MetLife, Inc. (NYSE:MET) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I think there’s a variety of other factors. I think it’s just as the curve begins to shift, how the impact of the caps versus the long end start to manifest itself in spreads. But I think right now we would view the kind of the third quarter outlook would be somewhere in this vicinity or maybe the average of Q1 and Q2.

Michel Khalaf: And my comment was around this competition as well because there’s a limit, obviously, to how much they can reasonably improve.

Jamminder Bhullar: Yes, what I meant was if the rates keep going up, you’re already at a pretty good point in terms of spread. So I’m assuming it’s unreasonable to assume that they keep improving a lot more from here.

John McCallion: Yes, that’s fair. I think the key for us is, I’d say to your point, new business pricing is, that’s where I think your point lies. I think, we still are on an overall basis have some — we’re short. So I think as there’s roll-off reinvest, that’s where my point was.

Jamminder Bhullar: Okay. And then in Japan, you’ve been selling a lot of 4x products some of your peers have as well. And I think with changes in the economic solvency margin, that product becomes more sort of capital unfriendly or not as friendly as it is right now. So I’m wondering if you are planning on making any changes to your products or you could actually manage around that through offshore reinsurance. And then relatedly, I don’t know if there’s a limit to how much the FSA would let companies use in terms of or use offshore reinsurance to shift business out of Japan.

Lyndon Oliver: Yes, look, hey, it’s Lyndon here. Let me make a couple of comments around this. So the ESR implementation is a couple of years away. And we continue to make very good progress looking at all these products under the new regime. But we’re still early in the work and the regulations are still evolving. The second point here is we currently price our products on the MetLife’s economic solvency and on a local statutory basis. So to some extent, we’re already using an economic lens as we analyze product profitability. But as I said, it’s a little early regulations continue to go to evolve. We’re in the middle of field testing. So I think as our implementation plan progresses, we will start to make adjustments as needed. This would include reinsurance or product modifications or anything like that. But it would still be too early given it’s a couple of years away.

Jamminder Bhullar: Thank you.

Operator: And our next question is from Thomas Gallagher with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Thomas Gallagher: Good morning. First one is just on a trend, peers have seen which has been elevated long-term care claims. It looked to me like holdings, underwriting and underlying earnings were actually pretty favorable. So I wanted to see if you also experienced elevated long-term care claims within that and if so, how much?

John McCallion: Thanks. Good morning, Tom. It’s John. We did see some unfavorability kind of towards the end of Q1 and into Q2 and maybe the first couple months of Q2 higher claims as well as some lower terminations on just on a relative trend perspective. Towards the end of Q1 or Q2, I should say, and then into July, we’ve seen those trends revert back. So right now, we probably would account for that as an aberration, a short-term aberration, but we’ll obviously still monitor I think just an overall point around results for holding. While that’s the case, we had favorable mortality in the segment. So that was a positive, but specifically the long-term care. That’s the case. I think on the flip side, the team has been doing a really, really good job continuing to get rate increases. We’ve already met our typical run rate of rate increases this year at 4.5% of premium year-to-date. That’s what we typically assume each year. So we’re off to a great start there.

Thomas Gallagher: Great. Thanks. And then my follow-up is, so last quarter, I think you all had mentioned 200 million of potential foreclosures on CRE or CMLs with 15 million of related losses, as I guess that was a stress test. What would the update be now? It sounds like it’s probably going to be less than that, but curious what you think now. And then also, have you seen any meaningful credit migration into 2Q on your CNBS portfolio? Thanks.

Steven Goulart: Hey, Tom. It’s Steven Goulart. Thanks for the question. And I think you were headed in the right direction basically. Obviously, we continue to do stress testing, but really nothing to note on that. We’re very comfortable with the portfolio, very comfortable with the results of the stress testing. Certainly nothing’s different. Anything may be marginally better than last time. You talked about foreclosures also. We did use a number. Frankly, it’s going to come in materially less than that. We think we’re going to have very small charge-offs in the portfolio as well. The portfolio is very well positioned. So I think we’re very comfortable with it. And it will continue to perform through this. I’m sorry. The last part of the question was related to CNBS migration. Can you repeat the last question?