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

Nasib Ahmed : The first one on ULSG, generally. So you clearly have a drag. You’ve got €25 million on the block that you’ve reinsured. Is there anything you can do on the assumptions there similar to down on the Long-Term Care morbidity on persistency or mortality to make sure that, that drag is zero and take a hit on the stock of RBC ratio? That’s the question one. And the second one is on the capital release from the reinsurance transaction. That’s only €50 million of the €4.1 billion. I think you mentioned a few actions at the CMD that you could take to unlock further up to €4.1 billion. Are there any more actions that you’re considering anything to update on versus the CMD?

Lard Friese: So, Matt?

Matthew Rider : Yes. So 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 also consider the potential for additional third-party transactions, but we’re not going to comment on those at this moment in time. One of the questions that we sometimes get is we’ve now got approximately 25% of the stat reserves that are — that have been part of reinsurance deals in the past. The question is, well, why don’t you do another one? Well, 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 were going to whittle away at this over time. I would not expect 1 giant reinsurance transaction. We’ve been successful in the past, and we expect to do that going forward to attack these blocks 1 bit at a time. But this last SGUL reinsurance deal was a very, very good one for us.

Operator: We will now go to the next question. And your next question comes from the line of Ashik Musaddi from Morgan Stanley.

Ashik Musaddi : Just a few questions I have. First of all on — a bit of clarity on this reinsurance transaction. So how do we think about this ERU 225 million? Is this just like a €50 million release capital x4, which is ultimately freeing up the own funds that can be used? Or is it €50 million is the own funds released basically because of the SCR reduction and then on top of that, you have generated €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 20% drag in first quarter from the RBC calibration to the holding company calibration, but now that’s 28%. So what is that 8% extra? And how does — 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?

Or do you need to fill it back if you have used it up something in that bucket? So that’s the second one. Third one is, I mean, the CSM, I mean, how do we think about the CSM? Do we need to care about the CSM because see 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% to 12%, whatever 10% release of CSM, then the CSM release, which is ultimately earnings, earnings are coming down by 10% every year for the next many, many years to come. That will be offset by your noninsurance business, WFG and Retirement, but probably that’s not as big as the decline in CSM. So do we need to care about the CSM and these one-off items.

There are 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’s 1 question I have is, how do you think of the CSM? Sorry, it’s a bit broad question…