Ryan Krueger: Could you provide some additional color on the pipeline for investment management flows as well as the opportunity to — from the enhanced AGI distribution as we move into ’23?
Heather Lavallee: Yes, good morning, Ryan, it’s Heather. Christine will take your question this morning.
Christine Hurtsellers: Yes. Good morning. So how to think about the strength of flows going forward? Listen, we — as you saw, we are quite proud of the business results we had in ’22, which is a challenging year. And so we really are well set up to leap with strength into 2023. So we see a very diverse, strong pipeline represented by many strategies. And we’re seeing green shoots in what were headwinds last year in retail flows, as an example, and increasing interest in fixed income, just given where overall levels of yields are, right? Globally, they’re quite attractive. And so thinking about Allianz and our distribution partnership in two ways. Number one, there’s going to be strong global demand for fixed income, given where our yields are.
And when you think about leveraging that partnership near term and long term, we are going to launch — we expect to launch four new funds this year with Allianz off their UCITS platform. Two, earlier in the year that are off of the new teams that we acquired as well as, two AfavoyaIM strategy. So there are many ways to leverage the strength of the partnership, the strong demand for income-related assets in Asia specifically, were really — that’s the high-growth area when you think about investment product demand. So overall, transformational year for the business, in terms of the strategic distribution partnership, and I’m very excited and optimistic as we go into the quarters ahead.
Ryan Krueger: Great. And then just a quick one on Benefitfocus. How should we think about the $50 million EBITDA guidance in terms of how it would actually come through as GAAP operating income?
Heather Lavallee: Ryan, Don, I’ll take your question.
Don Templin: Sure, Ryan. So we have — the $50 million of EBITDA, if we deduct from that what was sort of the historical depreciation and amortization of Benefitfocus, that gets us into a range of $25 million-or-so of pretax operating earnings. So for purposes of modeling, that’s what we would expect to use is somewhere in the range of $25 million. I might note that our definition of EBITDA and their definition of EBITDA are different. So this — our number includes stock-based compensation, the burden of stock-based compensation, theirs did not. So we’ve had some questions around that. But $50 million of EBITDA and roughly $25 million of pretax operating earnings.
Heather Lavallee: And maybe, Ryan, it’s Heather, if I can just add as a follow-on to that. While we talk about the financial benefit from Benefitfocus, we really acquired this for the long-term benefits and really thinking about how it accelerates our health and wealth strategy. It really puts us right at the center of the customer experience as well as helping employers to optimize their overall benefit spend. And this is an established partner with an established business that we’ve acquired. And I’ll close with what gets me so excited for Voya to own this property is we can put our muscle behind accelerating the road map, bringing in our health and wealth guidance tool into their client experience, helping to improve churn rates, RFP, close ratios and overall operating margins.
So while there is certainly real and significant financial benefits in ’23, we’re most excited about the long term and how this will help ultimately drive growth and shareholder value for our shareholders.
Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your questions.
