Aegon N.V. (NYSE:AEG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

You can contact our dear colleagues here in HR — or in IR for a tutorial on how this works, I think, at a later moment. Now with respect to your second question, I think you’re referring to the buyout of institutionally-owned contracts rather than the SGUL. So we have continued that program. This is something that we had started at the beginning of last year. We have added to it. And at this point, I think the [indiscernible] business, we’ve taken out pretty — 15% of the face value that’s associated with these policies that are owned by institutional investors. We are generally making an investment return of greater than 10%. That’s what we price for, and that’s what we monitor. But going forward, 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.

So we’ll do it as we go on. And as I said in my opening remarks, we’re going to use some of the capital that has been released from that SGUL reinsurance deal to be able to whittle down these Financial Assets, including the institutionally-owned SGUL contracts even further.

Michael Huttner : And you can say a little about the SGUL as well?

Matthew Rider : Yes, I can talk about the SGUL deal. So — I mean just let’s frame it a little bit. So what we’re talking about here is reinsurance of 14,000 policies representing about €1.4 billion of reserves. And I think as Lard has said in his opening remarks, that represents about 25%. So 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 of risk. So think of it as the face amount. So this transaction generates €225 million of capital and it’s basically going to reduce the RBC required capital by about €50 million. Now 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.

So we’ll get to see a benefit of about $25 million per year. But I got to tell you, that’s all embedded in the Capital Markets Day expectations. We had baked all that in, but I just want to give you a framing for what that SGUL reinsurance deal does for us.

Operator: We will now go to our next question. And your next question comes from the line of David Barma, Bank of America.

David Barma : Just to come back on what you just said about the OCG benefits from the reinsurance deal that you’ve announced today. So is that part of the €0.1 billion of additional OCG that you flagged at the CMD?

Matthew Rider : Yes, it is. Yes.

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

Lard Friese: Yes. Thanks, David. Yes, we’re very pleased with — I mean, your first question was answered by Matt, right? The answer was yes. So 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 partner of Nationwide when it comes to their customers since 2016, right? We’ve been doing that for 2016. And what we did is basically provide access to our products advised by Nationwide’s in-house financial planning service. Now this extended 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.