarks, relates to tiering limits on the, on the Solvency II reporting. In this case, we had more of a restriction on DTAs at a group level, and it really relates to the fact that we had a little bit higher DTAs in the U.S.. Because of the transaction with a.s.r., there was a tax settlement part of that, which reduced deferred tax liability, so we don't get that offset. As a consequence of it, you get that, that, let's say, breakage, I think, in the Solvency II ratio.

Finally, we, you know, we had that deal with La Banque Postale that we actually closed after the end of the quarter. We did reflect there is actually capital implications for that, required capital implications to the tune of about 2%. In general, should you care about the U.S. holding company? Yes. The U.S. holding company will come back to sort of normal by the end of the year as we work through some of these, let's say, the timing of funding for the WFG earn-out, as well as a couple other little bits for that TCS insourcing. It should not be an issue. By year-end, we'll have it straight.

The last one was a very general, a very general assumption about CSM. I want to talk in general about that. CSM, you should care about. CSM is a, you can think of it as a store of value. You can think of it in some manner as a present value of future profits, and over time, we will release that CSM into earnings. That's actually the biggest driver of the insurance operating result. It is something, it is something to care about. One thing that I would call out, though, is that in, during the course of the first half year, we had quite some, you know, some big adjustments, frankly, you know, with the assumption updates. Only a part of that hits the P&L, but some of it hits the, it hits the CSM.

You'll see a reconciling item there that talks about that talks about non-financial assumption changes, and in euro, it was more than EUR 550 million for the first half of the year. I don't think we're gonna be making any further changes to morbidity, morbidity improvement assumptions in the U.S. because we've eliminated it entirely. I wouldn't imagine that there would be giant changes in this going forward. What you are going to see is that, that CSM is gonna be released because so much of it is associated with with the financial assets, but that takes actually quite a long time for it to release. I mean, the duration of the long-term territory is something like more than 14 years, so it's a, it's a long time.

Most importantly, though, is the fact that although that's I'm describing the insurance side of the business, there, we are gonna get the benefit from new business that we're getting on the life insurance side. You see that come. You see, so you see that one come, but also the non-insurance parts of the business are going to be growing. As we always say, that, you know, the whole point of the financial assets, you know, we are trying to improve the quality of that earnings generation over time. This is, this is another, by the way, this is another example of it. By removing that morbidity assumption, we are going to report better operating results in that, in that line of business over time.

Most importantly, it allows us to go after premium rate increases, which is real cash, real money that we don't get, if we don't, if we don't, change that assumption.

Ashik Musaddi (Head of European Insurance Research)

Thanks. That's very clear. Just one follow-up. Is there any, so, RBC benefit from this reinsurance transaction that we should care about?

Matthew Rider (CFO)

RBC benefit? Well, it's, you will see the, the, the one-time capital implication coming through, coming through the results. The important thing is here is that there'll be a benefit on the SGUL reinsurance, but then we, we intend to use some of that in the, in the, in the, in the, the purchase of institutionally owned, universal life contracts. I would not, I would not put a, I would not put a plus in the column for RBC ratio.

Ashik Musaddi (Head of European Insurance Research)

Perfect. Thank you. Thanks a lot. That was very detailed and clear. Thank you.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

Yeah.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now go to our last question for today. The last question for today comes from the line of Michele Ballatore from KBW. Please, go ahead.

Michele Ballatore (Director)

Yes, thank you. The first question is about the growth in the U.S. individual life, which of course, was strong. I mean, what kind of how should we think about the development in profitability from this growth? I, I'm talking specifically about capital generation. The second question is about the asset management. Obviously, not a great out year, but, I mean, what is the outlook there? What kind of actions you, you're taking? In general, what is the outlook for this segment, specifically? Thank you.

Lard Friese (CEO)

Yes, Michele, thank you very much. I'm gonna talk a bit about the asset management business, and then I'll hand over to you on the profitability of the individual life segment, Matt, and the sales there. On asset management, if you look at the half year, you know, asset management is confronted with a number of reality that it needs to adapt to, right? I mean, over the last... If, if you look at the year on year, we've seen, of course, quite an increase in rates, which if you have a large portfolio of fixed income investments that are your assets under management, you're obviously gonna have the an impact of that in the fees that you're generating.

Also noticing, as I said in my opening remarks, in China, given the wobbly economic environment in China and the investor sentiment, which is not very conducive, that we saw in the third party business there, EUR 6 million outflows. You know, so it's partly the environment, but that's a reality, so we got to adapt to it, right? We adapt to it in two ways. First of all, we are reducing expenses. We are seeing that coming through already in the first half year. Did not, of course, completely offset the loss in revenues, but we need to continue to drive more expense reductions, and we have plans for that, which we are currently executing. It's underway.

It's already visible in the first half year, but you will see more of that coming through in the, in the future. That's number 1. The second piece of adaptation has to do with the focus that we have on those investment strategies that we believe are the strategies that we have a competitive edge and can compete successfully in the future. Those are alternative fixed income strategies, real asset strategies, the CLOs, et cetera. We're not only focusing on that in our sales efforts, in getting new mandates in, but also we're actually have acquired a CLO platform, a CLO team, to strengthen our CLO platform.

We have expanded in the LBP AM, so La Banque Postale asset management business, to also strengthen the capabilities there, and we will continue to do so. It's adapting to a new reality, expense reductions and efficiency, and focusing on those strategies that have that we have a competitive edge in and increasing those capabilities, and that attracts usually higher basis points over the assets managed. Matt, individual life.

Matthew Rider (CFO)

First, let's talk about the manufacturing side of this, which is, I think, where the, the question is really coming from. What, what you've seen is, as Lars had said in, in his remarks, we have seen good growth in individual life sales in the U.S. We like that. We are seeing consistently increasing new business stream, which we also like. Why do we like that? Because we've been able to maintain price IRRs of greater than 12% on the overall, overall life book. This is a business that is extremely profitable. We like to write a lot of it. We're doing more and more of it at younger ages. This is extremely good business, and it's... That one goes extremely well.

The other one that I always mention is that the manufacturing is one side of the business. We also have the WFG as a distribution channel within the U.S. You know, capital generation in WFG is through really just distribution-type earnings, which are also increasing in line with sales and even a little bit of a leverage effect there. On the life side in the U.S., we are making some very good progress, able to maintain our pricing margins, and you see things go generally in the right direction.

Michele Ballatore (Director)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes the Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Hielke Hielkema for closing remarks.

Hielke Hielkema (Investor Relations Officer)

Thank you, operator. This concludes today's Q&A sessions. On behalf of Lars and Matt, I want to thank you for the interaction. If you have any remaining questions, please do get in touch with us in Investor Relations. Thanks again for your participation in today's call, have a good day.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.