Sun Life Financial Inc. (NYSE:SLF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

I’m pretty pleased with where we are now if you look at our capabilities, cross Asia, building to do multi channel distribution. With the addition of bank insurance in Hong Kong, we now have bank insurance in every market except for Singapore. So we’re well suited in Asia. I think that that piece of the puzzle of adding bank insurance in Hong Kong was an important step for us. You’re right to note that and Ingrid may want to talk with us a little bit more that the border is opening. And we see that as a good thing for Hong Kong and the Hong Kong economy, which would be a good thing for sales in the Hong Kong business. Now that will take a little while. It just opened in January. And those bales take a little while to come through. And there’s still working through the getting the momentum and sort of that travel back and forth across the border.

I don’t know Ingrid if you wanted to add anything.

Ingrid Johnson: Again captured as well. Kevin, just Additionally, in Indonesia of the expanding our bank insurance deal with the is very important for us. Definitely optimistic about the potential as well as the underlying momentum that we’re seeing in the insurance sales, which were almost 30% in all of our other markets except Hong Kong and China. So we are well placed but clearly with some of the headwinds Kevin described.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott Chan with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Scott Chan: So identify a second quarter contribution. I remember when you announced the acquisition, you talked about robust growth and kind of cited a 14% revenue CAGR from 2018 to what was probably near 2021 to 2.7 billion. If I look in the supplemental on your gross premiums on dental, it seems to be tracking in line with 2021 in terms of sales growth. Am I reading that right? Or is it a more stable growth that you witnessed with that platform in 2022?

Daniel Fishbein: Well, thanks for the question. This is Dan Fishbein. One thing to point out is that we are reporting commercial dental, which includes the legacy Sun Life, commercial business and DentaQuest in that segment. So it’s important to look at both pieces. So first of all, commenting on the commercial, we’ve actually had really great sales growth in the past year on commercial dental that was up about 50%. It’s obviously still very early. We’ve only reported on seven months of DentaQuest results but their sales results have continued to be quite strong. They added 3 million government programs members last year, for example, we mentioned, Kevin mentioned in his opening remarks, some significant sales in the fourth quarter.

And that momentum has actually continued in January. But to specifically answer your question overall, both their sales and revenue growth have been roughly in line with the past trend. The sales in the government programs, business tends to be quite lumpy. You get big sales infrequently. So a seven month period is a little bit hard to establish a trend on but so far, so good.

Scott Chan: And when I look forward, Dan then I’m looking at growth outside of the revenue synergies. How do we kind of maybe track that? Is it more of like the industry trend on like government program growth? Or is it more on DentaQuest? Maybe taking market share and expanding into certain states like you did in Florida this last year.