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

Iain Pearce : Just a couple on the CSM. Firstly, thinking about the CSM walk, I’m guessing you expect that the size of the decline 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 to shrink as the 80% in runoff declines. I’m just wondering on the sort of time frame of how long you expect that CSM to be declining for and if you expect a gradual switch over of new business becoming bigger than the runoff of the CSM? And if there’s any sort time frame for what that might look like? And then the second one was just on the assumption changes that are made in CSM, flagging some deteriorating assumptions in Long-Term Care. Just wondering if this means that sort of profitability has declined in the Long-Term Care business?

So I guess that would be quite surprising given the sort of rate creates that you’ve been putting through there and the sort of favorable morbidity experience that you’ve been having recently. So just those 2 questions [indiscernible], please.

Lard Friese: Yes. Thank you, Iain. So, Matt, over to you.

Matthew Rider : Yes. It’s hard to give a bit of a time frame on the — on where we’re going to get a crossover point where we get the new business added in CSM to cross the release of the release of the CSM, but it’s certainly not in the short term or the medium term. The way to think about CSM release and just to kind of stick it in your models when you’re starting to model this stuff, it’s really — what we’re looking at is somewhere between 8% to 12% of the beginning balance of the CSM to be released every year and you can kind of walk that down. But I know it’s not a perfect answer for now, and we’ll come back with something a bit later on that one. With respect to the assumption changes on Long-Term Care, let’s recognize what we’re actually doing here.

So you have it exactly right that in the CSM roll forward, you’re seeing a big reduction in CSM as a consequence of the — removing the morbidity assumption and increasing the inflation assumption. And that is only partially offset by the increase in the CSM as a consequence of the premium rate increase program that we’re putting in. Now profitability, here’s the thing. Had we not removed that morbidity improvement assumption, we could have, if we don’t see morbidity improvement coming through, we would have seen a drag in that experience line for the block. Yes, you are right, we’ve had good experience for it in the past, and it’s — we expect that to continue in the future. But 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 — and it’s difficult to connect these 2, but you can imagine that we always do actuarially justified premium rate increases and part of that actuarial justification is the fact that we have removed the morbidity improvement assumption and increase the inflation. So what we would expect to see in our experience results going forward, if anything, it’s going to be good guys rather than the possibility that future bad guys occur, if that kind of makes sense.

Operator: We will now go to the next question. And your next question comes from the line of Nasib Ahmed from UBS.