Brighthouse Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:BHF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Myles Lambert: Yes. So then it’s Myles again, I’ll kind of wrap this up. But to Eric’s point, we all were jumping at this question, and I’m going to focus my comments specifically on the Rila category. And look, I guess, as it relates to competition and sales, yes, it’s had an impact on sales. But the way we think about it is it’s a really positive development for advisers and consumers with more entrants in the space. We like the competitiveness of our product. We have a very strong distribution footprint. We remain pleased with ourselves, and you’re seeing us continue to evolve our portfolio of Shield products with the new level — with our new Shield Level Pay Plus product, which gets us into the income category as well.

Operator: And it comes from the line of Erik Bass with Autonomous Research. Please proceed.

Erik Bass: I was just hoping you could provide some more color on corporate expenses this quarter, which it looks like it may have had sort of a positive favorable item in there? And then related, now that established costs are done, how should we think about the expense outlook going forward?

Ed Spehar: Erik. So there was favorability in the corporate line in the fourth quarter. We tend to call out the biggest items when we put the numbers out the night before because there are always puts and takes. So I would say that while there was favorability in the corporate line, we also had some elevated corporate expenses that were impacting other segments. So I think if you look at the number that you would calculate from our disclosures of $4.09, I think it was $4.09 of earnings ex those items we identified I would guide you back to the third quarter when we said — I think I said something like run rate looked like 360 plus or something. Obviously, we had buybacks that would have benefited in the fourth quarter relative to that number. But I would gravitate more toward toward that end as a kind of go-forward number than the north of $4 that you would come up with from what we disclosed last night.

Eric Steigerwalt: I’ll take your establishment costs comment, Erik. We’re done with establishment costs going forward, so you won’t see them anymore. But is there a little holdover into ’23? Is that part of what will maybe have our corporate expenses up a little bit in ’23, Yes. There’s some cleanup stuff as you can imagine. You’ve heard companies like us talk about this for years when you’ve got secondary stuff that you got to clean up. But generally, the future state environment for us is done. It’s finished, and you won’t see any more establishment costs. So we did 70-ish of corporate expenses in 2022. That number will go up a little bit for 2 reasons. One, I already said, just some cleanup stuff that we’ll do in 2023 from a technology point of view and inflation certainly, we will be experiencing some inflation, employee costs, vendor contracts, et cetera.

But I’m very pleased with where we are with respect to expenses. You’re not going to see a large-scale expense initiative here, though we remain laser-focused on expenses every day.

Erik Bass: And then, Ed, I was just hoping you could maybe provide an update on the expected book value impact for LDTI as of year-end.